Eternal Threads is among those pleasant types of games that don’t really invent anything new, but manage to take a lot of well established concepts and mechanics and combine them into an experience that hasn’t been attempted before. So while you’re playing, you’re enjoying the game as something that isn’t unlike what you already know, but when the time comes to analyze it and try to compare it to other titles you’ve played before, you realize – hey, this is actually quite new. It wouldn’t mean much if the game wasn’t good, but it is.
The game is a first person narrative exploration adventure game, heavy on the interactive story and light on item manipulation. You play as a person sent from the post-apocalyptic future ravaged by excess time manipulation into the past to undo said manipulation and restore the timeline to how it originally was on a case by case basis. At least, that’s what you’re told but you don’t get to see much apart from the one case you will be working on during the entire game, where a house fire killed 6 tenants due to some time anomaly, as in the “intended” timeline they were all meant to survive.
And if I start describing it mechanically, you’ll immediately have clear other game references in your head. For example, the location that you explore, after the fire happened, is very much your Gone Home-type gameplay, where you can look at some stuff, open locked doors and containers when you find keys and read notes that provide additional story. With the small twist being, that the configuration of things in the house actually change depending on the choices of the past.
Exploring the past is basically just watching an interactive movie or playing a simple Visual Novel, where you watch episodes from people’s lives and at certain points you may get a choice between two options that may or may not affect the availability of certain future episodes or choices appearing in some of them. You get a visualization of a Timeline too, kinda like in Zero Escape games or Detroit: Become Human, and just like in the latter you can switch viewed choices within that Timeline, without the need to replay the scene. While visually the episodes play somewhat reminiscent to, say, puzzles in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, events of the past in Return of the Obra Dinn or the scene reconstruction in Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One.
So, as I said – the parts of the game are nothing new and you’ve seen these ideas done before. But this particular mixture, along with the aforementioned effect the choices of the past have on the things you may find in the time you’re physically exploring, leads to a somewhat novel experience. And I’m surprised this hasn’t been explored previously, at least not that I know of. Granted, for the sake of player comfort some of the time discrepancies are ignored – for example if you open a door in your time with a key that you can only find in the place where it is if a certain order of events happens, when you change that order the door is still opened and you still have that key. So, basically, all of the “location unlocks” are your permanent progression items.
If this sounds like you spend vast majority of the game just watching a story, that’s because it is. Thankfully, the story is genuinely enjoyable, with a likeable cast of characters all of whom are well voiced and all of whom have some problems in their lives and some secrets that you may learn during the course of the game. It’s not necessary to learn everything about everyone to accomplish the base mission parameters of saving everyone, but there is a “perfect path”, that is supposedly representing the events as they happened before the time anomaly changed them (even though that perfect path isn’t necessarily without hurdles for characters to overcome and mistakes they must still make).
Given the freedom of looking at the past events in any order, I do feel like there’s a preferred way of doing it – by just following a thread to its logical conclusion before trying to jump around and watching other possibilities. But the game does give you that option and you can, if you want, view stuff mostly out of order. I know some people played Her Story this way and were still able to enjoy it, so it’s nice that the game allows that.
I enjoyed Eternal Threads specifically because the cast of characters was so strong and the mechanics were solid enough to keep me going. But I feel that if you’re not really into story-driven titles like this, you might get bored, because mechanically the game is super simple. And the story isn’t super over the top or crazy full of twists and conspiracies, it’s more of a slice of life type of thing with just enough mystery that feeds into the overall plot of time manipulation. But yeah – if you like story driven titles, VNs, interactive stories or good narrative exploration games, you might enjoy Eternal Threads a lot. I did.