Eternal Threads is a video game developed by Cosmonaut Studios and published by Secret Mode. It was released on Steam on May 19th, 2022, with versions for the Xbox One, Playstation 4, and Nintendo Switch planned for later in the year.
In the far future, experiments in time travel caused chronal radiation to alter the timestream. Many seemingly insignificant events have been altered, which have led to the world becoming an irradiated wasteland. The only hope the world has is the thing that destroyed it in the first place: Time Travel.
Enter Agent Forty Three. They are an agent tasked with traveling back in time to Set Right What Once Went Wrong. They're sent to a house in the North of England in May of 2015. According to their records, an alteration caused the six tenants to die in an erroneous house fire. Unable to stop the fire directly, Forty Three's mission is to alter the decisions made by the tenants to ensure all of their survival. The tenants include:
- Tom, owner and landlord of the house.
- Ben, a doctor currently taking F2 Foundation training, and Jenny's boyfriend.
- Jenny, a Uni student studying mathematics, Ben's girlfriend, and Raquel's best friend.
- Raquel, a Uni student studying art, and Jenny's best friend.
- Neil, a Uni student, and Linda's younger brother.
- Linda, an office worker temporarily living in the house, and Neil's older sister.
As Forty Three, the player alters the decisions made by each tenant to ensure their survival, and potentially improve their lives. The player monitors the events of the week leading up to the fire, altering decisions that may seem minor but can drastically alter the fates of the tenants.
The official website for the game can be found here.
This game provides examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Neil and Linda's father would regularly beat Neil during his childhood with either his regimental belt or his fists for the most minor things, like getting a C- on his homework, being late getting home from school, or getting his jersey dirty playing football.
- Butterfly of Doom:
- The introduction states that time travel caused chronal radiation to corrupt the past, eventually leaving the world in a radioactive nightmare.
- While setting up the equipment, the player is informed that stopping the house fire could have worse results, compared to keeping the people alive.
- Control notes that saving a bunch of random people in a single apartment actually has more of an impact than it might seem, because after twenty generations a single person can be responsible for nearly a million lives going forward.
- Brits Love Tea: The game is set in England and expectedly several times characters call for a tea break.
- Chronoscope: Forty Three's visualizer can project events from the past and alter them if it's determined to be a possible corruption point.
- Cool Uncle: Neil is this to Kieran. The two play video games online regularly, and play pool when Kieran comes by the house to visit.
- Doom It Yourself: The fire inevitably starts because Tom is at best a shoddy electrician who can't afford to have a professional do the work. The fact that he's running a small marijuana farm downstairs that is more than likely responsible for tripping the breakers every so often certainly doesn't help.
- Drugs Are Good: Downplayed. Tom secretly grows marijuana plants in the basement, but specifically as a pain reliever for the residents of his mother's senior home. He did extensive research into how to grow the plants, and specifies to Raquel (if he shows her the room) that they can't get high off the strains he grows.
- Dual-World Gameplay: The plot moves between the player's current timeline at the flat and the timeline before the fire started.
- Exiled to the Couch: Raquel and Ben can have a fallout over the pregnancy or her pills which leads to Ben having to sleep in the living room. This can actually save his life, as Tom will be able to get to him quickly in the open living room, as opposed to being locked in his upstairs room where he may or may not die of smoke inhalation.
- Experimented in College: Jenny and Raquel apparently had a history together. Jenny continues to tease Raquel in the present timeline.
- Fanservice: Jenny and Raquel are often seen in their underwear or dresses that reveal their curves. Ben, who has a great physique, is seen shirtless a couple of times.
- Golden Ending: The base objective is to manipulate events so all six residents survive the fire, which can be accomplished in multiple ways. A secondary objective is to resolve their personal stories in the ideal manner, signified by their "Alive" heart marker being green instead of white, which is much harder to do while also keeping everyone alive. Doing this unlocks a bonus scene.
- Grandfather Paradox: The introduction text claims that it's possible changing the past may eventually wipe the Second Chance Project out of existence, but that'd be preferable to the current status quo.
- Gratuitous French: After opening the safe in Tom's weed room and revealing the alternate visualizer, Control says "Putain de merde!", the French equivalent of "Holy shit!".
- Guide Dang It!: Some potential events are a lot harder to unlock than others, requiring a specific chain of events to trigger them, and the game isn't always willing to tell you what events to influence simply by clicking on the event. 62 and 64, for example, involve getting Linda to save Tom from Miranda, but the game shows no influence lines as to how you're meant to accomplish that. Some events also have to be backtraced through a series of decisions to produce the desired outcome, even though the influence line will only point to the nearest relevant decision.
- Hands-On Approach: Neil showing Emily the ins and outs of playing pool.
