Eternal Strands review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

You’d be hard-pressed to find anything in Eternal Strands that doesn’t remind you of one of its influences. The game is the first release from Yellow Brick Games, a studio founded by BioWare veteran Mike Laidlaw, the creative director behind a couple of Dragon Age games and one-time Mass Effect writer; not surprisingly, Eternal Strands is very big on branching dialogue trees and lots of world-building. Similarly, its gameplay brings together games like Shadow of the Colossus, Dragon’s Dogma, and Breath of the Wild, though you could probably name any number of other similar RPGs whose influence can be felt here.

So Eternal Strands isn’t a game to pick up if you’re after an entirely original experience. However, if you want something that captures its influences well and does a good job of imitating them…in that case, you might just be in luck, because that describes it perfectly.

And let’s be honest, doing a solid imitation of the likes of Shadow of the Colossus and Breath of the Wild is no small feat. Sure, Eternal Strands may not have a unique voice, but when you’re climbing up a giant, hitting it with magic and holding on for your life, those concerns are secondary to the fact you’re playing a pretty enjoyable game.

As that last paragraph probably suggested, for me the boss fights in Eternal Strands are the big draw (pun not intended). You’re tasked with uncovering the secrets of an ancient civilization, and by pure coincidence the way you do that is by beating some absolutely enormous bosses whose defeat just so happens to unlock new magical abilities. What makes it fun is that the game leaves it up to you to figure out how you want to approach those boss fights – you can whack away with your sword, but you can also use fire and ice to bring down the behemoths, or use telekinetic powers to hurl giant rocks in their faces. And, of course, you can do these things while climbing up the giants, looking for weak points in their armour you can exploit. None of this may be all that original, but it is awfully fun.

Similarly, exploring Eternal Threads’ world is a pretty rewarding endeavour in its own right. The enemies aren’t hugely varied – which is probably one of the game’s weaker spots – but it’s still fun to use your abilities to plow through them, and gathering supplies to craft better weapons is a breeze. There are also plenty of treasures to uncover, and the fact you can climb up everything and break all kinds of stuff makes exploration a lot more fun. Things are also helped by the fact the different worlds – sorry, “zones” – each have their own distinctive personalities, and look fantastic.

And even the dialogue seems fairly thorough – though I’ll admit that, more often than not, I skipped through a lot of what was being said so I could get back to the action. Still, you encounter a lot of people in this game, and even from my rushed interactions I was impressed by the amount of lore the game is able to cram in. (And, truthfully, I was also impressed that the game recognized there are sometimes players like me who just want to get on with the action, and it made it very easy to quickly get through even the longest dialogues.)

Again, none of this is all that new, and I can understand why some people might be tempted to write Eternal Strands off as a collection of influences thrown together. But if you’ll look a little longer, you’ll see that it combines those influences awfully well.

Yellow Brick Games provided us with an Eternal Strands PC code for review purposes.