It doesn’t help that the narrative is extremely boring. An interesting design choice, but ultimately one that feels off. The entire setting also reeks of scary vibes, given how dark and dreary the house is, even though the game has nothing to do with horror. However, if the entire house has already burned down and all the inhabitants have died, how are all their phones still working? The backyard is initially locked – from the outside - meaning you need a key to unlock it when you are inside. You can free-roam through the house, and inspect different clues and objects such as letters, texts on phones, pictures, etc. Do I tell him I’m pregnant or not? Do I take my pet bird to the vet or not? The choices that dictate whether someone survives or not are so trivial and end up being a game of guess and check. The ones that do give you different choices are binary and provide very miniscule payoffs in the grand scheme.
Most events cannot be altered, and are there only for context setting and character development. Gameplay is most akin to an over-glorified walking simulator, where the burnt house is your playground and all you do is walk from room to room, playing out different scenes among the characters. Your goal is to save not one, but all of the characters by playing around with the timeline and altering decisions made by various people. Your handheld device, known as the visualizer, allows you to access a linear time map, where you can either focus on events chronologically or in any order you choose. There’s Tom the owner, Neil the college student, Neil’s sister Linda who needs a temporary place to stay, Raquel the promiscuous tenant, and Ben the doctor and his partner Jenny. If time travel has already been made possible in this game’s universe, what’s preventing you from just going back to a point in time before everyone died? The game makes very little effort to explain the risks and consequences of time travel and leaves it up to the butterfly effect to see that things play out correctly.Īfter setting up your tech gadgets and signal boosters around the house, you are introduced to the six main characters of the game by replaying scenarios that took place in various locations throughout the house. You might be wondering: can’t I just go back in time and prevent the fire from starting in the first place? Nope, you are instead sent back to the point where everyone is already dead and given a futuristic handheld device that allows you to revisit events leading up to the tragedy. The game makes its first mistake with the initial premise. While I appreciate the technical soundness of the game and the novel concepts introduced, Eternal Threads ultimately misses both marks with an unappealing narrative and nonexistent gameplay. Cosmonaut Studio’s debut title, Eternal Threads, is a first person, narrative driven, time manipulation game that sends you back in time to save six people from dying in a tragic house fire. On the other hand, they need to have gameplay engaging enough to differentiate themselves from movies. On one hand, they need to maintain a story interesting enough for players to see them through to the end.
Interactive narratives have always been a hit or miss in the video game industry.
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