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Eternal Threads review: Eastenders meets time travel meets electrical safetyThe time is out of joint!
The time is out of joint!
Eternal Threads Date Reveal TrailerWatch on YouTube
Eternal Threads Date Reveal Trailer
Let’s list our dramatis personae, so it’s easier for you to keep track:
You turn up at their house in the middle of the night, a few hours after the fire has been put out and the bodies removed. Rather than constantly travelling back and forth along the timeline of the week, you use some special technology and some light emitting drones to project key events, each a few seconds to a couple of minutes long. You watch the ghostly holograms play things out, and can, with the press of a button on your special hand-held time-meddling machine, change their decisions. This then opens up other optional scenes to gather more information, or even re-route the timeline to another key difference that will save someone’s life. Each scene could be the small domino that makes larger and larger ones topple.
I think my favourite character ended up being your handler from the future, who talks in your ear and treats time travel with a very “more than my job’s worth” kind of vibe
Is someone thereThe drama in Eternal Threads is soapy and engagingly mundane, like a very condensed season of Eastenders, but there are some larger timey-wimey mysteries that I won’t spoil. I will, though, shout out whoever it was that managed to make the house so creepy as you explore. A dog suddenly barks as you approach a gate, a door creaks, a clock chimes. One of my drones went down and I swear that as I fixed it I heard footsteps…
These moments reinforce that you’re alone, when the rest of the time you trick yourself that you’re in a house with people you know. The story and form of the game put a lot of weight on the shoulders of the scripting and voice actors, and I’d say the voice actors in particular really hold it up. Tom is shy and sweet, Linda is quiet, observant and funny, Neil is a pitch-perfect brittle young man, Ben and Jenny are a very believable couple with established in-jokes, and Raquel is bubbly and charismatic.
The quality of the writing is a little more variable, not when the characters are being characters, but when they’re being advice machines. There are times where you’re given the choice between a person saying nothing or giving some absolutley bang on life advice. It’s always the right thing to say, and at these moments everyone in Eternal Threads sounds like one person, and that person is an experienced and broad-minded 65-year-old agony aunt. Given the backstory of some of these people, particularly Raquel, you’d think they’d have more of a fucked up perspective on things. It just becomes a bit monotonous when they’re always so collected and reasonable.
Once you’ve figured out the broad parts of how to save people, it becomes harder and harder to get the details you would like right. I spent an exorbitant amount of time trying to get Tom and Jenny to have an argument about the right thing on the right day, to no avail. It is extremely likely you’ll reach a point that you go, “Fuck it, just let ‘em burn!”, probably more than once, at which point you should turn the game off and leave it for a day or so. This isn’t a game that you should pick at for hours. It’s one to put back up the shelf for a bit, until you can take it down and look at the problem with fresh eyes. You have all the time you need. Sort of.
