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dkirschner's Eternal Threads (PC)
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| [October 29, 2024 07:38:58 PM]
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I've been playing this with Patrick all semester and we've finally beaten it. It's a strange one, like this slice of life narrative game about some housemates in England. The house burns down and everyone dies. Your job is to go to the house after the tragedy and watch fragments of past interactions, some of which you can affect by having characters make different choices, and prevent the housemates from dying in the fire.
To do this, you engage in incredibly mundane gameplay, watching incredibly mundane scenes of the housemates. One woman is pregnant, and another character figures it out, and she can hide the pregnancy or not. Another guy is being blackmailed, he grows pot in his basement for his ill mother, and has a psycho ex-girlfriend who he may or may not sleep with. He also has a secret door in the basement (ooh, aah!). Another woman is a photographer and artist who owns a creepy doll. Another guy has anger issues, takes another guy's bike out for a spin, and gets beat up and the bike is stolen. He also likes to play video games. One guy's sister moves in because she separated from her husband and sleeps with one of the other housemates. Another guy is a doctor and is considering taking a job far away, but doesn't want to tell his girlfriend (who is secretly pregnant). All these things cause minor drama. All of the characters are some degree of annoying. The voice acting is mediocre. After every event, your character types some "clever" name for the event on his timeline-travelling handheld device, and you have to wait for him to type out all the letters.
Despite all this, it's oddly compelling. You select events to watch on a timeline spanning about a week before the fire until the fire itself. Select the event, walk to the event location in the house, watch characters' interactions in the event. Select another event, walk to the event location in the house, watch characters' interactions in the event. Literally this for the entire duration.
We decided to start from the beginning and watch all the scenes, assuming that we'd uncover information that would allow us to make dialogue choices (available in some events) that would save characters from dying. I will save you a lot of trouble: there is no way to know which combination of dialogue choices will save characters and there is no way to prevent the fire. Even when you learn what caused it, there is nothing you can do about it. The easiest solution would seem to be to have a character make a decision to do something that would prevent the fire. But no. You go by trial and error. It follows zero logic. I do not know why they designed it this way. Toward the end, you'll sort of realize that you need to make decisions for each character that will result in them being out of the house, or like at least away from their place of death in the fire. One woman, you need to get her out of her bed; another two characters, you can get them out of the house together; another guy, you need to prevent from falling down the stairs and knocking himself out; etc. And there are long chains of events throughout the timeline that apparently lead to, for example, the woman getting out of her bed.
So, we played through every event and saved two of the six housemates. We clicked around on different decisions that seemed important, changing them, trying to reason our way to saving other housemates. Eventually, we found a walkthrough with instructions, which was wrong. I later found another walkthrough, which was right, and saved everyone. What an odd game!
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dkirschner's Eternal Threads (PC)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Tuesday 13 August, 2024
GameLog closed on: Tuesday 29 October, 2024 |
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This is the only GameLog for Eternal Threads. |
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