Linear story games based mostly on dialogue and characters are exactly the type of games that are really easy to make at first glance. But the more you think about it, the more you realize that it’s very easy to mess things up. It’s not easy to strike a balance between a solid but not severely limited number of characters; you have to make sure that they are not completely black and white, but convey their nuances correctly to the players so that they can understand and remember them. And all this needs to be wrapped in some interesting plot and scenery that can be learned in a reasonable amount of time without looking too trite. Such games stand and fall on the very story and script. And as we can all imagine, this is not the easiest part of creating almost any work.
But Eternal Threads has made things a little more difficult by adding elements of time travel to its concept. As an operative known only as 43, you travel back in time to a specific house in England in order to gradually save all the locals. There was a disaster that shouldn’t have happened. And so you have to go through major and seemingly less important events that occurred in one week, gradually get to know individual residents, they knew their lives and in the end were able to save it, if not improve it.
The description of this game actually sounds pretty epic, but it’s based on slow gameplay rather than a small amount of dialogue. You will get a map with a timeline almost from the very beginning – for seven days, it displays dozens and dozens of specific moments that you can play. All you have to do is mark the moment, go to the part of the house where it happened, and look at the scene through the holograms.
First of all, two fundamentally important mechanics are created here – in quotation marks. First, at some of these moments, you can change the decision that the character makes. For example, to influence whether he gives or does not give on the advice of his friend, or that something is being hidden from someone. This may subsequently change only some small detail, for example, four days in the future, or, conversely, it may radically affect several things throughout the week. The second thing you could call mechanics is the fact that you can play individual moments in any order. At your disposal from the very beginning, a fairly large number of them. And just as you can start from the beginning, you can start and go from the end. Alternatively, constantly jump back and forth, changing individual decisions.
On the one hand, it may seem very chaotic, but I think that the creators managed to beautifully balance some kind of straightforwardness with the same non-linearity. Basically, I never really got lost in the number of moments, several characters, a lot of events and their changes, and I always felt that I had everything under control and everything was clear to me. This is where the script comes in handy.
Fortunately, it is by no means abstract. More specifically, too “playful”. Other than time travel, you don’t have any purely mystical stuff or anything that looks like you’ve been sucked out of your finger. All characters behave realistically, speak like people, have their own strengths and weaknesses, their own character … Even their personal and life problems, difficult relationships with other residents and a difficult past. Gradually, you will learn everything and in the finale, the six main characters make a very realistic and, most importantly, pleasant impression. But it is a pity that the game is not the best way to motivate you to really not only save, but also improve them. In the end, you only get one small scene, a text list of what happened after the events of the week, and that’s it. So I apologize for the lesser spoiler, but if you’re playing this game in anticipation of an epic finale and due satisfaction, then it’s best to tell you right away that it simply isn’t here.
Source :Indian TV
