Old Skies review | Eurogamer.net

As a dead poet once famously wrote (in this timeline, at least), “No man is an island, entire of itself”. But what if you were? What if you were a single unmoving point in an ever-churning ocean of temporal uncertainty; where everything you knew, everything you loved, could suddenly cease to exist – to have never existed – in the blink of an eye? Who would you be in a world without constants or connections, and who might you become?

Welcome to the far-flung future of Old Skies, where reality is in constant flux thanks to the commodification and corporatisation of time travel. For the right price, anyone can go back in time and interfere with history; righting wrongs, wronging rights, even saving the dead – just as long as its impact on the future isn’t deemed too great. Here, whole histories can be unwritten and rewritten in an instant; people can pop out of existence, great works of art can be unmade, wars can be unwon, and entire skylines can change multiple times a day. And anchored unchanging within this temporal chaos is time agent Fia Quinn and her colleagues at the ChronoZen agency, striving to maintain some semblance of identity in this ephemeral churn.

It’s a wonderfully compelling – and existentially terrifying – starting point for Old Skies, the latest from indie developer Wadjet Eye Games, a studio you’ll almost certainly be familiar with if you’re a point-and-click fan. Wadjet Eye has been crafting critically acclaimed narrative adventures in the classic 90s mold since 2006, starting with its now five-part Blackwell saga (of which Old Skies shares a universe) through to 2018’s Unavowed. The latter was particularly remarkable; an extraordinarily ambitious, RPG-inspired spin on the genre, delivering a malleable urban fantasy adventure in which whole chapters could shift depending on who you chose to be and the characters you brought along. Old Skies, though – perhaps surprisingly, given its thematic focus on the choices we make and the impact they have – dials back on its predecessor’s ambitious design, instead following a largely fixed path, with seemingly only a few minor choices rippling out across the rest of the game.

Old Skies builds its narrative around half a dozen or so several-hour-long excursions to different time periods, all essentially working as complete stories as Fia attempts to fulfil each of her ChronoZen clients’ demands. It’s an anthology approach that initially feels a little unfocussed as storylines wrap up and characters depart just as you’re beginning to settle into them, but Old Skies slowly coalesces into a more intricate whole, clear parallels forming between Fia’s excursions and her own emotional journey. But even ignoring the bigger picture, Wadjet Eye has crafted a series of wonderful stories here. Each begins with a request; a client wants to learn a secret from a long-dead hero, or recover a lost great work of art, or perhaps revisit a treasured memory before they die – but rarely do these tales follow a predictable path.

There’s romance, mystery, farce, intrigue, subterfuge, and even a spot of murder as Old Skies gamely leaps between genres – often multiple times within each tale – and Fia hurtles through New York’s history, each era brought to life by a wonderful jazz noir soundtrack, and some beautifully evocative art. This is Wadjet Eye’s first HD game (three times the resolution of Unavowed, its marketing material exclaims!) and the studio doesn’t waste a pixel as its story leaps from its gleaming, pink-skied vision of the future to the cobblestone streets of the 1870s; from the smoke-wrapped speakeasies of Prohibition era 1920s to a New York in the shadow of the Twin Towers on 10th September 2001, and beyond. It’s lovely stuff, invoking the spirit of each era rather than attempting to slavishly replicate them.

Unusually, even refreshingly, Old Skies’ interest in time travel isn’t a particularly philosophical one. Rather than using the past and future to interrogate the present as is often the case with these kinds of things, Wadjet Eye’s interest lies at a far more intimate level, its focus firmly on the human stories, and the centuries-spanning tapestry of emotional connections, at the heart of its narrative – a focus it sometimes uses to devastating effect. Even the specific time periods Fia visits aren’t especially critical to the narrative beyond their basic chronology (aside from perhaps the symbolism of its Twin Towers segment, an affecting chapter handled with tenderness and tact), merely serving as evocative background texture for its diverse selection of tales. But that’s not to say Wadjet Eye doesn’t have fun exploring the possibilities of time travel, and that’s felt especially keenly within the playful chronology of its individual stories and its elegantly intertwining puzzle design.

At its most basic, Old Skies follows the point-and-click genre’s familiar rhythms of kleptomaniacal object acquisition and incessant NPC bothering to propel players through its tale. But Wadjet Eye uses its well-honed design instincts to streamline the experience (the roll-over ‘look at’ descriptions are a nicely efficient touch) then build out from there, introducing elements of clue-gathering, cross-referencing, and reasoning that provide an unexpectedly strong investigatory focus. You’ll pick locks, converse with characters, mooch through emails, crack codes, and amass useful objects to uncover new leads. And at the centre of it all is the Historical Archive; a grand database of literally everything that ever was or ever will be.

This repository of lives, deaths, notable achievements, and familial ties can be accessed using keywords gleaned over the course of each trip and provides a focal point of sorts for Fia’s investigations. There’s a bit of smoke and mirrors here – the entries you’re able to search are always tightly regulated, and the archive is used sparingly – but it’s incorporated into the broader puzzling loop brilliantly. It pushes you toward new conversations, new locations, new possibilities, and eventually back to the archive, with Wadjet Eye frequently engineering situations where you’ll need to puzzle your way to uncovering new keywords – sleuthing out a first name to go with a surname found on a screwed up bit of paper in a bin, perhaps – before you can proceed. It feels like proper detective work and, from a story telling perspective, lends your actions an unexpected sense of weight whenever you log back into the archive and discover a person’s entire timeline has changed.

Old Skies plays around with time in other entertaining ways too. There’s a spot of paradoxical puzzling, for instance, and a few chapters that splinter across multiple timelines as players hop between past and future versions of the same locations in order to manipulate events and achieve their goals. Old Skies strikes an effective balance between different modes of puzzling, and while it’s never a particularly difficult adventure, foregoing friction in favour of consistently paced storytelling, it’s generally a rewarding one – offering a clear sense of puzzle logic that makes for satisfying solutions.

Where things start to come a little undone, though, is Old Skies’ big time loop set pieces. Fia and her clients are essentially time locked while travelling, meaning fatalities are easily reversed by ChronoZen HQ. And with death no longer a hindrance, Wadjet Eye positively delights in peril, intermittently bringing Fia’s adventures to an end in a spray of bullets or with a well-hurled meat cleaver. Conceptually, these crescendo moments are lovely stuff, building puzzles around foreknowledge gained after the fact in classic time travel fashion. By observing, interacting, and exhausting dialogue options before Fia’s demise, players can gain new knowledge to exploit on their next loop around, perhaps finding a hiding spot or laying a trap where the killer will tread. It almost works, but Wadjet Eye struggles to offset the inherent tension-sapping repetition of these trial-and-error sequences, and aside from a smartly structured closing effort – one of the few with sensible checkpointing – they can feel a bit of a chore. Thankfully, these moments are relatively sporadic, and only a minor blemish on an otherwise strong game.

Old Skies might not reach the dazzlingly ambitious highs of Wadjet Eye’s remarkable Unavowed, but then it doesn’t try to – instead building its quieter, gentler adventure around some bold narrative swings. It doesn’t always work – its enthusiastic cast occasionally struggles to bring emotional authenticity to Old Skies’ more challenging moments – but it succeeds far more often than it flounders over its 18-ish-hour runtime. It’s beautifully written, intricately structured, and shows real elegance of design; that it does all this while turning its existentially bleak, high concept premise into a gorgeous, deeply human, and surprisingly moving tale of love, loss, and the legacies we leave is all the more impressive.

A copy of Old Skies was provided for review by Wadjet Eye Games.