ETERNAL THREADS
Sends you back in time to fix some broken hearts.
$44.95 | PC, PS4, XB1, Switch | eternalthreadsgame.com
Time travellers should be able to stop a house fire with ease. All you have to do is fix the faulty electrical wiring, or stamp out an errant cigarette butt, right? This is the premise you’re presented with in Eternal Threads, but in this timeline, the blaze’s casualties must be prevented with the power of kindness alone.
You are presented with a series of events that take place over the course of a week and imperceptibly add up to the tragic fire. Thankfully, you’re gifted with technology that can slyly edit some of the decisions made between the house residents, ideally brewing up a butterfly effect that will get them out alive. Eternal Threads is a showcase of second chances, an invitation to reflect on the times in our lives when we didn’t let cooler heads prevail.
There is a sci-fi veneer: you’re cast as some sort of chrononaut in a dingy future, where time travel has littered the fourth dimension with all sorts of
reality-eroding radiation. It’s all left pretty vague, and Eternal Threads quickly escorts you to a house in England. From there, Eternal Threads takes the form of a 3D stage play starring ghostly actors. You queue up one of the scenes dotting the timeline and key into the nuances of this particular group dynamic. Occasionally, your temporal device will chime in and ask if you want to swap in an alternative climax in the action. Weave enough of these fragments together, in the correct order, and eventually everyone survives the fire.
The Eternal Threads format could, I think, be adapted well to a number of other settings. The scope is already so small – the whole map consists of about ten rooms and six primary characters – and it’s easy to imagine it expanding further into the unruly, crisscrossing vectors of temporal fiction. I wanted Eternal Threads to make me feel a bit more clever than it did, but it never stopped holding my hand.
A promising time-travel mystery that doesn’t quite give players a truly mind-melting temporal puzzle. Luke Winkie
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