Eternal Strands Wants You to Break Its World, Not Just Fight Through It

Eternal Strands is an action-adventure game about a young Weaver named Brynn, a lost civilization called the Enclave, and a magic system built on temperature and telekinesis. Yellow Brick Games developed and published it. It came out January 28, 2025 for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S. It scores 8.3 out of 10.

Trailer, via IGN.

A Weaver Named Brynn and the Sealed Enclave

The setup is clean. Decades ago, the Enclave sealed itself off from the world, a powerful center of magical wonders gone dormant behind a barrier everyone believed was impenetrable. Brynn is a Weaver, one of the magic users who blend sword and sorcery, and she is determined to recover her people’s cultural home. She is young and fearless, which is the game’s way of saying she will climb things she should not.

Eternal Strands plays from a third-person perspective. Brynn carries a cloak that lets her manipulate elements and temperature. Freeze an enemy and it slows. Burn one and it loses health. That much is standard. What is not standard is that the temperature system reaches past combat and into the world itself.

Fire Spreads and the Map Remembers

Use fire abilities often enough in one area and the ground turns arid. Vegetation can catch, and fires can spread rapidly. That is a real consequence, not a visual flourish, and it is the most interesting thing Eternal Strands does. Most games of this kind treat the environment as a backdrop. Here the environment is a record of how you have been playing.

Brynn also has telekinetic powers. She can hurl objects at enemies. She can use the same skills to move through the world, launching herself across distance, burning obstacles out of the way, or building bridges out of ice. She can climb any surface in the game.

That last point matters more than it sounds. The game’s nine bosses roam different parts of the world, and fights often require climbing on them to strike weak points. Defeat a boss and you get a new magical ability, usable in combat or for exploration. The loop is generous: every win hands you a new tool for both fighting and getting around.

Nine Bosses, One Cloak, No Wasted Systems

The roster runs from humanoid constructs to towering beasts. The source material offers one example of how the environment and temperature feed into a fight: turning a dragon’s fiery breath against ice-covered minions. That is the promise, and the systems are built to keep it.

What holds Eternal Strands together is that nothing sits unused. The cloak, the telekinesis, the climbing, the temperature manipulation — each one feeds combat and traversal at the same time. A game like this usually has a mechanic that only exists for one mode. This one keeps folding its ideas back into each other.

The structure is single player, adventure, action and fantasy, third person throughout. Yellow Brick Games developed and published it, which means the studio carried both the creative and the commercial weight of the release.

What the 8.3 Says About the Design

Reviews landed generally positive, and the 8.3 out of 10 critic aggregate across five outlets is a fair reading of what Eternal Strands is. It takes a familiar frame — third person, big bosses, magic and weapons — and finds one genuinely new idea inside it, then builds everything else to serve that idea.

The temperature system is that idea. Freezing to slow, burning to damage, and a world that dries out and catches fire because of what you did is a mechanic with memory. It makes the player think about cost, not just output. That is rare in a genre that usually rewards the loudest possible action.

Key facts
– Title: Eternal Strands
– Release date: January 28, 2025
– Platforms: PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox Series X/S
– Developer and publisher: Yellow Brick Games
– Genre: Action-adventure, third person, single player
– Bosses: Nine
– Critic aggregate: 8.3/10 (five outlets)

The caveats are the ones that come with any release of this shape. Nine bosses is a real number, and the game leans on them hard. The climbing-on-bosses idea is strong, but it is also the kind of mechanic that lives or dies on how each fight is built, and a small studio has less room to iterate than a large one. The temperature system’s best trick — a world that changes because of your habits — is also the hardest thing to keep balanced across a full campaign.

None of that undoes the achievement. Yellow Brick Games set out to make a game where magic has weight and the map keeps score, and it did.

The Enclave is the mystery Brynn is peeling back, but the real draw is the world reacting to her. That is what separates Eternal Strands from the action-adventure games around it. It has one idea worth the price of admission and the discipline to make that idea run through everything.

action-adventure · Eternal Strands · game review · PS5 · Xbox Series X/S · Yellow Brick Games