Cause and Effect

We’ve just posted a video with a more in-depth look at the core idea and mechanic behind our game ‘Eternal Threads’ – manipulating the timeline.

Eternal Threads is not a linear game. From the initial outset, you can visit any point in the current timeline of the story and watch the events that take place. You can jump forward or backwards watching and rewatching any event currently available. You can watch chronologically, follow each character’s story separately, watch the whole story from back to front or even come up with some random viewing order based on the I Ching. How you watch these events and piece together the story is entirely up to you.

However, the current timeline is based upon the decisions that the characters make during the story. If you change a character’s decision in an event this can change the timeline, removing some future events and adding new ones. Ultimately your goal is to find a set of decisions that result in all six of the characters surviving the house fire at the end of the week.

You can try to predict the outcome of changing a decision based on what you have learned about each of the characters. Many will have obvious results, but others, like the butterfly effect, will be less predictable. Fortunately, as you can go back and forth changing any decision at any time, as many times as you like, you are free to experiment and can change things just to see what happens.

In this video we show some of the results at the end of the timeline and then experiment with changing some decisions to see how that affects the outcome.

Anyway, we hope you enjoy the video.