For a science fiction lover, the premise ofEternal Threads is promising. At some unspecified point in the future, the advent of time travel (and our clumsiness) has corrupted the “time stream” with countless anomalies whose cascading effects have ravaged the planet. To save this futuristic present made apocalyptic, you have to travel to the past to repair it. Too bad that after just a few minutes this staging is almost completely irrelevant.
The story ofEternal Threads is actually much narrower. We embody a time traveler responsible for restoring a piece of this “temporal flow”. Our mission is to save a group of people who were not supposed to perish in a house fire in 2015. To do this, we travel to the burnt house, just hours after the tragedy. On site, using our equipment, we can review the key events of the week preceding the fire, in the form of ghostly holograms, and modify the decisions of our proteges. Each change has the potential to unlock other scenes that will reveal more information, or even branch the timeline to another key difference that could save a life.
And this is perhaps the main fault ofEternal Threads. A puzzle game is expected, but it’s more of a narrative piece with elements of deduction. The heart of the game is the elaboration of a complete portrait of the life of our characters more than crafting their rescue. Disappointment.
That said, the timeline mechanics, central to the gameplay loop, are well thought out. You can navigate it in several ways: by going from one day to another, by following a precise line of cause and effect or by targeting characters. At some point, however, it becomes very complex and difficult to understand.
The game features a “normal” mode, with 197 events, 54 key decisions, and several different endings. If that seems too intimidating, we can opt for the “abbreviated” mode, with its 121 events and 37 decisions. The latter does not, however, lead to the “best” end, that is to say the one where not only we save all our companions, but where they are also happier.
The success of this kind of narrative game with limited mechanics relies heavily on clever writing and well-constructed characters who will want to be given hours of attention. This is not at all the case here. Our six characters, students and young professionals in their twenties, are sorely lacking in depth and, although they are on the whole well interpreted, we admit that we never felt the desire to really save their lives… Even less offer them an ending that improves their lot.
In fact, the most interesting “character”, in our opinion, is… the house. This transforms, evolves, as we modify the decisions of the characters: objects appear and disappear, or move. A room can look completely different after changing some decisions, which almost makes the house feel alive. Hats off to the developer for this stroke of genius.
Ultimately, Eternal Threads is disappointing. Some mechanics are interesting, but not enough to sustain its plot, flat characters, and poor dialogue.