Eternal Strands is an action-RPG with an emphasis on exploration, crafting, and equipment customization. It is set in the Mayda Basin, a region where an array of fantasy races have learned to harness their world’s innate magic. By plucking strands of energy from the land and from monsters, they can weave it into fabric and create clothing imbued with elemental power. Those skilled in this art became known as Weavers. 

Made up of people from every race and culture throughout Mayda and based out of their headquarters in the Enclave, the Weavers used their unique skills to place themselves at the forefront of Maydan culture. This age was brought to an apocalyptic end by an event known as the Surge, when magical eruptions sundered Mayda and every nation within it. The Weavers offered no aid to their neighbors as the Enclave was suddenly sealed behind an impenetrable magic barrier known as the Veil. Weavers caught outside the Veil formed themselves into nomadic bands, insulating themselves from persecution as they were blamed for the Surge and the years of war and unrest that followed in its wake.

The story follows one of these unexpectedly stateless Weaverbands many decades after the Surge. I play as Brynn, its newest member who is thrust into the position of Point, the band member who scouts ahead of the caravan to search for danger and resources. Her first mission in this role is a momentous one. Exploring near the Enclave, she accidentally leads her Weaverband through a temporary opening in the Veil—which closes as soon as they enter, trapping them inside. Brynn and her companions take it upon themselves to explore the decimated Enclave, now overrun with wild creatures and berserk magical constructs, searching for what remains of the Enclave’s Weavers and a way to lower the Veil, goals that soon entwine them in the mysterious origins of the cataclysmic Surge. 

Most of my time playing Eternal Strands is spent guiding Brynn as she explores the interior of the shattered Enclave. At first she can only enter the woods and swamps immediately adjacent to the Weaverband’s camp set at the Enclave’s perimeter, just inside the Veil. Soon, she unlocks access to the Loomgate network, devices that teleport its users to other Loomgates within the Enclave. Brynn uses this network to venture into a crumbling fortress set high on a mountaintop, a subterranean factory where magical automatons are constructed, a secret research base, and the abandoned Weaver capital of Dynevron, scouring their lengths and depths in search of answers about the Surge.

Brynn is afforded remarkable freedom to explore these areas. There is no obvious path through any of them. A hill that climbs down into a shallow pond where Acala wolves and camouflaged Darter lizards have gone for a drink is just as rewarding to explore as a sheer cliff supported by trees with trunks a dozen feet thick. Brynn is an impressive climber who can find handholds on almost any surface. I quickly learn that she reaches most places in the Enclave by climbing up rugged cliff faces and crumbling city edifices more often than following a meandering footpath. The length of time Brynn may climb is limited only by her stamina meter, which refills quickly as soon as she returns to solid ground.

Where Brynn may travel in an area is limited by a device called the Scry, a magical earpiece she wears whenever she leaves the caravan. The Scry lets her Weaverband follow Brynn’s progress through the Enclave almost as though they are spectators watching a videogame livestream, advising their Point on her route and giving her updates on her missions. It also functions as a magical tether, allowing the Weaverband to pull Brynn back to the nearest Loomgate if she runs out of hit points while fighting a monster or falls down the many chasms created by the Surge. It also sets boundaries around each area marked by a webbed dome of golden light. The Scry’s signal cannot travel further than these perimeters, so Brynn is forbidden by her Weaverband from traveling beyond their limits. If she tries, they will yank her back for her own protection. Thanks to the Scry and her watchful friends, Brynn’s life is never truly threatened no matter what dangers she encounters in the Enclave.

These systems of unlimited climbable surfaces contrasted against limited spaces do a good job creating large, open environments that are engaging to explore and do not succumb to bloat. The Enclave’s spaces are Eternal Threads’ best designed features. Each feels like a distinct part of a coherent, living space without resorting to stock planetary biomes. Each area also feels special at more granular levels. Brynn initially encounters the remnants of the Enclave’s former inhabitants in a modest village named Poldervale in the swampy Dredger’s Mire, which makes her first steps into the vast stone capital of Dynevron even more impressive. The Weaverband knows that The Arkons’ Hearth is where the Enclave’s automated servants were constructed, though the exact process is left up to my imagination to piece together using the area’s many factory workstations. The Institute is even more illusive. An apparent learning center for some of the Enclave’s most talented Weavers, it oftentimes more closely resembles a mine or a cave than a laboratory.

