It's to Cosmonaut Studios' credit, then, that in practice it's actually pretty easy to find your way around, shooting up and down the timeline to revisit certain days and events to tweak your outcomes. When you're first introduced to the mechanics of Eternal Threads, it all looks horribly complex and tricky to navigate. This is one of those times, though, when watching a Let's Play or teaser trailer may put you off. Making changes, like having Linda ask about the strange, broken doll in Raquel's room, perhaps, or stopping Tom from drunk-texting his ex for a boozy booty call, may not sound like much on their own, but make enough of these choices and you'll re-wire a timeline entirely, possibly putting them in a different frame of mind or location when the fire breaks out. To identify the things you can change - however seemingly inconsequential in the moment - you must navigate a Time Map, eavesdropping on their conversations and discovering clues. Yes, it's all very Butterfly Effect-y and Doctor Who-y and, at first, it's easy to be overwhelmed. Even if we're inexplicably not permitted to prevent the fire from starting in the first place - yup, that confused me, too - change the right ones in the right order, and you may just be able to save them all. You, known only as Forty Three (whatever happened to the 42 before you?!) must save them, and you must do it by altering decisions they made in the week before they died. A discarded mobile here, a singed book on a shelf there. What's left of their home holds only glimpses of the people they used to be. Six people lived here - a cohabiting couple a brother and his older sister who's only just moved in a party-hungry friend and their live-in landlord - and now they're dead. Firefighters crouch in the doorway, hoses pumping, desperately trying to get the flames under control. The first time you step into 14 West Park Road's past courtesy of your hi-tec Visualiser - a wristband device that reenacts holographic visions of what's come before - it is ablaze. Watch on YouTube Here's an Eternal Threads trailer to give you a clue about how it works. We explore only a single deserted home once inhabited by a handful of ordinary folks, but getting to know them isn't just a pleasure it's a matter of life or death. The ordinariness of its people - their rooms, their shared spaces, their conversations, the letters they screw up and toss into the bin - is captured with ease. Despite the melodramatic opener that informs us that "we broke the world" by time-travelling all willy-nilly and releasing radiation into the time stream that changed "countless seemingly insignificant decisions throughout history", an elegant layer of melancholy lies over Eternal Threads. This is undoubtedly where Eternal Threads' puzzling magic lies. Games that show me a kitchen littered with mouldy takeaway containers and scattered Vodka bottles are infinitely more satisfying than those that would instead give me an in-game diary page from an alcoholic. But I'm endlessly delighted by environmental storytelling. It's a common thread in some of my personal favourites - think Dishonored, The Last of Us, Gone Home - because of the many uninhabited homes we get to explore in those worlds. Availability: Out now on PC, coming 2022 to PS4, Xbox One, Switch. I've long thought that urban exploration - the peculiar pastime of rummaging through abandoned houses - is the best video game genre that doesn't exist yet. Marrying some frightfully clever time-scrolling with a captivating look into its characters' lives, Eternal Threads is a nosy player's dream.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |