- Publisher: Yellow Brick Games
- Release Date: Jan 28, 2025
- Also On: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
- Unscored
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Jan 28, 2025Eternal Strands serves as an incredible debut for Yellow Brick Games, stunning with its incredible visuals and wowing with its great magic system and enthralling gameplay.
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Jan 27, 2025Eternal Strands is an amazing adventure that excels in combat and exploration. Finding unique sights, battling fearsome bosses, and crafting incredible gear makes it extremely fun to play. Highly recommended.
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Jan 28, 2025Eternal Strands is an unforgettable combination of intense action, inventive improvisation and an engaging story.
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Jul 22, 2025None of this is all that new, and I can understand why some people might be tempted to write Eternal Strands off as a collection of influences thrown together. But if you’ll look a little longer, you’ll see that it combines those influences awfully well.
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Feb 5, 2025The Yellow Brick Games team consists of many experienced developers from renowned studios, and their first collaborative project reflects that. While the combat is a little bit janky, the world-building, characters, and overall design are excellent.
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Jan 27, 2025Despite pulling features and mechanics from a variety of different series, Eternal Strands manages to feel like a cohesive experience that really shines once players get the hang of its advanced physics and combat system. However, the average story and the game's repetitive latter half hold it back from being truly fantastic, making it a solid action-adventure that's just a few steps away from greatness.
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Mar 22, 2025Eternal Strands is a love letter to fantasy epics, blending the creativity of Breath of the Wild, the grand battles of Shadow of the Colossus, and the fluid combat of Dragon’s Dogma. Its magic system is the real star—woven into combat, exploration, and puzzles, making the Enclave feel alive with mystical energy. While the visuals sometimes falter and the story lacks depth, the sheer wonder of its world and spellbinding mechanics make it a journey worth taking.
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Jan 25, 2026If Eternal Strands somehow slipped under your radar amidst a truly insane previous year for video games, it deserves your full attention if you love magic, have a creative mind, and enjoy the epic feel of facing titanic monsters that Monster Hunter or Shadow of the Colossus wouldn't disown. This first game from a new studio composed of BioWare and Ubisoft veterans certainly offers a very solid foundation for a franchise as original as it is convincing. As it stands, however, one might regret a slight lack of risk-taking, which translates into an arsenal of weapons and spells, as well as a bestiary that, unfortunately, becomes repetitive rather quickly. We therefore hope that this successful first attempt has achieved well-deserved success, so that its creators can push the boundaries even further in a potential sequel.
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Feb 4, 2025Although not without its shortcomings and flaws, Eternal Strands proved to be a long-lived and solid action-adventure, both in exploration and in the combat system.
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Jan 28, 2025Eternal Strands delivers a slick, action-packed fantasy adventure with tonnes of heart and a whole lot of elemental fury to play with. Despite a little tedium creeping into its late-game grinding missions, it manages to weave an unbelievable number of mechanics into a cohesive gameplay loop that feels very satisfying. On top of that, its vibrant and imaginative world is gorgeously realised and full of delicious lore for fantasy nerds to devour. An incredibly strong first offering from new indie studio Yellow Brick Games.
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Jan 27, 2025An action RPG with magical powers that feel genuinely dangerous, married to level design that offers scale and prettiness.
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Jan 27, 2025The game expertly and exquisitely craft a dense, multilayered, and vibrant adventure set against memorable settings.
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Edge MagazineJan 24, 2025In short, the system - mostly magically - works. [Issue#407, p.94]
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Jan 28, 2025Eternal Strands is an ambitious debut that demonstrates both the potential and limitations of Yellow Brick Games. When its systems work in harmony – especially during battles against the Arks – the game achieves moments of brilliance that rival its inspirations. Physics and magic combine to create memorable situations that truly make you feel powerful and creative.
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Feb 26, 2025Eternal Strands is undeniably fun, but it struggles to offer anything truly exceptional. Across five acts, you'll climb massive monsters, wield epic magic, and craft stylish gear. However, the story and characters feel like empty filler, and combat against smaller foes serves mostly as a playground for your magical abilities.
