'Eternal Threads' Preview
In exactly a month, Eternal Threads, the time-travelling adventure game from indie developer Cosmonaut Studios and publisher Secret Mode launches on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Ahead of its release, I was given the opportunity to play an early build of the game and share my impressions after playing the game for 2 hours. However, I was not allowed to capture or share images/videos of my own playthrough as the developers note that the build I played “is still missing some critical improvements, polish, text changes and bug fixes prior to release”. As such, images you’ll see here are from the press assets provided rather than my own screenshots. However, that did not affect my experience of the game which I will elaborate upon below. With that said, let’s get started with the preview!
Eternal Threads starts off with an interesting premise. You play as “Forty Three”, a member of a cryptic organisation that sends its agents back in time to fix time corruptions so as to avert repercussions down the timeline. The latest case you’ve been assigned to involves a house fire that claimed the lives of its 6 tenants. You’ll need to study the case, with access to the events of the household two weeks prior to the incident, so as to figure out the turn of events and attempt to change the outcome and save the tenants.
Thanks to holograms beamed by your visualiser and signal booster, the individual and shared interactions between the tenants on individual days can be replayed. Playing out these scenes help you piece together the victims’ stories and relationship with each other, but also uncover more information about them than initially meets the eye; and these details can help you alter their fate. By learning more about the 6 victims, you can change decisions they make at potential “corruption points”. Opting for different options unlocks different events in the timeline and you’ll even find yourself going back in time to uncover past events that were previously inaccessible.
There’s a handy ‘Time Map’ that helps you keep tabs of the events unlocked. The Time Map also shows you where you are on the timeline of events as well as lets you jump to any day/event to view and/or change decisions. Based on the decisions and events unlocked, you can view the “ending scene” to check if anything you did altered the fate of the victims, with the eventual aim to save everyone.
Through such a time-jumping mechanic, Eternal Threads delivers an original approach to plot progression which the developers even term as a “narrative Rubik’s cube”. It helps to keep the intrigue going as you flesh out the characters through the snippets of their interactions that you eventually piece together. Fleshing out the NPCs is also aided by the fact that all conversations are fully voice acted and professionally done so throughout the plot.
However, the plot is mostly about the 6 victims rather than the “Forty Three” character you play as who, based on my time with the preview, feels more like a placeholder for you to view the stories of the NPCs who are actually the protagonists of this game; somewhat akin to Road 96. If not for the player character, I hope that the full game also explores the story of the cryptic organisation Forty Three works for.
In contrast to the aforementioned indie game Road 96, Eternal Threads is lacking in traditional gameplay. For the most part, it is a walking simulator, with minor actions such as pressing a button to learn more about specific items in the scene or picking up a key. You cannot even crouch and can only interact when prompted to. You’ll mostly walk around, aim your visualiser at a location where an event takes place and view that event.
The challenge is minimal to non-existent, at least based on my 2-hour preview, with no apparent downsides to the choices you make. I could even describe the game as a kind of 3D visual novel. This isn’t to say that it’s bad as your aim is to find a way to save everyone by changing the course of the events based on choices made by the characters. But there’s no real sense of urgency when everyone starts off as dead and can only be saved from that point on.
While I didn’t mind this lack of challenge in favour of a focus on the narrative, I did mind that the locations appear to be limited to that one house and the room of the tenants. This means that you’ll likely be patrolling the same areas throughout the game and it would help if you got to explore more diverse areas or are even given new cases to investigate (and make each case smaller to accommodate).
In addition to the limited location, the choices are also limited to two. Having more options that further branch the plot and potentially trigger timeline anomalies (or gameovers) could have been mixed up for a more compelling experience.
From a technical perspective, while I had access to an early preview build, the game played well, indicating that it will indeed be on its way for a May 19th release. However, I did find that the text font is rather small and would have liked to have the option to adjust it.
With its original premise and interesting time-jumping, event fixing mechanic, Eternal Threads shows promise as a narrative-driven mystery game. There are some aspects that I hope it expands upon and its lack of challenge can be divisive but it’s worth keeping an eye on this title when full reviews roll out.
