“Eternal Threads” is a walking sim with a focus on exploration very much in the same vein as “Tacoma,” “Dear Esther” or “Gone Home” while, at the same time, fundamentally misunderstanding what made those narratives so compelling in the first place: the people whose lives you’re walking through.
At some unnamed point in the future, humanity’s first experiments with time travel “broke the world,” poisoning the time stream with countless temporal anomalies. The cascading effects of these anomalies, while small and seemingly trivial deviations from the original timeline on their own, have devastated the planet.
It’s textbook butterfly effect stuff, a concept in chaos theory so embraced by popular culture that it may not even need an explanation at this point. It refers to the compounding impacts of tiny changes to a previous timeline, the idea that something as subtle as the flap of a butterfly’s wings could ultimately cause a tornado. To put the timeline back on track and change the world’s fate, present-day humanity sends agents back through time to prevent these anomalies before they can mess everything up. It’s your job as the de facto time police to go to the past, make small changes and hopefully line up all the dominoes in a way that doesn’t get anyone killed.
Read the full review here.