It’s in the systems that make these spaces explorable where I encounter problems. The physics are prone to odd behavior that result in Brynn suffering slapstick pratfalls, ranging from the inconvenient to the devastating. On the comedic end, a swing from Brynn’s weapon sends a bag flying into the air. Somehow, she ends up standing on that bag, which begins hopping in place as though the bag is rubber and Brynn weighs nothing at all. At the tragic end, I direct Brynn to jump onto a cliff face after she nearly falls into a chasm. Somehow, the physics engine decides this means Brynn should leap backwards and straight into the void, saved only by the Weaverband using the Scry to pull her to safety.

While exploring the Enclave, Brynn can encounter some areas overwhelmed by out-of-control magical effects. Choking clouds of raw magic and waves of perpetually burning fire damage Brynn while she passes through them. The worst effects come from ice. Frozen spaces damage Brynn while she occupies them in addition to slowing her movement speed to a shivering trudge, forcing her to take much more damage laboriously escaping its effects than she would running away from raw magic or fire. This is not only tedious and frustrating, but icy spaces far outnumber those affected by the other elements. Some cold-based creatures can even temporarily infuse this effect into Brynn when they strike her, causing her to generate ice beneath her feet that subject her to all of its additional negative effects. Most players have learned to dread ice in videogames. Eternal Strands may have the most obnoxious cold effects in any videogame I’ve ever played.

To protect herself from the wild magical creatures and berserk automatons that wander the Enclave, Brynn is equipped with a sword and shield, a massive two-handed sword, and a bow. She carries all three with her at all times and I can prompt her to switch between them with a simple button combination. Each of the weapon trio has a different function in battle. The bow’s is obvious, and I can use a responsive lock-on feature to ensure Brynn’s arrows are fired accurately at distant or flying targets. 

The virtues of the sword and shield and the two-handed sword are more dubious. The smaller sword wielded with the shield swings faster and deals less damage than the larger two-handed sword. If Brynn raises the shield just as an enemy’s weapon or claws flashes before their attack, they will be stunned, letting her get in many free hits. By contrast, the two-handed sword lacks the blocking utility provided by a shield, but its weight can overpower enemies. Repeated hits can even force automatons to drop their weapons and shields, leaving them vulnerable to further attacks. Its wider swing also makes it possible to hit multiple enemies at once. Despite its slower attack rate, the two-handed sword ultimately dispatches enemies faster and allows Brynn to adopt a strategy of total aggression. Outside the first few hours, I rarely direct Brynn to use her sword and shield. It never feels useful or necessary.

The standard enemies Brynn encounters around the Enclave are not threatening. They’re barely capable of hitting her once they know about her presence and don’t deal much damage when they do. To recover the damage she does take, Brynn can drink a red potion. She begins every expedition with a full stock and can find more by breaking open containers found around the Enclave.

Getting Brynn to actually drink these potions is frequently more difficult than it should be. The precise conditions where she is allowed to use a potion seem finicky. If she hasn’t quite returned to her neutral pose after an attack or if her arms are otherwise still moving in a way the videogames’ systems don’t like, she will simply ignore the command. The few times Brynn is pulled by the Scry back to a Loomgate when her health meter empties are because of this reluctance, not the actual combat difficulty.

Brynn’s other options in combat are her magical abilities. She can wield these awesome powers by donning different Mantles, a long piece of decorative cloth that drapes over her shoulder. Each has a magical strand woven into it that grants her power over an element. I can direct her to switch instantly between different Mantles at any time, even in the midst of combat, using the same button prompts that change her weapons.

Brynn begins Eternal Strands with two Mantles that let her use the spells Weaver’s Grasp and Icewall. Weaver’s Grasp lets her manipulate gravity to pick up objects from the environment and hurl them into walls or enemies. It’s a nice ability to have at the outset but is quickly forgotten. Brynn’s bottomless arrow supplies are more effective projectiles than random garbage and her two-handed sword is more capable of smashing objects with less effort.

Icewall sees far more use than Weaver’s Grasp. It creates a thick sheet of ice wherever I direct an on-screen cursor. This may be used defensively to block enemies from halls and doorways or offensively to trap them in place. A consistently effective strategy from Brynn’s first expedition to the last is to trap an enemy with Ice Wall and wail on them as they stand helpless, unable to defend themselves or even counterattack. There’s a suggestion that Ice Wall may also be used outside combat to create bridges across the many chasms left around the Enclave by the Surge. My attempts at this were inconsistent. It’s difficult to create a solid line between two objects and the bridge frequently collapses before Brynn can cross it. I learn to rely on Ice Wall for offense and not traversal.

