You, known only as Forty Three (whatever happened to the 42 before you?!) must save them, and you must do it by altering decisions they made in the week before they died. A discarded mobile here, a singed book on a shelf there. What's left of their home holds only glimpses of the people they used to be. Six people lived here - a cohabiting couple a brother and his older sister who's only just moved in a party-hungry friend and their live-in landlord - and now they're dead. Firefighters crouch in the doorway, hoses pumping, desperately trying to get the flames under control. The first time you step into 14 West Park Road's past courtesy of your hi-tec Visualiser - a wristband device that reenacts holographic visions of what's come before - it is ablaze. Watch on YouTube Here's an Eternal Threads trailer to give you a clue about how it works. We explore only a single deserted home once inhabited by a handful of ordinary folks, but getting to know them isn't just a pleasure it's a matter of life or death. The ordinariness of its people - their rooms, their shared spaces, their conversations, the letters they screw up and toss into the bin - is captured with ease. Despite the melodramatic opener that informs us that "we broke the world" by time-travelling all willy-nilly and releasing radiation into the time stream that changed "countless seemingly insignificant decisions throughout history", an elegant layer of melancholy lies over Eternal Threads.
This is undoubtedly where Eternal Threads' puzzling magic lies. Games that show me a kitchen littered with mouldy takeaway containers and scattered Vodka bottles are infinitely more satisfying than those that would instead give me an in-game diary page from an alcoholic.
But I'm endlessly delighted by environmental storytelling. It's a common thread in some of my personal favourites - think Dishonored, The Last of Us, Gone Home - because of the many uninhabited homes we get to explore in those worlds.
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