Acclaimed point-and-click studio Wadjet Eye’s gently paced, time-travelling genre-hopper blends elegant puzzling and intricate, affecting storytelling to beautiful effect.
As a dead poet once famously wrote (in this timeline, at least), “No man is an island, entire of itself”. But what if you ? 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?
Old Skies reviewDeveloper: Wadjet Eye GamesPublisher: Wadjet Eye GamesPlatform: Played on PC (Steam)Availability: Out 23rd April on PC (Steam, GOG), later on Switch.
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 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.
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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.
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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.