- In Spite of a Nail: There will always be a fire at the house on May 15th, 2015, because you're specifically told not to prevent it. Forty Three's mission (and by extension the player's) is to ensure the residents of the house survive the fire, but the fire itself will always happen.
- Irony: In the basement, you can find smoke alarm that's still in an unopened box. Control lampshades the irony of it.
- Kissing Under the Influence: If Linda gets drunk at the party, she and Tom may end up in bed together.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Jenny's visions. Are they the result of her childhood mental illness, or is she seeing flashes of the future? Was the death of her mother a Traumatic Superpower Awakening? Was she able to see Forty Three when her meds stopped working? Was the picture of the house on fire merely a poorly rendered photo, or a capture of the eventual fire?
- My Sister Is Off-Limits: Neil gets annoyed when Ian flirts with Linda and reveals she's married to head off that conversation, and can potentially get into a fight with Tom if Linda sleeps with him. Tom can also break up with Miranda if she insults his friends. He's fair game, but not them.
- Notice This: Objects that can be interacted with are visibly flagged even from a distance.
- Not Quite the Right Thing: Part of the trick to getting the Golden Ending is not just being honest, but knowing when to be honest. This means deflecting in certain circumstances to discuss them later at a more appropriate time, or deliberately causing conflict to bring issues out in the open. For example, to reach Jenny's ideal conclusion, you have to get her to give up her pills, but you also can't reveal her pregnancy too early or she and Ben will resolve that issue, leaving them to fight over the pills in their final conversation.
- Ominous Visual Glitch: Appears periodically in the main menu, while looking upon the time travel room.
- Percussive Maintennance: An event can have one of the light drones go out in the basement. 43 smacks it to make it go back to normal, or as Control calls it, "standard operating procedure #4."
- Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Neil's friend Ian constantly Speaks in Shout-Outs which Neil doesn't get most of the time.
- Psycho Ex-Girlfriend: Miranda, Tom's ex. It's regularly mentioned how she would get rough with him without his consent, and became jealous every time he talked to another girl. Ben, Jenny, and Raquel all warn him to stay away from her, although whether he does is dependent on the player.
- Secret Room: You find a hidden room behind a wardrobe in the junk room. It turns out Tom is using it to grow medical marijuana for his mother.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: You job is to prevent six people from dying in a house fire, and maybe fix up their personal issues along the way.
- Sequel Hook: If the player achieves the Golden Ending, then an alternate scene plays after the Conclusion Event. Forty Three's extraction is interrupted by a new time anomaly in Linda's room. When the player goes into the room, they're attacked by Brian Scott. He prepares his own extraction sequence, taking Forty Three with him, and offers to show them "what's really going on."
- Shout-Out: The Secret Room behind the wardrobe makes Raquel think of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
- Simple Solution Won't Work: At the beginning of the game, after being told that your mission is to prevent the residents from dying in a house fire, Control points out the obvious solution of just preventing the fire. He then explains that you can't do this because preventing the fire altogether would have an even worse outcome.
- Staircase Tumble: Assuming you don't manipulate any events, Tom's final event before the conclusion has him going down to the basement when the electricity fails and the lights pop, causing him to trip over some items on the staircase and come to a hard stop on the concrete floor.
- Surprise Pregnancy: Jenny (possibly) discovers she's pregnant before the party, but still avoids drinking that night to be safe. When (or if) she decides to tell Ben can be changed by Forty Three.
- Sympathetic Adulterer: Linda is meant to be seen as this if she sleeps with Tom, despite still being married. She dismisses it as not being a big deal since it was "just some fun" while her relationship with Harry is difficult since he's neglectful, though Neil gets really angry about it.
- Tragic Keepsake: Raquel keeps the doll of her childhood best friend, Megan, after she died in a hit-and-run accident. Depending on the player, she can reveal to Jenny that she was the reason the two were in the street in the first place. Megan, who had recently received a new doll, was going to abandon her old one, but Raquel didn't want it to feel "abandoned." Their argument led to them running in the street, and the car going too fast above the speed limit hit Megan. Raquel refused to let go of it for three days, and even refers to the doll as Megan in the present day. The choice to either hold onto "Megan" or donate her to charity is dependent on the player.
- Wham Shot:
- When the player finds Tom's safe code, they can retrieve the belongings of the tenant who used to rent Linda's room. One of those belongings is an older-model visualizer, indicating that another temporal agent was sent back to this location before you were.
- In the final scene, Forty Three heads back into the house to investigate another temporal anomaly, and runs into Brian Scott, who has returned to retrieve his lost property.
- When You Coming Home Mom: Linda's son Kieran. Linda left behind her job, husband, and son in a fit of unhappiness, and rented out the spare room in Tom's house while she figured out what she wanted in her life. Kieran wants her to come back, even asking her this at least once.
- You Are Number Six: Text on the uniform reads "SCP 43", and the agent is only referred to by their number.
