Eternal Strands

[Maryokutai]

Picked this up as it's on sale at the moment and I've really just been looking for an excuse to give it a shot (and I need a break from Xenoblade).

 

Today being a holiday and all I managed to get about 4 hours of playtime with it. It starts off relatively linear and scripted before dumping you into its main world, which is a seemingly abandoned piece of land cut off from the rest of the world via a magical dome surrounding it. From a story perspective you and your team are stranded inside, so the main narrative thread is exploring it and also looking for a way to escape.

 

I was surprised at how talkative it is and I can see some people disliking that, but on my end I have no issues with it. It is, however, strictly split, as in you can only really talk with your comrades and move the story forward in camp whereas out and about it's purely about gameplay, except for some (rare) chatter via a magical comm device. The thing that made people pay attention to this is its playfulness with physics that loosely was reminiscent of BotW, but at least in the beginning that aspect is rather under-developed. There's telekinesis, which works a bit like in Control, though less snappy, and ice powers, which can cool down the area or freeze enemies in place. The third power you unlock is summoning a Vortex that traps enemies, but it's so weak early on that you kind of have to throw enemies back in again after wacking them with your sword, though that also highlights an early and simple way to combine powers. I'd imagine this aspect growing more prevalent as you progress (especially with a larger mana pool and fire powers), but right now I tend to dispatch smaller enemies with parries and sword swings, which works well enough and is fun, but there's no progression for melee combat in the sense of unlockable combos and such, hence why I assume it wants to slowly nudge you towards being experimental will the element powers in the long run. You also have a bow but I find it not particularly useful – though again, that might change.

Some gameplay aspects are a bit 'wonky', especially if you combine multiple features like freezing a big enemy in place, climbing on top of them and trying to aim for a weak spot. It's a sign of a smaller game without month-long AAA Q&A testing and polishing, but relative to its ambitions I think it does a fairly good job glueing everything together.

 

The gameplay 'loop' of leaving camp, exploring the outside (which is divided into large, open-ish hubs) and then coming back to improve your equipment with collected resources is a bit basic but it works. I previously had some reservations about the fact that you lose the majority of your collected resources if you die, but right around the time when it opens up a bit and throws stronger enemies at you, you also receive an items to teleport back to camp without any kind of penalty. So if things go south, you can always just jump away, maybe improve your amour and weapons, and go back. Whether it becomes grindy or not I can't say yet of course, but at least it doesn't seem overly punishing.

 

First impressions are really positive, and for an indie project I think this looks quite fabulous, and very cleverly hides its budgetary shortcoming by (2D stills of the characters during most conversations for example). It's also refreshing to play a game that is just fully optimised for the system you're playing it on. I get that the usual quality and performance modes have their uses, but here there's nothing – just press start and play it as intended (60fps). Also nice soundtrack and really solid voice acting – depending on your dialogue choices the main character is also quite likeable and thankfully not even remotely the kind of girlboss archetype I was expecting after some trailers.

 

 

[one-armed dwarf]

Yes it's very wonky, I only played the demo but it was a generous demo. I'm sort of curious how much player driven combat you can generate with late game powers, cause early on it's sort of like you can do Half Life 2 stuff or Bioshock stuff, or Shadow of the Colossus stuff, in a BOTW looking world. It feels a bit like designers cobbling parts of their favorite 00s games together a bit.

[Maryokutai]

One thing that might hold it back later on is the command wheel to switch your power. I can see that becoming either cumbersome or annoying when you want to mix and match without any kind of mappable hot keys. But I guess that also depends on how much interplay is possible – you're not going to combine ice and fire for example.

[Maryokutai]

I think they might have oversold the amount of emergent gameplay this can conjure, or maybe I just interpreted it too ambitiously. I only have half of the powers unlocked but I have at least one per category and while it is a fun toolset to use, it's not really that far away from just playing any RPG as a mage class. There's of course the addition of physics and temperature – and the latter in particular is pretty cool, no pun intended, when you walk through a frozen village for example and keep yourself heated by blasting fire – but it ultimately doesn't give you the amount of freeform encounter design something like BotW did. Which of course is unreasonable to expect, but it's impossible to avoid the comparison either.

 

That's not to say I don't like it, but it might end up being a bit disappointing to people who were looking for that kind of stuff. I'm okay with simply seeing this as a less curated (as far as combat design is concerned) action RPG and the fights against bosses in particular are really well done for such a small game, particularly against flying dragons and such who take to the skies while you cling to them. And I know I say this a lot but this is yet another of those AA projects that makes me question the technical arms race because it looks really good. The third area in particular, which I unlocked yesterday, is incredible IMO.

 

Anyway, that's where I stand after 8-ish hours.