My favorite game of 2025 (so far) lets you climb monsters, but that's not the best part

I love Eternal Strands' systems. Maybe you will, too.

Facing down one of Eternal Strands’ many giants. Screenshot: Yellow Brick Games / captured by Game File

It might be wise to begin the review of a new video game with an explanation of what the game is.

But I really want to tell you about what the game’s lead creator told me.

So, to get past the first thing quickly—and I’ll get more into it later—Eternal Strands (which you probably haven’t heard of) is a new game (that you may have missed) from a new studio (Yellow Brick Games), and it’s a fantasy action game full of swords, spells, proper nouns and nine or so exhilarating fights against giants, dragons and other behemoths that you can climb as you try to kill them.

Here’s 40 seconds of my battle with one such monstrosity:

The game—out now on PS5, PC and Xbox Series (including on Game Pass)—looks like a Monster Hunter-inspired game or even a riff on Zelda, but it’s really a big sandbox, with wild physics around gravity, fire and ice.

• You can use gravity powers in the game to hurl boulders at enemies, even toss wagons as weapons or crunch a house into splinters.

• You can use a freeze power to make ice bridges or to lock a dragon’s wing in place—as you are riding it and whacking at it with your free sword hand—so that it falls from the sky.

• You can blast flames at enemies, but those flames might burn down the wooden staircase you’re all standing on, and down everyone will fall.

There’s a story in the game—about magic-wielders called Weavers, a closed-off community called the Enclave, a battle with an enemy called the Surge, an emergency measure called Asylum, a band of heroes trying to make things right—but the best moments of Eternal Strands emerge from players’ unscripted experimentation.

That’s enough set-up to get me to what I’m most excited to share with you.

As I played Eternal Strands, I had become enamored with several well-implemented systems, including the aforementioned fire/ice physics and a very smartly made crafting system that I’ll get into in a bit.

So I emailed Eternal Strands creative director, Mike Laidlaw, earlier this week with the most softball of questions. Basically: why is your game so awesome?

More specifically, I asked Laidlaw about the Yellow Brick team’s approach to Eternal Strands’ systems and how well-designed they are.

He wrote back, referencing chats he has had with his Eternal Strands colleague, game director, Frédéric St-Laurent B.

Here’s what Laidlaw said:

“Fred’s always maintained the vision that with physics and a set of consistent rules, players should be able to be surprised by what just happened [in the game], but also work out -why- it just happened.

“So, to that end, we took the approach that nothing in the game should be a custom ‘flame attack.’ It’s simply an attack that emits heat of X intensity over Y time. From there, the systems take over: the air is all voxel-based and temperature conducts and convects, and materials in the game (such as wood) have ignition points and their own statistics for how much more heat they emit when they burn.

“That systemic approach, we think, lets the game be “playful” and surprising in ways that can be a lot of fun, in the moment to moment. You’re never quite sure all the outcomes of your actions, but there’s a sandbox just begging for you to experiment.”

I hope the excellence of that answer comes through. What a fun way to think about game design, no?

It probably helps to play the game, to start blasting the fire spell and witness how and when various materials start to burn and melt. It all plays out like he said.

What’s wild is that I actually disliked Eternal Strands when I started playing it.