Depending on how diligent Brynn is at exploring the Enclave, her number of Mantles expands to nine in total. The power to launch a firestorm from her fingers is the only newly acquired spell that feels essential. Other magical powers are only situationally useful, like the ability to encase Brynn in a suit of frozen armor, and such situations are quite rare. The others are variations on a theme, like a gravity spell that pulls enemies towards an object instead of throwing the object at them and a fire spell that causes flames to erupt from a localized point instead of from Brynn’s hands. Despite going to great effort to acquire these Mantles, I rarely have Brynn use them. Like her sword and shield, there is never a reason to.

The exception to the harmlessness of the Enclave’s magic beasts and berserk automatons are the Great Foes. One of these titanic creatures stomps around every region of the Enclave and respawns whenever Brynn returns to the caravan after exploring. Fighting them becomes a regular part of the gameplay loop.

There is an impressive variety of Great Foes for Brynn to contend with. Some are mighty Arks, giant versions of the standard automaton enemies who swing weapons the size of buildings or try to crush Brynn with fists thick as boulders. Others are more typical fantasy creatures, ranging from giant quadrupedal lizards to flying drakes. Every Great Foe wields a specific kind of magic and will use it freely against Brynn to devastating effect. Many of them are capable of knocking out most of her health bar in a single blow, encouraging careful tactics and defensive play. I often find it prudent to have Brynn retreat from a fight and scavenge more health potions from the environment before returning to finish the job.

Equally impressive to the variety of Great Foes is their many interactions and vulnerabilities to Brynn’s broad toolset. Some will fling rubble, rocks, and other large objects at Brynn. Using Weaver’s Grasp, she can pluck these projectiles out of the air and hurl them right back. Ice Wall can also be used to freeze their limbs, locking their legs to the ground and preventing the Arks from using their hands. Sometimes it’s wise to avoid their titanic power by pelting them from afar with arrows. At other times, getting in close and hacking away with Brynn’s sword is the better option. Scenarios constantly change depending on which Great Foe Brynn is facing and the region in which she encounters it.

Most Great Foes have protective features which must be removed before their vulnerable parts may be struck. Fortunately, they prove just as climbable as the Enclave’s many walls. Brynn spends large parts of her battles clambering around on Great Foes, hammering scales to break them off or shattering the bolts that hold an Ark’s armor to their body, then striking at the weakspots exposed underneath.

Of all the activities in Eternal Strands, climbing around on Great Foes’ bodies is the one I am most weary of by the ending. Brynn is overly reactive to the many decorative objects that adorn the Great Foes. It’s common to try and climb up one’s leg or back only for Brynn to suddenly grab a decorative fringe or tassel when it passes near her during the Great Foe’s gyrations. Now far away from the weak point I was aiming her towards, it’s faster just to have her drop to the ground and try again instead of trying to fight Brynn’s way back from the creature’s extremities.

Great Foes are also designed to be incredibly defensive against Brynn climbing around on them. All of them can shake their bodies, forcing her to stop and take a firm grip to avoid being thrown off. Arks can even use their hands to pluck Brynn off their body, squeeze her like an insect in their colossal fist, then throw her to the ground. Brynn can leap away from their grasping hands, but the hand’s hitbox is so large that she frequently ends up in their clutches even when she is nowhere near their fingers. By the time Brynn overcomes these defenses and reaches a creature’s weak spot high on their body, most of her stamina is usually drained, allowing her to get in a few token hits then have to drop back to the ground and try again with a refreshed meter. As Great Foes grow more difficult and elaborate the deeper into the Enclave Brynn explores, climbing up to their weak points becomes more and more tedious.

Any Great Foe Brynn meddles with may be killed through sheer brute force, and this is often my preferred approach. Each one also has a special, hidden way they may be killed, called harvesting, which may be discovered through experimentation or by looking for hints in a Great Foe’s codex entry. 

The methods to make each kind of Great Foe vulnerable to harvesting follows a general logic across all nine varieties. Each has unique features on their body that channels their magical abilities. Locating and destroying these features will reveal a ring of golden light somewhere on the Great Foe’s body. Brynn’s job is to climb up to this ring and pull a strand of light from within the creature’s body. This takes several seconds and great effort from Brynn. If she is able to pull the strand completely from the creature’s body, then it is successfully harvested and dies instantly.

The strands of light Brynn pulls from their bodies may be used by the Weaverband’s tailor to craft a new Mantle. The pressure to collect every Great Foe’s strands is light. Brynn may acquire a basic strand, and subsequently the most basic form of a spell, for dispatching a Great Foe through any method. Harvesting is only required if Brynn is to acquire the more powerful second and third tiers of each Mantle.

