However, the biggest example is watching the week’s events – house parties, TV nights, loud conversations – quietly taper off, leaving you alone in the quiet sorrow of a torched home.
You’ll feel like a cosmic voyeur watching Niall’s masculine facade slip when away from his friend, catching Jenny alone in her room and haunted by unsettling paranoia, spying on Tom as he sneaks down to a hidden room in the basement. There’s a lot to enjoy in Eternal Threads, but the game’s most promising element is its atmosphere, and unspoken sense of duality. While the dialogue between housemates can feel a little clumsy, as not every conversation feels like one that real people would believably have, for the large part it’s solid – funny in parts, gut-wrenching in others. From the game’s very first event – helping beleaguered landlord Tom decide whether to take his pet bird to the vet or not – Eternal Threads pours big doses of humanity into each of the tragic play’s cast members. However, none of this would matter if Eternal Threads‘ characters weren’t compelling enough to want to sit with, to watch them juggle their relationships with housemates, to see them in their revealing moments of solitude. While opting for alternate decisions can create new events or remove existing ones, the time map is fairly clear – meaning that as tangled as the story gets, picking it back apart and changing the timeline never gets too overwhelming.
#Eternal threads game full#
While time travel can be confusing, full of paradoxes and contradictions, Eternal Threads is surprisingly ambitious, and the week leading to the house fire is filled with events that both can and can’t happen depending on the choices you make.ĭespite being crammed with small and seemingly-inconsequential events, Cosmonaut Studios spends the game’s week-long timeline whisking tiny butterfly moments into life-shattering tornadoes, but still manages to keep the deliberately fragmented plot feeling coherent.
Credit: Cosmonaut Studios.Īs you explore the consequences of deliberately playing with the butterfly effect, the studio’s attention to detail shines – which neatly sidesteps the hazard of using time travel as a narrative device. The “time map” detailing every event between day one and the fire is crammed, which means developer Cosmonaut Studios gives the player’s decisions plenty of room to breathe and branch out.Įternal Threads. In the last example, nothing big will come of the siblings’ conversation at that very moment – but the next day, it will cause a confrontation where Niall is called out over lying about when he last spoke to his mum and dad. They’re not decisions that scream “life-saving”, and there’s rarely any immediate drama to accompany the monumental act of changing time itself. In another, you can have Niall’s sister ask him how university is going, or query him on how their parents are doing. In a scene where one character, uni student Niall, flicks through the morning’s post without paying much attention, you can have them flick through the letters again to spot an envelope addressed to their housemate. Not all of these events offer the chance to change anything, and more often than not you’re merely an observant spectator in Eternal Threads‘ first hours.Īs a house full of students is apt to be, the week leading up to the fire is a microcosm of life’s drama and mundanity – and that reflects in your decision-making. This is done by visiting the location that each event happened – it could be the torched kitchen, or a bedroom dingy with smoke damage – and replaying the event, with each scene’s unknowing participants replaying the moment.
0 kommentar(er)
