On one hand, as previously mentioned, the game fails to be emotionally engaging and that makes it difficult to care for the happiness of the characters. The player can choose to just save the characters even if it means ending their marriage or costing them their dreams or do it in a way that guarantees their happiness. The game fails to create an emotional bond between the player and the characters and they mostly remain “mission objectives” rather than human beings to care for.Įternal Threads has multiple endings. To cut a long story short, the character subplots have little to no depth and sitting through them usually serves no purpose. There is little interest in finding out that one of the tenants is pregnant, the other has problems with his parents, the landlord is growing weed in the basement and another tenant is thinking about ending her marriage. Perhaps the main reason is that the life of the tenants is like old-school soap operas. It is really difficult to sit through it for more than one hour straight without getting bored. The pacing of the game lacks balance as well. His salvation comes only through his sister’s sexual decisions! For instance, the only way to save one of the tenants called Neil who is a gamer with anger issues – what a cliché – is to make his sister sleep with the landlord! No matter how hard the player works on Neil’s personal decisions, he can’t be saved on his own, even when he admits his issues to the doctor in the house, employs anger management techniques and tries to be a better person. The causal link of the events is in some cases, disputable. Each choice opens a new path to potential futures and possibilities, but the choices are mostly too straightforward and devoid of heartfelt consequences. The player has to sit through long and boring conversations and occasionally choose between one of the two dialogues. Interacting with objects and studying them in detail is useless and only a handful of objects – two in my playthrough – are used for game progression.Ĭhanging the outcome of the events is also not very engaging. The player can only move around the house, interact with objects and watch the events in the past. Although the game claims to be a “story-driven puzzle game”, it fails to put the player against a decent puzzle. As far as the gameplay is concerned, Eternal Threads is just a walking simulator. With this information at hand, the player is sent back in time to a week before to move around the house, watch the events that eventually lead to the death of the tenants in the fire using a special holographic image generator, and change the decisions the tenants make.
The game underlines the importance of butterfly effect and claims that saving the lives of the six tenants could eventually lead to humanity’s salvation but the fire can’t and shouldn’t be prevented. For that purpose, the player has to go to a burned house and save its six tenants from their fiery death. As an agent of The Second Chance Project, the player is tasked with changing the past in order to fix the future.
The game takes place in a future where humanity’s tampering with time and excessive time traveling has caused an apocalyptic event. Eternal Threads uses this theme to tell a story about time travel, butterfly effect, and the importance of everyday choices. Time travel has always been an interesting subject for sci-fi writers.
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