Eternal Threads
Eternal Threads is a single-player, first-person story-driven puzzle game of time manipulation, choice and consequence.
As an operative tasked with fixing corruption in the timestream, you have been sent to the North of England in May 2015, where six people died in a house fire. Prohibited from simply stopping the fire, you must instead manipulate the choices made by the housemates in the week leading up to it so that they all survive the event.
From the outset, you have free and complete reign to explore the seven day timeline before the fire. You can watch and alter the significant events from the entire week as many times as you like and in whatever order you wish. Some decisions will have only minor effects on the timeline, moving objects around the house or revealing deeper stories and secrets. Major changes however, rewrite the timeline by changing existing events, adding new events and even replacing other events entirely.
You must traverse up and down this timeline, changing decisions at different moments throughout the week so that their effects interact and combine together to save all six housemates.
However, it is not just the housemates who have choices. Each of them can be saved from the fire in multiple ways, with each outcome having a profound effect on their lives in the future. Will you just search for the quickest and easiest solution, or can you find the best possible outcome for everyone?
Ultimately, everything is about choices and consequences.
Features
Choose how you want to follow the game’s story
Want to follow each of the six characters’ stories ‘Pulp Fiction’ style? That’s fine. Want to watch the whole thing like ‘Memento’, with the final event first and then moving back in time to see what caused it afterwards? That’s okay too. Or maybe you’re old school and just want to watch things in good-old chronological order? You can do that as well.
Watch and change things as many times as you like
Can’t remember exactly what happened in an event? Changed a decision and you’re not sure you like the consequences? That’s fine. Just pop back along the timeline and watch and change whatever you like, whenever you like, as many times as you like.
Change the past to affect the future
Setting up temporary base in the house mere hours after the fire, provides a unique perspective on events. As you look back through the timeline, past events play out in front of you in ghostly form, with the smoke and fire damaged house a constant reminder of what is to come. In addition, as you manipulate the past, the environment can be reset around you to match the changes taking place. Some new objects will appear, others will move around the house and the contents of rooms can change substantially as you change the past.
Read More: Best Mystery Indie Games.
The Inner Darkness
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The Short of it: A well-crafted, challenging, indie platformer/puzzle/horror. The physical logic puzzles and dimensional shifting really make you think through trial and error - I felt smarter having played this =)
Reminds me of: A fairly unique title, it doesn’t remind me exactly of any other title I have played. If you like good puzzle platformers, indie horror, and modern pixel graphics, you’ll probably like The Inner Darkness.
– Real player with 9.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Mystery Dark Games.
I must give the game it’s dues. It really uses as much of its limited mechanics as it can without ever really overstaying its welcome (as you can see, the whole thing took only slightly more than an hour to beat, playing suboptimally). Even a couple of core mechanics which I feared would become annoying never became so, they just added a slight illusion of urgency.
The puzzles were on the easy side, with more than a few times me overthinking what they needed, but several did feel clever enough (even if they were never particularly lateral). A few of them did easily screw you over due to movement rather than misunderstanding the core puzzle, but that was partially on me for rushing.
– Real player with 1.6 hrs in game
The Sexy Brutale
The Sexy Brutale
…is a time-puzzle mystery game. Lafcadio Boone wakes up in the Sexy Brutale Mansion, reliving the same day over and over, as he attempts to prevent tragedies from happening all while trying to figure out what secrets are kept in the deepest rooms of the mansion.
⚙ Game Description & Mechanics ⚙
As you begin the story, you are guided by the mysterious Bloodied Girl that has you witness the assassination of a guest. But thanks to a pocket watch she gives you, time rewinds back to 12pm, allowing you to visit different rooms and uncover what happened from a different point of view. From that point on, it is up to you to prevent other tragedies from happening.
– Real player with 13.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Mystery Indie Games.
8 hours of gameplay, I still don’t know what Brutale is? Is it a combination of Brutal and Tale? Is it a made up word? Is it an alternate form of the word Brutal? Why is it Sexy? Ultimately these questions don’t matter much, yet I still feel I should ask them because I really want to know.
On the other hand The Sexy Brutale does deliver a solid gameplay experience. People have called it “Groundhog’s day in video game form.” And that works for the most part. The entire game has the player reliving 12 hours, and trying to “save” people. To do this, the player has to stop their death, which can be as simple as Activating a control panel, to as complex as timing a number of objects and following someone around. It’s a rather great game, that reminds me of classic point and click games.
– Real player with 13.6 hrs in game
The World After
A short but sweet game. The quality of the film shots is really nice, and the story is well written.
The second half of the game (from after the mansion gate) felt a little too linear, as you can only access one or two screens at a time. If you missed a lore QR-code at some point, you will realise this only in the very last game scene, forcing you to replay the game to get the true ending. A more open approach to the map would have been nice.
The puzzles were simple but consistent with the world, and the day/night mechanic was a great idea. Except for the very last puzzle, the solutions are more or less apparent from the story or available items.
– Real player with 5.2 hrs in game
The World After is an FMV game with gameplay similar to Contradiction: Spot the Liar.
A writer has recurring dreams and the answer to their meaning lies somewhere in the French village where he resides. It’s an interesting set-up, and while there isn’t a great deal to the plot, I liked what there is.
Unlike most modern FMV games, there is only one choice in this game to make. It isn’t the sort of game where you make many choices, and from those choices come many variations in the plot. It’s basically a point-and-click adventure game in FMV form, complete with inventory and a small number of characters to interact with.
– Real player with 4.4 hrs in game
Welcome Home
Welcome Home is a murder mystery set in two timelines in which you play both the murderer in the past and the investigator in the future.
Play as a murderer in 1922, infiltrating a family house, solving puzzles and discovering the unspoken secrets of the Moore family.
