New Game Pass Open World RPG Is Good

As a massive dragon-like drake hurled fireballs at me, I fired arrows back while dodging the projectiles. And I did a good job. None of them got me! But they did hit the wooden scaffolding I was standing on. Seconds later, it was burning and collapsing. And I was very high up. So I hopped down to a part that wasn’t on fire, turned around, and used my magical powers to grab a piece of the burning scaffolding and launched it back at the monster, doing enough damage to kill it. I felt extremely cool in that moment. Then I ran across a piece of debris that had landed on the platform and my character’s physics got weird and I fell off the tower to the ground below, where I stood alive, but damaged. Just another day in Eternal Strands, a sometimes wonky, but ambitious and fun action adventure RPG.

Eternal Strands, launching January 28 on Xbox, PS5, and PC, is the first game from indie studio Yellow Brick Games. The company was founded in 2020 by former Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw and a group of ex-Ubisoft Quebec developers. And with its first game, the studio is leaning on its developers’ past.

Eternal Strands is a large, map-based open-world fantasy action game set in a new universe where people who practice magic—known as weavers—are shunned from society after a horrible event scarred the world. The epicenter of that disaster is a large kingdom of weavers who locked themselves away and disappeared after all that destruction. You play as Brynn, a young woman who has joined a band of weavers determined to explore that locked-away kingdom and discover what actually happened. To do that, you’ll need to explore various open-world maps, collect resources, craft better gear, fight a lot of enemies, and use your magic to survive.

If you’ve played Breath of the Wild or Immortals: Fenyx Rising, you’ll be familiar with the type of game Yellow Brick Games has created. Its painterly visuals and character designs feel heavily inspired by the look of those other games. Similarly, the action RPG plays a lot like those games, too. You can block, dodge, parry, lock on to enemies, charge melee attacks to hit harder, and shoot arrows at far-away foes or items. And Brynn can climb practically any surface while you manage a depleting stamina bar that limits how far you can go before needing a rest (or falling). Yeah, you’ve played games like before.

Magically blasting enemies off cliffs

However, while Eternal Strands is clearly inspired by these past games, it also has its own ideas. A big one, literally, is that each map you visit (the world isn’t one big open world but a series of distinct locations) contains a massive boss enemy that can be defeated for rare resources. These enemies are truly huge. Usually, you can hear or see them stomping or flying around even when they’re way off in the distance. These bosses can be killed in standard combat or you can figure out a way to harvest them—like climbing on them to attack weakpoints—to extract the rare energy you need to upgrade your magic abilities. And this is something you’ll want to do because magic in Eternal Strands is awesome.

You start Eternal Strands with two powers: The ability to create ice walls to trap enemies or put out fires and a telekinesis power that can be used to grab items and enemies and hurl them around. As you progress you unlock more magic, including fire attacks and spells that let you drop gravity wells that suck enemies in and then blow up when triggered. Thankfully, all of these abilities feel really powerful right out of the gate and only get more powerful (and enjoyable) to use as you upgrade them.

I especially want to call out the telekinesis power as it’s mighty powerful right at the start of Eternal Strands. You can straight up grab most enemies and toss them off cliffs instead of fighting them, though you won’t be able to collect any resources if you do this. One of my favorite video game moments of 2025 so far is grabbing a big object and using my magic power to shunt it at a group of tiny enemies, sending them all flying off in different directions like pins being hit by a bowling ball.

Sadly, this physics-based action and the ability to set nearly anything on fire or break almost any item or prop you encounter does lead to some wonkiness in Eternal Strands. I’ve lost track of the number of times I flew off a cliff or boss seemingly for no reason. I also encountered issues with fire not always working to melt ice or burn structures. Or enemies getting stuck in debris or their pathing breaking in weird ways. Performance can also get rough if there are too many items breaking and too many enemies around at once.

There’s an overall sense that Eternal Strands is probably a tad too ambitious for the smaller team working on it. It’s like the game is barely being contained and at any point it could suddenly break, sending you flying into the air. It’s never so bad that the game is unplayable, but it might be too much for some players to put up with. At least the devs seem to know things can get wonky, and let you basically survive any fall from any height without taking much damage.

Exciting exploration, but boring conversation

Once you’re done tossing enemies around using magic, you’ll eventually return back to your base camp, and this is where Eternal Strands differs from most open-world RPGs. While the locations you visit are big and varied, including swampy forests, caves, and destroyed cities, they aren’t filled with random quests or objectives to complete. Instead, each map has a few collectibles, a previously mentioned boss (that respawns), and enemies to kill.

As you talk to the other members of your weaver band back at camp, you’re given quests that will have you visiting these maps for different reasons, like collecting flowers at night or finding a blueprint in a specific area. Once you’re done with that, you return, bringing back all the crafting resources you collected. Each of these treks out into the world moves time forward between day and night while also possibly activating different weather patterns and events. One time, I returned to an early area to complete an easy little collecting quest but discovered a nasty magic storm created by a new, harder boss monster. Enemies were more powerful, making the quest harder, but there was rarer loot to be had as well.

Survive your trips out into the world and you return with all your loot. Die, and you come back to camp mostly empty-handed. This setup leads to a situation where as you spend more time in an area collecting good items while completing quests, you start to get nervous about dying and losing your resources. This tension makes combat against big bosses or enemy ambushes all the more exciting. This loop really got its hooks in me after a few hours, making me excited to go back out and get more crafting materials so I could upgrade my camp and improve my gear or even build brand-new weapons and armor.

It’s at this point that I’d love to tell you about how great the other members of your camp are and how talking to them is wonderful, but instead, a lot of the conversations with them are boring or worse, annoyed me. There are some standout moments with your camp leader and your archivist, but most of the time the chats with my camp felt like the vegetables I had to eat to get back to the sweet dessert of tossing trees at enemies and fighting big dragons.

Eternal Strands is a very ambitious fantasy action RPG that’s inspired by some big-budget titles like Dragon’s Dogma and Breath of the Wild. The small team behind it mostly pulls it off thanks to a focus on dynamic, but not-too-big sandboxes to play around in, interesting boss fights, and a unique exploration loop that rewards adventurous players willing to take a chance. Sure, the physics don’t always work as expected and performance isn’t perfect, but Eternal Strands is fun enough to put up with these problems because when it comes together and works—which is more often than not—it’s an impressively fantastic game.

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