Magic is at the heart of this world, and magic provides the most immediately surprising bit of game design in Eternal Strands. Far from simply being attacks, or traversal mechanics, the three elements of magic you can access are deeply simulated. Cast a fire spell, and flames will spread across vegetation, or leave stone walkways superheated, damaging those who pass through. Ice can be used to hold enemies in place, or cool a now-flaming area. Telekinesis allows you to pick up and move practically anything that isn’t nailed down, or pull them into an orbit you create.

Once you’ve understood these, you can start combining them – a favorite combo of mine is attaching what amounts to a gravity well to an enemy, filling it with fire, then detonating the original spell to cause enormous explosions – no hand-to-hand combat required.

Each strand of magic becomes a means of truly affecting the world around you – which means you’re constantly left thinking about how to use your spells, long after you first unlock them. You’ll discover that cold will uncloak enemies using active camouflage, or that you can rip the shields away from robotic guardians left wandering The Enclave. As a marker of how deep this goes, I only realised – around 5 hours into the game – that the ore-filled rocks I’d been smashing for materials could be heated by flame spells first, effectively smelting the loot inside. If I smashed them after heating, the materials inside became more valuable.

This attention to detail turns totally innocuous bits of environmental detail into useful, reactive pieces of design – taken as a whole, Eternal Strands turns something as fundamental as video game magic into a tool and a toy.

And magic is far from the only system Yellow Brick is tinkering with. The game’s setting is split into multiple zones, each an open world in miniature, filled with blueprints to unlock for new equipment, changing weather conditions, alterations based on whether you’re entering during night or day, major and minor objectives, and secrets waiting to be uncovered. These areas are built outwards and upwards – in a nod to the recent Zelda games, Bryn can climb almost any surface, meaning looking above you is as important as seeing what’s on the horizon.

But core to each area is the Great Foes they hold. From flying drakes to building-sized automata, these are titanic bosses left to wander each area. They’re your biggest combat challenge, as well as the means for unlocking and upgrading your spells – each one is tied to a specific ability, meaning you’ll need to defeat all the Great Foes multiple times to unlock and then fully upgrade each spell.

The brilliance of the Great Foes is that they’re far more than a dangerous healthbar – each one acts like a puzzle in itself. One automaton boss requires you to climb across its gigantic body, unlatching armor plates before attacking specific body parts. A drake can fly away and attack you from the safety of the skies – but you can ice up its wings to keep it bound to ground level (at least until the next gout of flame).

When you’ve defeated a Great Foe once, you’ll unlock a codex entry covering not only its lore, but offering clues as to how to beat it without grinding down its HP. Instead, you can find ways to tear out the magic that powers it (effectively an insta-kill) – and offering another layer of puzzle. That drake, for instance, will only offer up its magic while it’s airborne, and when its horns have been smashed off – but it can easily knock you off its back when fully mobile. So, you’ll need to target the horns and just a single wing – enough to leave it able to fly, but unable to perform more difficult maneuvers – in order to get your prize.

Combine the fact that Great Foes can appear in any area, and can even react to the weather conditions in different ways, and each boss becomes a thrill to fight multiple times across the length of the game. And that’s to say nothing of the rare loot they drop.

Like the Monster Hunter series, progression in Eternal Strands isn’t tied to XP, but the gear you wear. You’ll find blueprints for new armor and weapons on your travels – but the key change here is that any material can be used to build any equipment. One type of ore might boost your sword’s attack, but weigh more, slowing you down. The thread you choose to make your gloves out of might increase your heat resistance, but make you far more susceptible when stepping into an unexpectedly frozen zone.

In a lovely touch, every material comes with a different visual aspect – the same bow can look very different, depending on what you’ve chosen to make it from. Of all of Eternal Strands’ innovations, the fact that it makes the RPG staple of scattered loot not only useful, but interesting, might be one of its most impressive.

And behind all of this restless tinkering, this game also offers a gently fascinating, surprisingly relaxing experience. As you explore, you’ll build relationships with your party back in the main hub area. Sure, you can relentlessly complete main objectives and push the story on, but equally you might want to complete some side tasks to hear more from your band’s blacksmith, or simply ignore objectives altogether – go loot hunting, secret finding, or boss killing.

There’s no real pressure put on you to progress, meaning your route through the game is effectively self-directed – I spent multiple hours simply gathering materials to make a metallic red suit of armor, simply because I wanted to. That became an exercise in relaxation, rather than a desperate grind – something I wouldn’t normally associate with the genre.

Eternal Strands emerges as a game that pulls from so many familiar places, but comes together feeling vibrantly new. Experiments like this so often feel interesting, but remind you that the established way of doing things is there for a reason. Instead, this game offers a pointer for where the action-RPG could go.

Eternal Strands launches today for Xbox Series X|S, PC, and cloud, and is available with Game Pass. It is also an Xbox Play Anywhere title, meaning when you buy it through the store on Xbox or Windows, it’s yours to play on Xbox and Windows PC at no additional cost, and your game progress and achievements are saved across Xbox and Windows PC.