It’s textbook butterfly effect stuff, a concept in chaos theory so embraced by popular culture that it may not even need an explanation at this point. It refers to the compounding impacts of tiny changes to a previous timeline, the idea that something as subtle as the flap of a butterfly’s wings could ultimately cause a tornado. To put the timeline back on track and change the world’s fate, present-day humanity sends agents back through time to prevent these anomalies before they can mess everything up. It’s your job as the de facto time police to go to the past, make small changes and hopefully line up all the dominoes in a way that doesn’t get anyone killed.
You, playing as Operator 43, are sent to the year 2015 to save six residents of a U.K. townhouse from dying in a fire. Now, you can’t actually stop the fire from happening, as mission control explains, because that would screw the timeline up even more, but you can alter the residents’ decisions throughout the week leading up to the incident. Why? Don’t worry about it; as with all time travel logic, it works best if you make peace with the leaps of faith required to explain it.
Using your Time Map — yes, that’s its actual name — you can observe all the significant events from that last week, popping in and out of moments as you please. You wander around a single location, unlocking narrative notes and piecing together clues based on what’s left behind: a job offer letter stuffed away in a drawer; a phone with texts begging the owner to come home; a positive pregnancy test thrown in the garbage.
Your options for influencing each event are limited: Should a character choose Option A or Option B? Where things get more complex is how these choices influence events later down the timeline. You can access events in any order and sort them by character, which makes it easy to hunt down answers for whatever mysteries you come across that piques your interest. Early on, I found a locked door to a hidden room in the basement and made it my mission to find the key. When I spotted the landlord sneaking around down there, I binged through his events to try to find it.
Your Time Map keeps a running tally of who ends up alive and who ends up dead based on your choices. At one point, I had one housemate tell another to keep quiet about what was clearly a bout of morning sickness, instead of making up a flimsy excuse that would later prove incriminating. The Time Map let me know that one decision ultimately led to the death of four characters who otherwise would have lived had the alternative, and all the later events tied to it, played out.
I’m guessing it was supposed to be a sobering experience, but I just laughed in disbelief. These kinds of narrative-driven games with limited mechanics put almost all of the heavy lifting on smart writing and characters worth investing hours of attention. Unfortunately, “Eternal Threads” and its cast buckle under that weight.
The characters, mostly university students and young professionals in their 20s, are robotic, one-note and so comically horny that it felt like watching an after-school special. The writing feels similarly stilted and unnatural; characters say things like “hussy” and “sex on legs” without a hint of irony. Another speaks almost exclusively in movie references. It called to mind the first “Life is Strange” and its “hella” out-of-touch attempt at teen slang.
Some interesting interactions between the characters surface here and there, but for the most part, I found them and their stories weren’t fleshed out or compelling enough to entice me to care about listening in on their day-to-day lives. Poring over every memory — of which there are almost 200 in normal mode — quickly began to feel like a slog. One small but enduring annoyance: After each scene ends, Operator 43 gives the event a code name and types it, letter by letter, into the Time Map’s keyboard in an unskippable cutscene. You can opt to play an abridged version with just 121 events at the start of a new game; I strongly advise going that route.
The environment itself piqued my curiosity more than its inhabitants did. “Eternal Threads” isn’t a horror game, but it often feels like one as you walk through its dimly lit rooms, steps echoing eerily in the empty house. In one event, a character mentions they sometimes feel like they’re being watched, and they’ve heard strange noises in the night. Later, a painting fell off the wall as I walk by and I about jumped out of my skin.
A neat touch is that your choices impact the state of the house on the day of the fire, and, by extension, what you see as you wander through it shortly after the incident. Whether one tenant decides to leave or stay changes the decor of her room. I opt to move the last tenant’s junk and later spot it downstairs in the basement. One unfortunate choice ends up with a character falling down the stairs to his death; the paint cans he tripped over now litter the basement floor instead of sitting on the steps.
“Eternal Threads” can be a fun puzzle to play with once you have all the pieces together. It encourages experimenting with different possible outcomes. With some combinations of choices, a character may survive the fire, but their life is irrevocably changed for the worse because of what they did or didn’t do beforehand. But it takes a long time to get to that point. The full playtime is around 10 hours, and by the time you’ve absorbed enough context through cutscenes to understand how certain events impact the timeline, the game’s in its final hours. It’s a shame too, because the narrative’s final act does take an interesting turn, but my patience was already exhausted by that point.
“Eternal Threads” almost seems aware that it’s not building a strong case for your emotional investment in whether these six people live or die. Throughout the game, mission control chimes in to remind you that these people’s lives definitely matter, that the average person has such and such number of descendants, so the fate of these six people and, more importantly, whoever comes after them could ultimately decide the fate of the world. And while that’s all technically true, I suppose, I can’t help but feel that “Eternal Threads” would have found infinitely more success laying the foundation for players to care about its existing characters instead of hinging your investment on theoretical stakes.