A step seems missing from this process. Earning the basic Mantle for any kind of Great Foe kill, then its second tier for completing a harvest makes sense. Earning the third tier merely requires completing the exact same harvest a second time. There are no special conditions or additional materials required. It’s one of the most visible places where there seems to be something missing from Eternal Strands’ design, a suggestion that there were further features intended for the Great Foes that are conspicuous by their absence.

Strands earned from harvesting Great Foes are not the only resources Brynn retrieves while exploring the Enclave. Nearly every beast and automaton she kills, container she destroys, or rock she smashes will drop small pieces of wood, stone, cloth, and other valuable materials with which Brynn can fill her pockets. Where and how Brynn obtains these materials affects their quality. Defeating a monster with fire or ice magic can change the type of material it drops, and monsters in general drop higher-quality material than what is found from containers and environmental objects. Great Foes, naturally, drop the highest quality materials, providing incentive to keep hunting them even after Brynn has obtained every Mantle. Anything Brynn carries on her when she returns to the Weaverband after an expedition is added to the caravan’s bottomless coffers. As Point, Brynn is given top priority to use any material to craft the weapons and armor she needs to perform her job.

Crafting in Eternal Strands is remarkably flexible. Its only rigid point is its entry. The Weaverband’s blacksmith requires a diagram of any weapon or armor piece Brynn wants crafted. The actual materials that go into the creation of her equipment are up to me. Each resource confers different attributes to the resulting weapon or armor. Rarer resources provide greater attacking and defensive power. Other types are specialized for different scenarios. Alcala fur provides high resistance to cold effects, while Drake scales are more resistant to fire. Loading screen tips encourage me to stack these resistances on all of Brynn’s equipment to counteract elemental effects. I eagerly load her up with as much cold resistance as possible and, to my disappointment, it makes no discernible difference to ice magic’s slowing and damage-over-time effects. An armor’s quality is important to Brynn’s survival but its impact on elemental effects is oversold.

Once a resource is used to create equipment, the choice is not permanent. Any piece of equipment may be reforged at any time, swapping in different materials to change its attributes. Brynn even gets the old materials back as though they had not been cut, pounded, and forged into armor or a weapon. This reforging system encourages me to constantly tinker with Brynn’s equipment, swapping in more powerful materials as Brynn discovers them instead of crafting whole new pieces every few hours. Even Brynn’s starting equipment can be made powerful enough to combat the Enclave’s most dangerous creatures using this method. Different varieties of weapons and armor are more important for the passive abilities they confer, like a larger health pool or faster stamina regeneration, than for their statistical power, which is instead determined by the resources used when they are forged and reforged.

The Weaverband is an important part of Brynn’s adventures in the Enclave. In addition to providing her crafting services through its blacksmith and tailor, they also provide her with much of her motivation to keep exploring, act as a sounding board for her feelings and difficulties, and fill in details about the Maydan Basin, the Enclave, and the Surge.

As I first begin to learn about the Weaverband, I sense a queer subtext to the whole concept. As a traveling band of mystics who are treated with suspicion and scorn by people who nevertheless seek out their services, at first the Weaverband strikes me as a fantasy version of Roma stereotypes. It’s how new Weavers join the caravans that gives the idea a queer twist. Weavers can come from any race or culture in the Maydan Basin and have to make a conscious decision to embrace becoming one; it has to be something they feel they are inside which cannot be resisted or denied. 

The Weaverband becomes a chosen family to its members as their identities often strain their relationships with their birth families. Brynn maintains a distant and frosty relationship with her family. Other members of the Weaverband have outright forsaken their roots. Dahm the tailor comes from a rigidly theocratic culture that stamps out any sense of individualism. He proudly enjoys his new life where every day’s events are uncertain and he is free to be himself and act on his own desires—an attitude which begins to put him at odds with his wife, the blacksmith Sola, who needs the emotional security of knowing Dahm will still be part of her life in the future. Laen, the Weaverband’s alchemist and loremaster, comes from a harsh nation where Machiavellian politics seem to be the norm, in which they were groomed to be a power player. They plainly prefer a simpler life in service to only their closest friends.

I am intrigued by these queer undercurrents, though I wonder if I am reading too much into coincidental details. As I progress further into Eternal Strands’ narrative, my wondering decreases as the queer subtext increasingly becomes text. Laen has an androgynous appearance and goes by they/them pronouns, a preference every character honors without being asked or needing to be told. Sevastyan, Sola’s blacksmith apprentice, is a large, furry character with a fearsome appearance and a timid personality that puts in my mind the bear subculture (and here I admit I may be reaching). When Brynn finally encounters the Enclave’s surviving Weavers, she can help two women admit their feelings for each other. Late in the story, Brynn is able to enter into a romantic relationship of her own with another member of the Weaverband. One of the options is Casmyn, the quartermaster and a lesbian woman. At this point I stop wondering because I know: The subtext is real and intentional.

