Going into this game, I was not very optimistic about how well it would play out as it seemed a bit strange, but it seems I forgot to take into account that the best narrative titles are always strange. Now that I have played through Eternal Threads, I have to say that Cosmonaut Studios has made a title I look forward to seeing be turned into a series. It’s a good thing they worked with Secret Mode to get it published on more platforms as well because this was a pretty solid experience.

Story

Humanity has let science take themselves too far and has effectively broken the timeline. This left the world in a state that forced an organization to begin putting all their time, effort, and resources into fixing it. However, the only way to fix it is to do the same thing that broke it, only this time more strategically. By that, I mean they have to time travel back to key points in time where their timeline was broken and fix what happened one event at a time.

To do this work, they train agents to be the ones to go back while an operator works from base and communicates with them. Taking the role of Agent 43, you are sent back to a house fire that killed six people that were all supposed to survive. Skipping the obvious step of just preventing the fire, as it shows that that action will have adverse effects further down the timeline, you will have to go through the events that took place in the house over the last eight days and alter the decisions the housemates made in order to ensure they all survive the fire.

Probably what made me skeptical of this game was the fact that the story has literally everything to do with time travel and altering the timeline, which is just a plot point that I usually get frustrated with. Overlooking the obvious aspects of how we don’t really know how time travel would affect our timeline and every question that flows with it, the concept of the game’s progress and the story is actually rather stable.

Gameplay

There actually isn’t too much to this game, which is part of what makes it a surprise to be so entertaining. Since your mission is to alter the choices to make sure everyone survives, you simply need to open the timeline, select the event you want to see next, head to that part of the house, and watch the event unfold. When a decision moment appears, you will get an indication and the event will pause until you decide which of the two routes the event will take.

All the events and actions all take place through a handheld hologram projector that functions with the aid of some other equipment you set up when you first get started in the game. That said, all the characters are only there digitally so you can’t actually affect the scene or get in the way, giving you the ability to watch the scene from any angle you want. However, when you make choices in the game, the location of some objects may move around. For example, all six of the characters leave their cell phones in the house but based on which decisions you make these phones will be in different locations and have either a text message conversation open or a voicemail for you to hear.

At any point, you can go back and watch an event over again if you want to. Or there is the route that I took and that was to simply watch every event on the timeline in order and simply choose for each decision moment to be the alternate choice. This didn’t lead me to a very happy ending, but it opened up the timeline for the puzzle of figuring out how to keep everybody alive. If you want to change the choice a character made for an event you already watched, you can do that from the timeline without rewatching the event unfold. From there, the choices that are made show where it links to other events making it easy to start chasing down events that were locked behind different choices and seeing how different choices affect different characters.

This is pretty much what makes up the whole game and the rest is just enjoying the story as it progresses. They have both the standard game and an abridged version, which is basically the same story and events, but just fewer of them and fewer choices. So the abridged version is more to-the-point while the standard version is more narratively driven.

Audio and Visual

I do have to give credit to the visual aspects of this game. While you are in a real house, after the fire took place, and it is not a horror game, they managed to keep me on edge about my own surroundings throughout the game while trying to figure out the story itself. It presented a weird balance in focus on my surroundings and focus on the mission that they played with every so often. Plus, the overall graphical quality of the real world and holographic characters was a good mix and very well done.

The sound effects for the house itself, when you are sitting in silence or walking around the house, definitely boosted the spooky feeling that shouldn’t have been there in the first place. That said, all of the voice work was very well done and the writing for the dialogue felt really natural for each character. I would have expected a few moments to have felt forced, given that they had a few filler events, but it really seemed like watching the past week playout for the six individuals that lived there.

Replayability

Given that there are multiple endings, I would say that this game has some replayability. In fact, even when you save all six characters, you could get a less-than-ideal saving score where it isn’t the best ending possible for each character but they survived. This is what I got as the brother and sister characters survived thanks to a fight they had and while I could have spent time figuring out the better way to get them out, I just accepted that at least they survived.

What It Could Have Done Better

Sometimes the timeline event connection line didn’t properly flow as it is supposed to between events. This made some of the events a bit of a memory game if they were too far apart. It was more than likely a glitch because in most events you could just slide to the connected events, but when trying to solve the puzzle that is the main mission, you will be jumping around the timeline a lot so it is a pretty disruptive glitch.

Since I am watching events unfold, there should be a way to fast forward or rewind in the middle of the events. If I wanted to see something in the middle of an event, I would have to restart the event, which can be annoying on the longer event sequences.

Verdict

Eternal Threads is an intriguing narrative puzzle game that I strongly recommend checking out! The story itself is full of moments that make you wonder who is at fault for the fire, what different characters are up to, and pretty much all the little “what ifs” that catch a viewer’s attention when you have six characters living together in what appears to be the most eventful week of their lives. It was a fun tale to follow and each character had their own personality, reasoning to be there, and personal connections to the other characters. The flow of the story between the characters we had to save and the flow of the story for Agent 43 never clash, but they went together very well to make up a great experience.

Eternal Threads is now available on PC via Steam, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.