Yellow Brick Games, the studio co-founded by Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw, has finally announced its first project. Titled Eternal Strands, it looks like an incredible blend of Shadow of the Colossus with modern Zelda, and it's instantly shot to the top of my gaming wishlist.
Eternal Strands is an action game that gives you an array of magic elemental powers that can interact with the world in robust, emergent ways. You can shoot ice to build a bridge over a ravine or use fire to burn down obstacles. Telekinetic powers let you hurl pieces of the environment - or even other monsters - at enemies. It even looks like you'll be able to pin giant enemies down by encasing their limbs in ice. It seems like the exact sort of physics-driven simulation that's made Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom such joys to interact with.
Sandbox combat that challenges you to smartly use your environment rather than memorize a list of combos is music to my ears, and we haven't even gotten to the giant monsters yet. This trailer is largely focused on an encounter with a hulking titan that you can grab onto and clamber all over to find an advantageous spot to attack. It's all very Shadow of the Colossus - or if you want a very current comparison, it looks just as chaotic and fun as taking down giant beasts in Dragon's Dogma 2.
All it's taken is a 76-second trailer to utterly sell me on Eternal Strands, but we're due to hear a lot more on the game soon. The trailer debuted through IGN First, and the outlet's set to publish a lot more on the game throughout the month of April. For now, we know that the game is will hit PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X and S sometime in 2025.
"Our hope with Eternal Strands is to deliver an adventure that brings a sense of fun and excitement to fantasy, while encouraging players to experiment with its systems," Laidlaw says in a press release. "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!’ It’s also exciting to have a chance to build an all-new world that encourages and reacts to this kind of play."
Laidlaw, of course, is best known as the creative director of the Dragon Age franchise. He co-founded Yellow Brick Games back in 2020, and the studio is now packed with AAA industry veterans - even though its 68-person headcount certainly makes it much leaner than the average big-publisher team.
Looking for new games in 2024? You know where to click.