If there’s a flaw to how these identities and relationships are portrayed, it’s in how heavily they skew towards women. This is partly understandable, as the player character is immutably a woman and optionally a lesbian or bisexual. The lack of a prominent, visible male homosexual relationship is still notable. Female homosexual relationships tend to be more tolerated because of the fetishization put upon them by heterosexual men, and the relationships portrayed here are skewed heavily in that direction. Bigots of a certain brand thus may find Eternal Strands more titillating than objectionable, and why should they be allowed to have any fun?

Brynn’s primary means of developing her relationships with the Weaverband are through quests. Aside from the main quest that guides her through the mystery of the Surge, every member of the caravan has a long chained sidequest Brynn can help them pursue.

At first I am eager to complete these sidequests. They give Brynn a reason to spend more time in the Enclave, exploring corners where the main quest does not send her, collecting more resources and diagrams, and creating new opportunities to challenge Great Foes. Over time, the sidequests become repetitive. Brynn discovers every area within the Enclave before I am halfway through the narrative’s forty-plus hour length. After this point, sidequests increasingly send her to areas she’s already visited multiple times. So many send her to Upper Dynevron’s administrative Spire that it starts to feel like a running gag. As Brynn returns to Dredger’s Mire yet again to pick flowers, I wonder: Were there intended to be more areas in the Enclave, and these sidequests were rewritten to accommodate their absence?

Completing as many of these sidequests as possible can make Brynn’s periodic returns to the Weaverband feel unbalanced. It’s enjoyable to spend several hours at a time exploring the Enclave as Brynn never leaves my control for more than a few seconds. When she returns to the Weaverband with her quest log filled with completed objectives, her reward is an awful lot of talking. At the most extreme end, these stretch to over an hour in length to check in with every character. Some of my shorter sessions playing Eternal Strands were taken up almost entirely by turning in sidequests.

The way conversations between the Weaverband are portrayed can make them especially difficult to sit through. Each begins with what looks like a cutscene, with each character’s polygonal model gathering around an important object or in an inconspicuous corner. The screen then awkwardly fades into an out-of-focus backdrop where each character is represented in the foreground by a hand-drawn portrait. The initial pseudo-cutscene feels like a fragment of what was intended to be greater use of the more expressive polygonal models which there ultimately was not enough time to animate.

Portraits can be a wonderful method for communicating a character’s feelings if their representation is expressive enough. The Weaverbands’ portraits, frustratingly, are not expressive. Each has a small number of expressions their face shifts between while their body remains locked in a dynamic pose that often makes their body language contradict their feelings. 

Oria, the Weaverband’s leader, is always straight-backed and regal even when speaking covertly with Brynn—and that she is a large bipedal bird means even her face has no discernible human emotion. Sola always has her blacksmith hammer slung casually over her shoulder which does not help convey the anger and sadness she feels towards her husband. Laen always holds their codex protectively against their chest even as they gush about the latest piece of lost knowledge Brynn has retrieved from the Enclave ruins. Every character is fully voiced by a cast that does a great job, but their performances are let down by static character representations that do not communicate the feelings their voices and dialog convey. It’s another place where Eternal Strands feels squeezed by some missing, unknown quantity.

Eternal Strands is a videogame of incredible ambition. Its explorable areas are large and varied without becoming bloated or boring to navigate. Its setting and characters are incredibly detailed and beautifully imagined. Its queer subtext is admirable and all the more important to see realized in the present cultural climate. The crafting system is fun and flexible, finding original ways to minimize resource grinding and avoid feelings that resources have been wasted on bad equipment.

Eternal Strands’ problem is the more I play, the more I experience a consistent feeling that final steps were not completed and temporary bandaids were elevated to permanent solutions. Combat against standard enemies is unrefined, consisting of repetitive button mashing and spamming the same spells. Great Foes offer a grander perspective on combat systems, but become repetitive to fight over time and their rewards give the impression there was another layer to them that was never implemented. Sidequests push Brynn to repeatedly return to the same few areas. Character dialog is overwritten and portrayed by static images that clash with the emotions the characters are feeling. There are several aspects to Eternal Strands I admire. Its limitations leave me expecting more and feeling frustrated for being given less.