Eternal Threads Review (PC)

good
key review info
  • Game: Eternal Threads
  • Platform: PC
  • Show system requirements
  • Gamepad support: Yes  
  • Reviewed on:
Eternal Threads key art

Linda talks to her brother about their parents before he runs off to university. Raquel, Jenny, and Neil are involved in a bathroom incident. Tom and Ben have a conversation about the future. All six will die in a fire and only careful exploration of all events leading up to the catastrophe can save them. They are rarely interacting as a group, with plenty of conversations that feature just a pair or trio. So I need to haunt the timeline, watch as each reveals secrets, and try to find out what links them, before making decisions that will affect their ultimate fate.

Eternal Threads is developed by Cosmonaut Studios and published by Secret Mode. I played on the PC using Steam, but you can also pick it up on the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4. This is a narrative-driven experience with some light adventure game mechanics.

The future that the title envisions has seen the invention of time travel, which in turn led to catastrophic events for the world. The player becomes a new agent of an organization that seeks to carefully re-build the timeline. His mission is to jump into a house where six people died in a fire and make sure that they all survive.

There’s quite a bit of writing to sit through: some of it is funny, some of it is emotional, and a lot of it delivers information about the house and its inhabitants. Ben, Jenny, Neil, Linda, Tom, and Raquel, alongside a few outsiders, will become very familiar to players, although opinions will vary on how well developed, they all are.

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Gameplay is very simple in Eternal Threads. Players have access to a detailed timeline. They can pick an event, find where it is happening, and then watch slightly ghostly characters play out the scene. The characters might move around a little, they will deliver their lines, and they might reveal a big piece of information.

Sometimes, there’s a choice that can affect the future or open up alternate events. Some locations in the house are impossible to access (they have time-travel, but they don’t have universal lockpicks or a way to move through walls) and it takes a bit of work to open them up.

But the core of the experience involves watching scenes play out, absorbing info, and thinking about how it fits into the big picture. Is it better if Linda never mentions their parents when speaking to her brother? Should someone address the impressive amounts of alcohol that they seem to consume during a party? Players need to try out decisions to see how they can stop the coming fire and keep everyone alive.

Eternal Threads has a premise that I like, especially because it takes a huge social disruption event like time travel and then focuses on how it affects a smaller situation. The developers have also done a great job of making the timeline easy to read, especially when it comes to how consequences propagate towards the future. There are also moments when the interactions, especially in smaller groups, feel authentic.

But the pressure of the massive fire and the idea of trying things out makes it hard to actually connect to anyone or take their apparently trivial problems seriously. The fact that gameplay is very limited in scope and repetitive doesn’t help the experience.

Eternal Threads aims for realism in terms of presentation, a choice that doesn’t always deliver the best results. It looks good and makes it easy for players to visualize the timeline and track how they might change the future. But the game opts to voice all its characters, even if it does not have the quality of actors to make sure that each of the six has a clear personality.

I wanted to care more about the people in the house and the voices did not make that easy for me. I suspect that many players will actually first seek out the sequences linked to the characters that have the best voice work (and probably the best writing).

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The Good

  • Some funny moments
  • Deep relationships
  • Timeline manipulation

The Bad

  • Stripped down gameplay
  • Limited voice acting
  • Internal inconsistencies

Conclusion

Eternal Threads has an intriguing idea at its core and its small scope means that it can introduce a lot of detail to a situation, challenging players to find out everything they can before making choices. It will be interesting to see if gamers actually connect with the characters as written or if they don’t bother to get the best outcomes for the entire cast.

The biggest issue with the game is that it asks for an investment of time and emotion that the narrative might be unable to support. Gameplay is both limited and repetitive, which means that the universe needs to carry all the weight of engagement. Eternal Threads has potential in terms of storytelling but it does need a little more than a solid premise to keep players watching.

Review code provided by the publisher.

story 8
gameplay 6
concept 8
graphics 8
audio 7
multiplayer 0
final rating 7.5
Editor's review
good
 
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Eternal Threads screenshots (21 Images)

Eternal Threads key art
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