MAGICAL

Big hearts and bigger monsters make ETERNAL STRANDS something special

- By Kerry Brunskill

I don't even have to waste my time trekking across boring expanses of open field to reach the things that have caught my eye, as this compact game is broken up into a series of carefully crafted areas attached to a homely hub. It reminds me of Monster Hunter more than a seamless but flabby open world sprawl of #content.

The missions I undertake in these areas often overlap in some way, so even though one character's request to collect glowing plants at night didn't exactly have me rushing out of camp, I ended up easily gathering everything I needed anyway when I later found myself in the same area as part of an expedition.

The weather, shown on a summary screen for the area before heading out, matters as much as the time of day. The climate is fixed for the duration of the expedition, and deliberately extreme and unnatural—another mystery to unravel in this strange land. These conditions add new hazards to familiar places; a drought making fire dangerously easy to spread, miasma forcing me to choose between going around or taking a painful dash through.