Many moons ago, in the Old Times, a mysterious cataclysm scattered a group of experienced BioWare programmers across the sky. The Creators fell to the mortal planes like comets. Where each of them landed, a game development studio took root. Inflection games. Summer studies. Humanoid origin. Untold Worlds. Archetypal entertainment.
It looks like autumn flourishingbut many of the studios founded by former BioWare developers have fallen on demanding times. Notably, Humanoid Origin and Worlds Untold respectively shut down and went “on hold” without releasing a single game. So I first raise a glass of congratulations to Yellow Brick Games, the studio founded by former Dragon Age director Mike Laidlaw. The company’s debut game, Eternal Strands, will be released on January 28, and a demo is currently available on PC.
I haven’t played the demo yet – it just went live and I wanted to play it before the end of the work day – but I quite like the look of Eternal Strands, emphasis on “quite”. It’s a radiant and breezy fantasy action game that puts you in the role of a muscular battle mage who can start self-propagating fires, build ice bridges, and throw destructible boulders using telekinesis. You’re basically a Jedi from Dragon Age, with a dash of Shadow Of The Colossus and oh, Zelda climbing at a bargain price.
All these obvious similarities may suggest a design without an identity of its own. It doesn’t aid that the visual direction feels a bit soulless – too neat, chunky and rounded for my taste. However, I’m willing to forgive all of this if Eternal Strands manages to follow through on its secret plan to hopefully capture the spirit of mid-tier action games from the 1990s with flashy real-time physics systems. Games like The Force Unleashed and Psi-Ops. Where are my Psi-Ops fans? I sense Midway’s restless spirit in the way Eternal Strands lets you freeze a golem’s feet to the floor and then smash it over the head with the nearest tree.
The demo version offers two areas of the game world, called the Enclave, not counting the base camp area, which fills with NPCs and objects that give quests during the campaign. The demo includes a crafting system with three basic types of weapons – sword and shield, bows and two-handed weapons, as well as a selection of magic spells. Apparently it’s playable on Steam, but it’s not yet verified, and progress in the demo will carry over to the full game.
You can find the demo at Couple and Epic Games Store.