Play as a tourist in 1987 exploring the house now turned museum, investigating it, gathering clues and piecing together the events of that horrific night.
Can you uncover the decades old dark truth haunting your family?
The Gardens Between
Imagine playing with a very beautifully illustrated and intricate pop-up book. That is about as good a description I can give you for what The Gardens Between is. You can close and open the page to make things move backwards and forwards. But seeing as this is a digital pop-up book we can add some other mechanics too such as using lanterns to clear fog which would have otherwise been blocking your way. We can spin a dial to mess with the chronological order of other things independent of us….and just in general we can manipulate time to solve puzzles and uncover a fully relaxing and heartwarming story of two friends who love each other.
– Real player with 7.8 hrs in game
The first time I loaded The Gardens Between and saw the title screen, I knew I was in for something special. I was reminded immediately of the initial screen for “Braid” a game that I constantly referred back to for The Gardens Between. And like “Braid”, The Gardens Between is a beautiful puzzle game that often uses time as a mechanic and rewards patience, interest and pondering of the tales we tell ourselves of our rose-tinted youth.
The Gardens Between is a universal story then, all told without a script, dialogue or any written words whatsoever. As you journey with our young friends, Arina and Frendt, you get a sense of their personality and their enduring friendship and moments together, through objects that make up the levels and the snippets of moments they share when each is completed.
– Real player with 6.5 hrs in game
Escape the Loop
What if I told you, we’ve done this before? You’ve read this text, you’ve looked at these screenshots, and you’ve watched this trailer. Not once, but a hundred times. Maybe even more. And in five minutes, you won’t remember any of it – and do it all over again.
Escape the Loop is an open-world adventure game about time and recollection. You’re stuck in a time loop – after five minutes, the world goes back to its initial state. Everything resets. You keep nothing. Except your memory of past loops. Every loop will be exactly the same, unless you change it through your actions. Use your knowledge of previous loops to find out what causes the time disruptions and break free once and for all.
The Chronos Principle
The Chronos Principle is a refreshingly inventive game all about journeying through various minimalist puzzle stages, each with their own intricate designs that explore the idea of time manipulation. It brings a unique twist to the old sliding puzzle genre. Immerse yourself in a serene atmosphere and cooperate with your past self in order to find solutions to these meticulously hand-crafted puzzles.
How to Play
Reach the exit using simple mechanics that are easy to grasp but hard to master. The way these concepts are communicated to you is spliced seamlessly into the narrative of the game leading to a smooth and enjoyable experience.
Key Features
★ 77 handcrafted puzzles
★ Supports both Light and Dark mode
★ A calm and relaxing atmosphere
★ Time travel and various other mechanics
★ Cloud saving
Enjoy the Experience!
Inua - A Story in Ice and Time
#### A mystical game in Canadian far north
Inua is a mystical narrative adventure spanning several time periods in the Canadian far north.
Follow the story of Taïna, Peter and Simon, three characters separated by more than a century but whose destinies are mysteriously intertwined with Nanurluk, the great polar bear.
10 000 thousand years ago, nanurluk lived peacefully with her cubs? One day, motivated by ambition and their desire to show their superiority, humans attacked her. After a long and dire hunt, Nanurluk was slain ,disturbing the balance between man and nature.
Navigate through time and instill ideas into the minds of characters to bring back harmony to the world.
#### Of time and space
Travel to the Canadian far north, navigate between the ages and interact with the past to change the present. Inua, will have you unravel space-time to solve puzzles and guide the characters. Each level is made up of several scenes that take place in the same location, but at different times. As you move from scene to scene and era to era, you will uncover events from the past. You will be able to breathe new ideas into the characters to help them overcome the obstacles that stand in their way and change the course of history.
#### An epic of historic proportion
The original and supernatural scenario of Inua is based on a very real story: that of the Franklin Expedition, a British mission in the 19th century set to explore the then unknown Arctic. Shipwreck, illness, mutiny: by gathering clues, you can shed light on the tragic destiny of this expedition, whose fate is still largely unknown..
#### Inua - A Story in Ice and Time is :
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A supernatural tale based on incredible historical facts.
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An extraordinary story inspired by Inuit spirituality, based on extensive research with Inuit artists and supervised by an Inuit author
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Original puzzles based on space and time manipulation
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A game conceived by the creators of Bury Me, my Love and Vignettes, adapted from an original story by Nathalie Frassoni and Frédéric Bouvier, under the breathtaking artistic direction of Delphine Fourneau of the Klondike collective
Clinically Dead
This is a very fun puzzling game that really makes you think! I get a lot of portal vibes from this but it definitely does a lot of unique things with its' concept. The idea is basically space=time=health, which seems simple at first, go into the blue part of the environment to move the environment into that part of time, run away from the shadow beings that take your time away, etc. etc., but this game really does capitalize on these mechanics and does a lot of clever interplay with them. I would be stuck on a puzzle for a while until I thought “what if I did this” and would be amazed every time how much the same mechanics make for different and interesting puzzles each level. On this front, the puzzling is an A +
– Real player with 6.8 hrs in game
As stated by other reviewers, the graphics are simplistic but there’s a lot of effects to make it look really vibrant and trippy. It could easily bother people, but I liked it.
Puzzles are also very creative, the story takes a turn at the halfway point which ultimately leads to multiple endings.
I really enjoyed small details such as the monsters moving their jaws perfectly to the sounds they’re making, wasn’t expecting that for a game like this.
Some cons:
The menu is very, very basic. Not only does it not look good, but it doesn’t even have essential controls such as mouse sensitivity or FOV slider. I managed to get used to it after a while but my enjoyment would’ve been much better if those options were available.
– Real player with 6.6 hrs in game