#Eternal threads of life free

Soon after laying down the relay devices necessary to let you view the past ghost forms of all six housemates, you’re warped to the end of the seven-day timeline and forced to stand in the building as flames rise and firefighters struggle to control the blaze. The stakes are set almost immediately after you’re sent back to 2015. This hopefully the player a central focus, while also showing all the possible alternatives that were available for them to connect and explore through the changing of decisions.” “Ultimately,” says Bottomley, “we settled on a basic timeline diagram, with the scenes currently active being lit up and connected to the central line, while all the alternatives were greyed out and disconnected. “It was overwhelming to look at and absolutely the complete opposite of ‘easy to follow’”.īoiling all that down into a form that players could get their heads around took Cosmonaut Studios months and many iterations. “The original whiteboards on which we charted the story looked like some strange mixture of ancient cave-paintings, alchemical scribblings, and the calculations of an insane astrophysicist,” jokes narrative director Dave Bottomley. It’s a lot to wrap your head around, no doubt, hence why having an in-game time-map to hand made a lot of sense. They set the stage for an eight to ten-hour first-person adventure where you must play the watcher, jumping back and forth over a week’s timeline to find out how the fire started, taking note of dialogue and actions while saving as many characters as possible in the process. The sci-fi shenanigans might be set within the confines of a single building, but six people’s routines constantly intertwining still results in 190-plus character decisions for you to navigate (and potentially change) on both a small and grand scale.

This set Johnson and the team on a path to create hundreds of different paths and outcomes for the player to explore – including one perfect ending, which will see all housemates survive and go on to enjoy their best future lives.

#Eternal threads of life free

“Then, we had a crazy idea… What if the entire story was open from the start? What if the player was free to go to any point in time and change any decision they wished, as many times as they liked? This is when the idea of the house fire with the deaths of all the housemates was conceived and the story was reworked and refined, so now the decisions have a direct impact on their survival.”

“Our initial efforts became a much more supernatural experience,” says creative director Paul Johnson.