Time Waster

So, remember how Gone Home overcame "walking simulator" bullshit by focusing on a single, tightly-crafted story, even at the cost of its running-length? And remember how Fullbright's next game, Tacoma, delivered more interactivity and additional character development but still kept it brisk and brief?

Eternal Threads had an idea similar to Tacoma's - scrub through a timeline to learn characters' stories and uncover key secrets - plus, branching decisions like a choose-your-own-adventure; but it fumbles by spending entirely too much time on un-critical, un-interesting content.

Foremost, there's the "experiments in time travel" sci-fi meta-narrative, which forces you to sit and stare at a prologue filled with boring, inconsequential technobabble. But even in its core narrative, made up of nearly 200 individual scenes, Eternal Threads can't help but waste time in many scenes that just aren't meaningful to the plot nor to its cast. There's considerable "filler" that, even when it's well-written, didn't need to be here.

The mechanical gameplay is a bit of a slog, too. Credit where it's due: Eternal Threads has a pretty damned convenient timeline navigation interface, like a streamlined view of Elsinore's schedule notebook -- plus, here, you can seek to any event at random. But to watch a scene, after selecting it in that interface, you then need to walk your character to the scene's location. Following the timeline's order of events means you'll do lots of going upstairs, watching a bit, going downstairs, watching another bit, going back upstairs...

This is where I wish Eternal Threads had copied Tacoma's homework, and let me walk along with characters as they moved from one event to the next. With this game's scene design, even if I'm only following one character's scenes, I still need to pull up the Time Map and select the next one every time.

Okay, the game is annoyingly slow and a little clunky, so why did I keep playing it? Well, the upside is that this story is actually, legitimately good. I put the hours into Eternal Threads because I wanted to unravel the mysteries of its house, to investigate each character's personal mysteries, and to observe all of their possible outcomes.

And although the characters' presentations are imperfect - rough models, primitive lip-sync, mediocre voice acting - their writing is really well-done. The emotive exposition each has, and the way they interact with one another, really made me feel like I understood these people and their individual plights.

Though I hestitate to recommend the game, due to its pacing struggles, Eternal Threads does have a strong-enough narrative to be noteworthy. (Maybe it would've been more fun as a co-op activity, choosing branches and watching them play out with a partner.)

Better than: Dear Esther, Shadow of Destiny, Until Dawn
Not as good as: Elsinore, The Forgotten City, Gone Home, Tacoma
... one more caveat: getting the "good ending," making the branch decisions that the game wants you to make, isn't always what I would call logical or reasonable. The destination isn't as satisfying as the journey.