Eternal Strands is a great reminder that creative tools and reactiveness in big open-world sandboxes trump content bloat

Eternal Strands has quietly become one of early 2025’s biggest surprises. While it’s not topping the sales charts nor dominating the online conversation, the sentiment which surrounds it is generally positive, and in the age of bloated open-world experiences (which are otherwise good), many players are finding great comfort in its smarter approach to world size and tightening the gameplay loop.

Yellow Brick Games, founded in 2020 by AAA industry veterans from BioWare, Ubisoft, Blizzard, and EA, has knocked out a notable game that feels neither too big nor small, in roughly four years. With the industry facing many difficulties as I type these words and polarisation leading to bigger and more expensive experiences as well as small itty bitty indies that often bite more than they can chew, Eternal Strands is the sort of rare beast that typically flies under many radars.

I arrived a bit late to this party due to my gaming commitments elsewhere, but largely positive chatter and comments that came from folks who are typically burned out from playing big-budget behemoths made me far more interested in the game than any piece of promotional material. Yellow Brick Games CCO Mike Laidlaw’s enthusiasm and generally wholesome vibes on Bluesky also helped, I’ll admit.

Recent disappointments with ambitious games that were built with UE5 also had me a bit worried. Could Yellow Brick Games deliver on all it had promise, while also dealing with that tech’s weaker points on the first try? Well, I can say all that AAA experience didn’t go to waste. Eternal Strands is a darn fine video game that feels laser-focused on what really matters most when devs don’t have a ‘forever’ budget and creatively clueless executives breathing down their necks.

Eternal Strands’ premise is simple, and even the initial cutscene keeps things concise in spite of all the colourful worldbuilding done with the text and the (excellent) voice acting: Weavers are this world’s version of mages and they’re not welcome in most places after some bad stuff happened long ago. In many ways, control of magic is a lost art, and while there are practitioners moving from one town to the next and looking to unearth lost secrets, the fact is that most people don’t care about or simply hate these weavers and what they do.

Of course, Brynn, a young weaver, and her band of cheerful and passionate magic pals are on the move and trying to find a way to restore weavers to their former glory. Without getting into more early story details, they come across the Enclave, a region that was essentially the centre of magic in the world. Nowadays, it’s a hazardous magic wasteland where nature thrives, but danger lurks around every corner. And that includes giant scary constructs called Arks, as well as behemoths such as drakes.

Yellow Brick Games’ key members haven’t been shy about explaining the biggest influences on their game. Shadow of the Colossus, recent Zelda games, and even Dragon’s Dogma have been brought up time and again. You don’t need to play much of the game to feel their DNA all over the Enclave’s ruins and Brynn’s abilities. There is, however, a distinct interest in making the gameplay loop breezier and far more focused than in your average open-world extravaganza.

A few hours in, Eternal Strands shouldn’t be considered a small game. Its areas, which are laid out like and similar in size to Monster Hunter’s, change under different weather (and even magical) conditions and are designed to be revisited during hunts and side quests. The key difference here is that they’re quite easy to memorize and navigate quickly. It’s not about the sheer size of all the combined areas, but about how that space is used.

The general feeling is that most of Eternal Strands’ development was spent figuring out how to give players enough control over the game rather than how to keep them engaged. It turns out that, if the basic tools and loop are cool and unique enough, people will be interested in exploring more of a world. There are clear objectives driving the whole thing (exploring a lost civilization and defeating massive enemies with inventiveness) and more than enough cutting-edge tech powering the creative vision up.

Monster Hunter figured this out long ago (Wilds is about to prove Capcom right again), and Nintendo’s refreshed open-world take on The Legend of Zelda was a gigantic win that worked twice because its astounding freedom wasn’t limited to ‘more things to do’ and a striking visual presentation. Both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are games that simply are fun to figure out and ‘solve’ in a multitude of ways. Eternal Strands feels exactly like a downsized version of the combination of those design philosophies.

The most fun I’ve had so far with Eternal Strands has been trying different spells on different parts of a giant automaton’s body, luring giant monsters into elemental traps when my health bar was almost depleted, or seeing how much I could literally break the game’s environments with the limited (but expertly crafted) tools I’d been given. It’s the sort of game that speedrunners will probably tear apart sooner rather than later, and I’m fairly sure they’ll have a blast trying to figure it all out, as the game actively encourages you to ‘mess’ with its limits and try different strategies with finite resources constantly.

Of course, the fact the mystery at the centre of the narrative is intriguing and that dialogues and exposition never go on for too long (adding to the overall breezy vibes) are big pluses that don’t disrupt, and even elevate, the smooth pacing of an adventure that strikes an almost perfect balance between epic and swashbuckling. Plus, the art has a distinct, clear style and is pretty cute!

I’ve got my complaints, sure, but they’re relatively easy to overlook when a game runs and plays so well, in addition to having that visual appeal. More importantly, Eternal Strands fully knows what its limits are and what it wants to do. I wish that happened more often.

Eternal Strands is now available on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. It’s also part of Game Pass’ current offering of third-party games.