This is a game that came out of nowhere. Never heard about it before, just happened to see a trailer after it was out in the end of January 2025, and my first impression was… Mmm, this looks really good. Open world, fights with large ennemies a la Shadow of the Colossus, nice graphics… there’s probably a catch. What are the gamers actually saying about it? What, VERY POSITIVE on Steam? Well, not every rating on Steam is accurate, but this convinced me at least to try it out.

A Deep Story

There’s a lot to unpack about the story. You are Brynn, a young woman who’s a magician apprentice (a Weaver, able to use telekinetic powers and other kinds of magic). You are part of an expedition. With a few of your colleagues and mentors, you are on a journey to reach and enter the Enclave, an ancient place where powerful magic was used and was sealed off by a barrier for many, many years, following an event referred to as The Surge. Your hope is to find a way to enter to break through the barrier, enter the Enclave and uncover some of its secrets. After a short introduction that also acts as tutorial to the game (very well done), you and your band ends up entering the Enclave.

Your companions start setting up camp, and you are tasked to go out and explore the surroundings, gather information, and find out what you can about the Enclave and its secrets. As expected, the Enclave may be in ruins after such a long time, but the powerful magic is not gone from this world. And you are not alone…

As you are still somewhat inexperienced, your older and more senior mentors are here to guide you in your quests and support you as needed. They can talk to you at a distance (that’s practical!), and they intervene as you reach specific checkpoints in the map.

The Game Loop

At the end of the day, Eternal Strands is a classic open-world game. You have quests, separated in main quests and secondary ones, and you can choose to tackles them as they come, in the order that’s available to you. You have a map, and some portals called the Loomgates make it easy to teleport from one area to the next, so that you don’t have to walk the whole way every time. You unlock new Loomgates when you reach a new area, which makes it possible to return to camp (and save the game).

As you go around, expect to get attacked by the local fauna (monsters, beasts, and some kind of ancient looking robots) - you have a bow, a sword and a shield to fight back. And of course, your Weaver powers: moving objects and throwing them on your enemies, summoning blocks of ice, or burning things around as if you had a flamethrower. The combat is actually quite fun. I like freezing the enemies into blocks of ice, and finishing them using my sword while they can’t move. Throwing large objects is fun, too, but not as easy as it sounds when enemies are moving. At the beginning your powers only allow you to throw small rocks too, but as you level up, levitating much larger objects and throwing them with force becomes a redoutable weapon. Or, alternatively, you can grab ennemies and throw them away, too.

One of the things that make Eternal Strands stand out is that you can interact with many objects in the world: plants, pieces of wood lying around, rocks, and all. At a level very rarely seen in other games. This is an integral part of the Weaver game mechanics - telekinesis demands that. You also have the typical elemental interactions at play: a field of burning fire can be taken care of by spawning ice on it. The only problem with your elemental magic is that it can also hurt you directly. If you create a block of ice, and you keep walking on it, you progressively lose your health (frost bites?) so it cuts both ways.

The interactions with objects and plants serves another purpose: to collect ingredients that can help you make new material and upgrade your weapons and equipment. This is basically why you have a whole team waiting for you at the camp: to upgrade your gear and make new stuff for you too. Bringing back resources also makes it possible to upgrade the camp equipment, which is necessary to unlock new capabilities. This reminds me a little bit of Monster Hunter.

Your companions also like to talk, and as far as NPCs go, they are fairly interesting. Each of them has their own personality (might I say geekiness) and you have choices when it comes to what you talk about with them. The game also includes an affinity systemt that make your relationship evolve with them, depending on your interactions, over time.

As you start to explore the map, you just walk around, but soon enough you will discover that you character can climb on about anything, and cross mountains solo-style painlessly. You do have to watch your stamina - if it reaches zero, you end up falling from wherever you are. You need to find a way to take breaks as you climb up, to regnerate the stamina so that you can continue going up. It’s quite fun to consider that there are different ways to reach the same goal, by taking shortcuts. Climbing sometimes feels a bit TOO easy, as if you activated a cheat mode or something. But well, that’s what you get, so you might as well use it.

When I mentioned Open World, this was not strictly true - the world does not stream continuously when you move around like in GTA or other open world games, but instead loads up fairly large levels. Once you exit a level there is a loading screen. Kind of unusual these games but it’s not a big problem, you don’t get loading screens every 5 minutes or something.

Really well done

For the first game of this studio, it’s kind of amazing how much they got right. The art style is very nice - it’s not trying to be realistic. The style is not completely original but still quite different from most of your regular fantasy games. I found myself looking at the landscape many times across the map, as the views are simply beautiful and feel like another world altogether. The architecture of the Enclave feels full of magic and wonder.

