House about that then?
David Bottomley and Andrew Coggan on bringing housebound time-travel puzzle game Eternal Threads to life
All seven days will be available to you once you get past the title screen.
Cosmonaut Studios isn’t playing it safe with its first game, choosing to develop something that’s not directly comparable to anything else on PlayStation. In it, as a time-travelling regulator of spacetime, you’ll bounce around the seven days preceding a fictional house fire in May 2015 to ensure that all six people within survive – as they were supposed to.
“A house fire, and waking up in the middle of the night to a house filled with smoke, is a common fear,” says narrative designer David Bottomley. “It’s realistic and yet it was also something that we could spin as being a necessarily fixed event in time that could be prohibited from changing (because it would alter the timeline too much on a macro level) but would still allow us to alter the lives and the choices of the people involved so that they could survive it.” The threads of the housemates’ lives have become tangled in a way that results in their deaths, and it’s your job to straighten them out.
The atmosphere is slightly spooky. You can’t interact directly with the housemates as they exist on a different timeline, and none of them are aware of your presence (or are they…?). You are, in effect, an unseen ghost nudging them along different paths. Interestingly, Eternal Threads started out as something explicitly horror-flavoured.
“The player was a contemporary detective who specialised in the supernatural,” explains Bottomley. But reality soon quashed that idea. “As you explored and made discoveries there was going to be an entity that periodically stalked the house, and that you had to hide from. However, the actual layout of a typical British house doesn’t really lend itself to evading and hiding from a hungry slavering monster – there are only so many times you can hide in a cupboard or under the bed before it gets a bit tedious.”
ETERNAL FLAMES
The sense of unease is reinforced by the audio, which is incidental. This is due to the design which, audio lead Andrew Coggan explains, was influenced by Bioshock. “As the player has free rein to choose how to experience the events within the story, they can potentially go from the most emotional portion of the game to the most humorous. […] So we made the choice early on not to use continuously playing background music. Instead when viewing each memory within the scene, the player would hear any music the characters happened to be playing at the time […] This idea was influenced by the music spatialisation used within Bioshock Infinite, where all music heard throughout comes from a location within the game.”
Alternate events and even some rooms remain locked until you have met set conditions or made certain discoveries. However, all seven days will be available to you as soon as you get past the title screen. You can start by going through the days in chronological order, or jump to the end and work backwards, or simply pick days and times at random; it’s up to you.
“We ended up with what is essentially the ‘chalk line on a blackboard’ trope that we see in countless movies and TV shows,” says Bottomley, “because of its simplicity and familiarity. Though, due to the sheer number of decision points we had, we couldn’t use the traditional ‘alternate timelines branching off into new lines’ as that made the map incredibly complicated and essentially unreadable. So instead, all the possible events were lined up next to the central timeline; with those currently real and active lit up and anchored to it, while the alternative potentials from other timelines were severed from it and faded down to grey. While some players instantly understood the non-linear nature of the gameplay with just a little bit of dialogue from the controller character, others didn’t. So we created scenes on the first day that took place behind locked doors that were impossible to open until scenes later in the week had been watched. Paradoxically, restricting the player’s initial access to a few scenes helped them to realise the freedom they actually had available.”
Despite the sci-fi elements being crucial to the story and action, the housemates who you are working to save live realistic lives (“They all literally started out as one-word archetypes and then just grew through writing and rewriting dialogue, and putting them into certain situations, until they all began to feel like real people,” says Bottomley). Influences include This Life, Fresh Meat, Shameless, and Grey’s Anatomy. The result? A group of people you’ll really want to save.
Eternal Threads allows you to put right what once went wrong on PS4 in 2023.