Here’s a demo for Eternal Strands, the Zelda-meets-Colossus wizarding sim from a former Dragon Age director
Many moons ago in the Before Times, a mysterious cataclysm scattered a number of seasoned BioWare developers across the face of heaven. The developers fell upon the mortal planes like comets. Where each landed, a game development studio took root. Inflexion Games. Summerfall Studios. Humanoid Origin. Worlds Untold. Archetype Entertainment.
Summerfall appear to be prospering, but many of the studios founded by former BioWare devs have experienced hard times. In particular, Humanoid Origin and Worlds Untold have respectively closed and “paused operations” without releasing a single game. I’m raising a tentatively congratulatory glass, then, to Yellow Brick Games, a studio founded by former Dragon Age director Mike Laidlaw. The company’s debut game Eternal Strands will release on 28th January, and there’s now a PC demo.
I’ve yet to play the demo – it’s just gone live, and I wanted to bang this out before the end of the working day – but I quite like the looks of Eternal Strands, emphasis on the “quite”. It’s a bright and breezy, hub-based fantasy action game in which you play a brawny battlemage who can kindle self-propagating wildfires, build ice bridges, and toss around breakable boulders with telekinesis. You’re a Dragon Age Jedi, basically, with a pinch of Shadow Of The Colossus and ooh, Zelda’s free-climbing in the bargain.
All those obvious parallels may suggest a project with no real identity of its own. It doesn’t help that the visual direction feels a bit soulless – too clean and chunky and rounded for my liking. But I am willing to forgive all that if Eternal Strands succeeds at fulfilling what I hope is its secret agenda of capturing the spirit of mid-tier noughties action games with gimmicky real-time physics systems. Games like The Force Unleashed and Psi-Ops. Where my Psi-Ops fans at? I can sense the restless ghost of Midway in how Eternal Strands lets you freeze a golem’s feet to the floor, then smash it over the head with the nearest tree.
The demo gives you two areas of the game’s world, aka the Enclave, not including a basecamp area that populates with quest-giving NPCs and facilities in the course of the campaign. The demo includes the crafting system with three base weapon types – sword and shield, bows, and two-handed weapons, together with a selection of magic spells. It’s apparently playable on Steam Deck but not yet verified, and your demo progress will carry over to the full game.
You can find the demo on Steam and the Epic Games Store.