Eternal Threads Review (Xbox One)

STAFF REVIEW of Eternal Threads (Xbox One)

Monday, August 12, 2024.
by Adam Dileva

I love the 2004 movie The Butterfly Effect. Not because of Ashton Kutcher’s acting, but because of its premise. The premise of the Butterfly Effect is that the smallest decisions can have much larger impacts further down the line in the future. Maybe the smallest or a meaningless decision will affect someone or something else on a grander scale, causing ‘ripples’. A small change can set forward a series of events that result in a completely different outcome. Just like the Kutcher classic, this is the premise of Eternal Threads as well.

A single player first person narrative adventure, Eternal Threads is about changing the past, one small decision at a time, seeing the new outcomes and consequences of each alteration. You’re thrust into a story revolving around six housemates that need to be saved. Thing is, they’ve already all died in a terrible house fire. Altering outcomes one decision at a time, can everyone be saved? What’s the consequences of altering the timeline? I was hooked from the beginning and intrigued with how the butterfly effect can completely change future events.

You’re simple a numbered operative from some time in the future, tasked with fixing a corruption in the timestream. You’ve been sent to a specific house in England, 2015, to a house where six people died in a fire. The thing is, you’re not allowed to simply stop the fire from happening, as doing so has greater consequences in the future. Instead, you’ll need to manipulate choices made by the housemates a week leading up to the fire, aiming to save them all.

Able to freely explore all of the events a week before the accident, you’re able to watch all of the events that happened prior, even alter significant events so that other cascading decisions can be made or occur. While a number of events will be minor and simply give background information on people, this is maybe how you’ll find out a combination or where a key is hidden for a locked door in the house. The major events that can be changed have larger changes in the timeline, altering them, or even having different outcomes completely.

As the butterfly effect states, the smallest decision can have massive changes in the future, and with a week of events to witness and alter, you’ll quickly see how things can drastically change from seemingly insignificant choices. Finding the right combinations of choices is the only way you’ll be able to save all six housemates. Saving one or two wasn’t difficult, but making so everyone gets out alive is the real challenge. Choices and consequences.

As you arrive in the charred house, you’ll set up base with a futuristic handheld scanner that will show you where in the house these events on the timeline occurred. Able to look at the timeline of events, you can choose any event and the scanner will guide you to where it occurred. Here you’ll watch what happened for that specific event as holograms of the people replay for you. Sometimes small details in the house will change based on which outcome you choose, which is a small touch that didn’t go unnoticed.

I’ll admit, the story is quite slow to start and it’s challenging to follow along a disjointed series of events for six different characters, but once you get passed the introductions and know who’s who, it becomes much more interesting, especially when you realize you’ve got to figure out what happened and how you can save them. Over the course of the week of events you’ll start to uncover issues some of the characters have, their demons, trauma, and possible ways you could save them.

It takes a while for the narrative to really to start becoming intriguing, but once it does, I wasn’t able to put it down, needing to figure out a way to save everyone. There’s a point in everyone’s individual story where it goes from 0 to 100 real fast, and that’s when I was hooked. There’s even a shorter abridged version to play if you want a quicker playthrough, but this doesn’t give you the full story and every outcome possible, so I highly suggest playing the full version.

The house has about twenty rooms or so, some locked until you know how to access certain doors. You choose how you want to experience the story and events in any order you wish. I opted to go in chronological order of the week, but if you want to lock to one character only and see their story from beginning to finish, you can. Or jump from the end, to the start, and back to the middle if you wish. Making multiple decisions across numerous timelines is hard for me to keep track of, which is why I chose to view events from oldest to newest.

The house isn’t too large, but you’ll be constantly running from one bedroom, to the next, to the backyard, to the kitchen, wherever the events originally occurred. It’s a little tedious at first, but once you learn the layout of the house, it only takes a few moments to get from room to room. Seeing events unfold as holograms make it obvious that these occurred in the past, as does the rest of the room dimming, making you focus on the characters and being immersed on the conversations. If there are others in the room nearby that aren’t part of the narrative or a vital character, like at a house party for example, they are simply silhouettes.

There are over 150 scenes, so keeping track would be quite difficult if it wasn’t for the timeline menu. Here you can clearly see each event, what time and day it occurred, and which of the six characters are involved, usually multiple of them at a time. A feature I really appreciated was the ‘Event Lock’, where it’ll then only show you the scenes that influence, or are influenced by said event. On the scenes were you can choose a different outcome, this is handy to see what it changed on the timeline as well.

The timeline menu is how you’ll keep track of everything, from the minor events to the decision ones, indicated by different shapes. One of the best features they’ve added is that you can replay a scene you’ve already watched, but just skip to where you make the choice, so you don’t have to rewatch the same parts again. If you really wanted, you could simply make your choices on the timeline without having to go to the room in the house and actually watch it play out. It gives you enough information on what happened and you can see the following events that each choice links to.

There are of course different endings with all of the different decisions you’ll make, and there’s different ways to save each person. Finding the way to save everyone though is the real challenge, as changing one event may make someone else not survive for one reason or another. Manage to get the ‘perfect’ ending, and there’s quite an interesting twist at the end that I quite enjoyed.

Investigating a burned down house knowing six people died in it is creepy at first, but there are no jump scares even though I was expecting them at some point. The house and environment is done quite well, especially when you notice small details change based on your choices. Because the characters are always down in hologram form, you don’t always get a bunch of detail, and while the animations are well done, there’s virtually no expressions on their faces and poor lip syncing. The voice acting on the other hand was done wonderfully across the board, each matching their character quite well.

I could see some players not enjoying themselves since much of the ‘gameplay’ is simply running to a spot in the house and watching some dialogue, but if you become invested into each of the six individual stories and can understand how they are intertwined, it can be exciting to see how each decision changes follow-up events. While there’s no replayability once you’ve experience all of the events and save everyone, it’s still a great play on a weekend for narrative game fans.

**Eternal Threads was provided by the publisher and reviewed on an Xbox Series X**

Overall: 7.8 / 10
Gameplay: 8.5 / 10
Visuals: 7.0 / 10
Sound: 8.0 / 10

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STAFF REVIEW of Eternal Threads (Xbox One)

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