Every now and then, you run into a really good video game thief. And by that, I don’t mean your Astarions or your Slys Cooper: I mean games that are cunning thieves themselves, snagging an idea here, an idea there, and bringing them all home to craft something really spectacular.
Yellow Brick Games’ Eternal Strands is a very good thief.
Released late last month, the action-adventure game underwhelmed me a little at first. (God save me from another crew of attractive, emotionally intelligent support characters who are all fundamentally good people with their hearts in the right place.) But the more I’ve played it—and as the game has layered in more gently snatched elements from The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, Shadow Of The Colossus, Dragon’s Dogma, and more—the more I’ve come to appreciate how freely the whole thing flows. I’m even finding myself enjoying its crafting system, which is not a sentence I typically expect to see myself type.
At the core of those pleasures is a commitment to taking only those lifted game concepts that emphasize player power and freedom: The “Yeah, go ahead and climb whatever” verticality of Breath Of The Wild, mixed with a fire, freeze, and physics-based magic system that allows you to turn a pleasant meadow into a blazing inferno, or smash apart a tree with your sword, then lift it telekinetically and blast it into an enemy’s face. Yes, you can just run at every monstrous lizard or wayward robot and hit them with a sword until they drop dead, but the game also gives you a ton of tools that allow you to treat every new fight as a problem to solve, rather than an algorithm to execute. When I came across a wolf that was radiating a crippling chill—sapping playable character Brynn’s speed and health—I had multiple ways to approach the situation: Chug one of my limited supply of frost-negation potions? Grab a flammable seed pod and hurl it at the ground to create a zone of burning heat to ward off the cold? Or just pick up the wolf with my “weaving strand” magic power and hurl it far away from me so that I could pelt it with arrows while staying out of its aura of cold? It’s in these moments, when pressure forces engagement with the game’s many systems of player power, that Eternal Strands builds something genuinely interesting out of the sum of its pilfered parts.
I’m only about 4 hours into Eternal Strands, so it’s possible that I’ll reach a terminus on how much expressive fun it allows me to have. (I’ll note that the game’s boss battles, which let you Colossus your way all over big monsters, cutting apart their armor while also pulling tricks like freezing their feet to the ground with ice magic, remain fun as hell so far, even as you’re encouraged to repeat them, Monster Hunter-style, to get more resources.) The story remains a pastel blur for me—Brynn’s crew contains nothing but kind and empathetic helpers who only want to offer her found family as she recovers from past traumas, and it makes me desperately wish I could import a real asshole like Baldur’s Gate 3‘s Lae’zel into the mix—but as an excuse to run around the woods, picking up junk and setting wolves on fire, it’s serviceable. (One important touch of the crafting system, by the way, is that it makes it easy to see how each of these bits of forest litter will contribute to getting some sort of meaningful upgrade—in comparison to, say, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, where you are an all-purpose Hoover just hoping to turn giant bags of junk into a few slightly higher numbers.) There are much worse things a video game can be than a good thief—which, if I’m being less glib, is really just a matter of synthesizing a lot of good ideas into one extremely satisfying package—and Eternal Strands knows exactly how to show players a good time as it demonstrates its collection of liberated influences.