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Feb 14, 2025Eternal Strands is filled with great ideas. But sporadically, the game’s execution and exposition can’t match these lofty ambitions. At best, the game is a thermodynamic playground that lets you experiment with frost and flame. But once you’ve absorbed its principles (and the weaknesses of the game’s bosses), the game’s appeal might dissolve like ice in an inferno.
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Jan 28, 2025If we were to blend Shadow of the Colossus, Assassin's Creed and Zelda games in one place, I think something like this would come out. The game is not bad, it entertains, but it gets very repetitive and boring over time.
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Jan 27, 2025Made up of highs and lows, great moments and dull ones, Eternal Strands is a real rollercoaster. Still, even its less successful moments aren't enough to drown out the tremendous fun of taking down giant foes, armed with a pocket full of spells and a whole lot of creativity. The pace of the narrative isn't always constant and enjoyable, but the amazing work of the voice cast gives it a lot of vivacity, and fortunately, Eternal Strands doesn't stretch too far to the point of losing its magic.
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Jan 27, 2025I can’t make heads or tails of Eternal Strands. If we talk about polish, art direction, music, and combat I think it is a great title that will entertain for quite some time. But once all was said and done, I struggled to remember anything aside from a few cool combat encounters. The progression system aside from spells is a little uninspired, and the story outside of its charming cast isn’t much to write home about either. If you want to know if this game is for you or not, I highly suggest you give the demo a go. If you like what the game is putting down after completing that, I think you’ll enjoy it. If you don’t, I doubt the rest of the game will make you fall in love with it either. While I’m walking away from Eternal Strands with my hunger sated, I would’ve liked more adventurous appetizers and a dessert alongside the filling main course.
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Jan 27, 2025When Eternal Strands is good, it’s very good, thanks to exciting boss fights that iterate upon Shadow of Colossus’s gigantic encounters better than just about any of the other games that have used it as inspiration. While its story is underwhelming and some aspects of its gear progression are especially convoluted, the combat is built on an extremely strong foundation thanks to a versatile set of powers that encourage and reward creativity, especially in the showstopping Great Foe battles. The novelty does begin to fade after a while, especially when you’re forced to fight those same bosses and enemies again in the same locations, occasionally with frustrating weather effects, but the high points of Eternal Strands mitigate the low points enough to still make it an action RPG that’s easy to recommend.
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Jan 31, 2025Eternal Strands is a straightforward action-adventure game. The physics-based magic system adds a lot of fun and satisfyingly strategic energy to Brynn's regular run-ins with colossal enemies, but smaller threats rarely rise above being a tedious hindrance. And although the history of the world is interesting to uncover and conversations with Brynn's party members a regularly lively delight, the actual moment-to-moment story beats don't feel all that compelling. It's a shame that Eternal Strands' lows drag parts of its experience down, because the narrative and gameplay have clear highs that would excel in a game that wasn't holding them back.
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Jan 27, 2025While it always feels bad to slam a small-ish studio that is more overly ambitious than actually incompetent, Eternal Strands is too shoddily-made to be praised. Not challenging and intelligent enough to promote a smart use of systemic magic effects, too repetitive to be charming and too strained between inspirations to find an unique voice, this is more of an unfinished tech demo with wacky physics than a true fantasy tale.
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Feb 5, 2025This is an ambitious, confident debut by a small team that is swinging for the fences. When a game like this arrives, bubbling up improbably from an industry that all too often rewards one million-dollar-sequel after another, it stands to be celebrated. I’d go out into the glittering ruins of Dynevron and rumble into a boss fight and then, somehow, lose the boss, and get sidetracked by some flowers I needed to find, and then go and unlock a teleport gate, and then organically find the boss again stomping obstinately past a fallen cupola, and I’d think "this is a blast, I’m having a blast, this is great." And sure, I don’t tremendously care about any of these people, and it’s never been less physically satisfying to swing a sword at these dogs, but right about then I notice that there’s this beautiful cliff about ten feet away and I can pick things up with my mind and in a matter of seconds all my problems have been forgotten.