The game alternates between the world in 3D, and dialogs with 2D versions of the protagonists. It does not feel out of place, and blends in really well. The lore is rich but does not get in the way. If you have no interest in the background and the overarching world, Eternal Strands does not force you to care. Same with dialogs with NPCs, you can cut your interactions short if you want to get to the point and not waste time. By the way, all conversations are fully voiced, and the voice actors do a really good job at it.

If there’s one aspect where the game could improve, is more enemy variety and some repetitiveness in the missions - it does tend to send you the same kind of foes time after time, and there is some grinding needed to progress, while it’s not as bad as many other games in the genre. They got the gameplay right, but might not have had a lot of time to develop more diverse content.

Fighting large enemies like the Arks (25m tall enemies) is challenging, especially since the climbing mechanic is not always super precise (some strange thing is going on with physics and collision boxes), but you get used to it.

That’s actually a very difficult problem to solve: climbing a large enemy and having proper interaction with it as they move around is tough, and Shadow of the Colossus based its entire gameplay on it because they managed to do it so well. In Eternal Strands, it’s not as smooth as you’d expect.

Who’s Behind This?

This kind of level of quality is certainly not the work of amateurs. Checking out who’s behind the studio, Yellow Brick Games, revels a team of about 30 to 60 employees working on this title, based in Quebec, Canada. The game director and co-founder is Frédéric St-Laurent, and his profile shows that he has worked on high profile games at UbiSoft before backing Yellow Brick Games in 2020, working on the Assassin’s Creed series.

Mike Laidlow, Chief Creative Officer, has had a long career as well, being lead designer on the Dragon Age series at Bioware before joining Ubisoft as well.

The common thread for all senior devs in this studio is that they worked together at Ubisoft, it seems, before jumping ship. Looking at what they did with Eternal Strands, they seem very capable at making very high quality games without the support of a large company. The game’s positionning in terms of pricing feels just right, at 30 USD - not claiming to be at the same level as an AAA title, and totally worth it considering the work done on the game. Where they have apparently messed up is the marketing of the game. I heard nowhere about it prior to its release: I guess this is where having a big publisher like Ubisoft makes a big difference in the end to be able to generate buzz about your game, with larger advertising budgets a connections in the industry.

Steam Deck

The game works very well on the Steam Deck as long as you put the settings a bit lower (at low settings) and can you usually get a stable framerate at about 30 to 40 FPS. Of course, you look some of the beautiful graphics that you get on a more powerful machine, but the game still looks great and plays great too. There are some times where the framerate will drop (in some cutscenes), but it’s not frequent.

It gets a Verified rating on Steam and that sounds about right. Starting the game the first time led to a shaders compilation step (lasting a few minutes) - I’m wondering why it did not benefit from the regular shaders downloads that Steam provides for the Steam Deck: does it have anything to do with the number of gamers running the game, or something that is required on the developer’s side?

In any case, it works well on Desktop and on your favorite portable Linux console.

Commercial Failure?

Looking at the number of reviews on Steam, it looks like the game has not sold that much yet. Several ownership estimators point at figure around 20k to 30k gamers who purchased the game, which would certainly make it a huge failure compared to how much the game has actually cost to make (Canada is not cheap). It only has 20k followers, and the number of active players are stable but on the lower side.

This is a good example why going independant is a very risky endeavor, EVEN IF you have all the skills and talent in the world. And that’s yet another example that creating a new franchise without a big name is very challenging. Hey, I’m not marketer but I think the naming of the game did not help. Eternal Strands is not catchy at all, it has no stopping power and is hardly evocative and distinctive. It feels way more generic than the game itself! In any case, there is a sweet spot for game developers to be in:

• either you are very small and do games in your garage at very low cost, and you can survive and potentially thrive with an indie hit with 20k sales.
• or you’re a fat studio, and your strategy is to make the game as big as possible because you need and plan to sell several million units anyway, and you have the support of a whole marketing machine to achieve it.

Not saying that these strategies work every time (small indie devs giving up is very common, and large studios not making it, like Ubisoft recently, are well known), but this is still the two proven business models that exists in the industry.

If you are in the middle, it’s a very precarious position. You are too big to survive on a few units sold, and this means your studio could be downsized very quickly unless you have external investment pouring in. Or, at the end of the day, you end up splitting your resources between titles you do for money for bigger publishers, and your own creative titles to end up doing what you are interested in.

Since most games sell the most in the first few weeks, now there’s probably two venues to drive more people to it: word of mouth, and using sales time to time to price down agressively and drive trial. They are currently doing a 25% off on the game - and that does not seem to drive the needle much yet. It’s a shame, because Eternal Strands deserves a lot more attention than it is currently getting.

Following our review, this game deserves a spot in our recommended games list!

Note: we have received a key from the publisher to review this game.