Do you like graphic adventures? Did the Butterfly Effect blow your mind? We have the perfect game for you. Cosmonaut Studios developed Eternal Threads, a title that will allow you to travel to the past and make all possible changes to save a group of young people from a fierce fire.
Eternal Threads It is available for PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and Xbox One.
The flap of a butterfly’s wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world
A fire that occurred in a house located in the north of England in 2015 caused the death of six people. We, agents of the future, must travel to the past and do everything possible to prevent young people from losing their lives in said event.
What if we directly avoid the fire? No, we have it flatly prohibited. Avoiding the fire would change the timeline too much.
In this way, we can and should move between the seven days prior to the fire –I recommend doing it linearly– and modify the various events that occurred, not to prevent the fire, but to save them individually.
This review of the hundreds of events –the figure is real– will allow us to get to know the group of young people in depth and thus understand their motivations and frustrations, something that will be key to logically thinking about what key events we can change so that their story in the face of the fire be another.
There is no single way to save young people: each of them can be saved in different ways. Of course, there are many possibilities that when the final day arrives you will not be able to avoid the death of each one of them. In that case, the game allows you to continue manipulating the timeline so that you get the best result for everyone.
As you can see – and as it happens in (almost) all graphic adventures – the weight of the title is placed entirely on the story. Luckily for us it is captivating from the first second. Not only does it keep you trapped and tense to do your best for the ultimate goal, but the story of each of the characters is more than interesting. Each one has a noticeable growth arc that allows it to stand out on its own.
Forget Abraham Simpson’s great advice: now travel back in time and touch EVERYTHING
As I mentioned previously, the title allows us to travel between the seven days prior to the big event. For this we will have a small device where we will have all the events available. Although we can start and continue wherever we are told, I strongly recommend doing it linearly again.
Many of the events will be locked and in order to access them, past events must be changed. For this, there is an option that will guide us directly to the event that will allow the change in question.
For our benefit – and something that I appreciate, since it made the experience much lighter – we do not have to rewatch the cinematics of past events that we already saw. To make the desired changes, simply click on the event and apply the desired change (choose the other alternative).
The gameplay of Eternal Threads it has nothing more than what I mentioned previously. In fact, as I pointed out before, its weight is placed purely and exclusively on its history. We will do nothing more than move around the different corners of the house, jump between events, return to the past, change some events, unlock new paths and so on throughout the game.
I can question that at times the gameplay was a bit tedious for me, not because it is not well done – in fact, quite the opposite – but because being the only thing we have to do, it becomes somewhat repetitive as the hours go by. In any case, although it would have added some more mechanics, the one that is available is more than efficient for what the title intends.
The perfect excuse to not have to be so wordy
As you can see in the images shared in this note – or in the game trailer if you wish – the graphics are not exactly the game’s forte. Clearly the developers took the fact that we see the characters through a hologram as the perfect excuse not to have to worry about them looking like a 2022 title.
The facial expressions of the characters or the details that surround them can never be fully appreciated when we see them in any of the cinematics. The only way to appreciate some details is when we go through the house on our own. And it is not that in this instance the graphics stand out for being detailed. There is some other object that can be appreciated, but they are the minimum and indispensable.
And music?
That is a question I asked myself throughout the whole experience. The music directly shines by its absence. The title does not have any soundtrack. A pity seen and considering that it is a narrative adventure that is based on its history and, as is known, music is key to enhance the climax moments and / or to accompany (us) in the background in the adventure.
Something similar happens with ambient sound. It is almost non-existent. The sounds heard in the background can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The only one that is always present is the sound of a storm. It should also be noted that the ambient sounds present seem to be taken from the first video they found on YouTube when searching for “bird sound”, “electric storm sound”, etc.
System Requirements
MINIMUM: OS: Windows 10 (64-bit) – Processor: AMD FX 6300 X6 / Intel Core i5-3570K – Memory: 8 GB RAM – Graphics: 2 GB VRAM, Radeon 7870 / GeForce GTX 660 – DirectX: Version 11