There’s something genuinely great about looking at a gigantic monster lumbering toward you in the distance and thinking, “I am going to climb that thing and stab it in the head.” A new indie “supergroup” studio, Yellow Brick Games, has just revealed Eternal Strands, and it looks like it’s going to be an exciting blend of big ideas drawn from games like Monster Hunter, Shadow of the Colossus, and Dragon’s Dogma 2.
Yellow Brick Games is a Quebec City-based studio formed by former Dragon Age director Mike Laidlaw and three colleagues he met during his post-BioWare stint at Ubisoft, where he had worked on a now-canceled game codenamed Project Avalon. These include Frederic St-Luarent B., Jeff Skalski, and Thomas Giroux, who have worked on major Ubisoft series like Assassin’s Creed and Watch Dogs.
Eternal Strands is an action-adventure game that’s rooted in physics-based systems. The hero, Brynn, is “a young and fearless Weaver determined to recover her people’s cultural home by uncovering the mysteries of the Enclave – a once powerful nation that now lies dormant.” To do that, she’ll have to scale and defeat behemoths called Arks that can tower over 25 meters high, and wield both magic and the weather itself.
Every surface in Eternal Strands, not just the giant Arks, is climbable, and the environment can be used as a weapon. According to Yellow Brick Games, you’ll be able to set tree trunks on fire and hurl them into enemies with Brynn’s telekinesis, and block enemy attacks with her ice magic.
The studio says it’s leaning into the emergent gameplay created by these powerful abilities, and so players will be able to improvise new ways to use Brynn’s magic as they explore the world and discover new powers.
“It’s a very different game to ones I’ve worked on in the past, and it’s been a delight to generally answer the question ‘what if the player does X?’ with ‘Cool!'” Laidlaw says. “It’s also exciting to have a chance to build an all-new world that encourages and reacts to this kind of play.”
Yellow Brick Games has not announced an Eternal Strands release date yet, but you can wishlist the game on Steam. In the meantime, check out our list of the best fantasy games on PC, as well as our guide to the best Dragon’s Dogma 2 settings to max out your FPS while you practice slaying massive monsters.
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