Review of Old Skies: 7 secrets that could erase your world.

As a famous dead poet (in this timeline, at least) once wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself.” But what if you were itWhat if you were a single, motionless dot in an ever-churning ocean of temporal uncertainty; where everything you knew, everything you loved, could suddenly cease to exist—or never have 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 distant future of Old Skies, where reality is in constant flux thanks to the commercialization and corporatization of time travel. For the right price, anyone can go back in time and intervene in history; correcting mistakes, doing evil, and even saving the dead—as long as the impact on the future isn't considered. too much big.

Here, entire histories can be unlearned and rewritten in an instant; people can disappear, great works of art can become nonexistent, wars can go unwon, and entire horizons can shift multiple times a day. And anchored, immutable within this temporal chaos, are temporal agent Fia Quinn and her colleagues at the ChronoZen agency, striving to maintain some semblance of identity in this ephemeral maelstrom.

It’s a beautifully captivating – and existentially terrifying – starting point for Old Skies, the latest from indie developer Wadjet Eye Games, a studio you’re likely familiar with if you’re a fan of point-and-click games. Since 2006, Wadjet Eye has been crafting critically acclaimed narrative adventures in the classic 90s mold, starting with its now five-part Blackwell Saga (with which Old Skies shares a universe) and continuing through to 2018’s Unavowed.

The latter was particularly notable; an extraordinarily ambitious, RPG-inspired take on the genre, offering a malleable urban fantasy adventure where entire chapters could change depending on who you chose to be and which characters you brought with you. However, Old Skies—perhaps surprisingly, given its thematic focus on the choices we make and their impact—tones down its predecessor's ambition, instead following a mostly fixed path, with seemingly only a few minor choices resonating throughout the rest of the game. 🔍🎭

Old Skies builds its narrative around half a dozen multi-hour excursions to different time periods, all essentially working as complete stories as Fia tries to fulfill the demands of each of ChronoZen's clients. It's an anthology approach that initially feels somewhat unstructured as plots conclude and characters depart just as you're beginning to settle into them, but Old Skies slowly consolidates into a more intricate whole, forming clear parallels between Fia's excursions and her own emotional journey.

But even ignoring the bigger picture, Wadjet Eye has created 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 great lost work of art, or perhaps revisit a treasured memory before they die – but rarely do these stories follow a predictable path. 🌌❤️

There’s romance, mystery, comedy, intrigue, subterfuge, and even a little murder as Old Skies gleefully jumps between genres – often multiple times within each story – and Fia hurtles through the history of New York, each era brought to life by a wonderful jazz noir soundtrack and beautifully evoked art.

This is Wadjet Eye’s first HD game (three times the resolution of Unavowed, its marketing material proclaims!), and the studio doesn’t waste a pixel as its story jumps from its bright, pink-sky future vision to the cobblestone streets of the 1870s; from the smoke-shrouded speakeasies of the Prohibition 20s to a New York in the shadow of the Twin Towers on September 10, 2001, and beyond. It’s lovely stuff, invoking the spirit of each era rather than slavishly trying to replicate them.

Unusually, and even refreshingly, Old Skies's interest in time travel isn't particularly philosophical. Rather than using the past and future to interrogate the present, as is often the case with such narratives, Wadjet Eye's interest is on a much more intimate level, focusing firmly on human stories and the centuries-spanning emotional tapestry at the heart of its storytelling—an approach it sometimes uses to devastating effect.

Even the specific time periods Fia visits aren't especially critical to the narrative beyond its basic chronology (save perhaps the symbolism of her segment at the Twin Towers, a poignant chapter handled with tenderness and tact), serving simply as an evocative backdrop for its diverse selection of tales. But it's not that Wadjet Eye doesn't have fun exploring the possibilities of time travel; this is especially acutely felt within the playful chronology of its individual stories and its elegant puzzle design. 🕵️‍♀️💫

At its most basic, Old Skies follows the familiar beats of the point-and-click genre: kleptomaniacal item acquisition and incessant NPC pestering to propel players through its story. But Wadjet Eye employs its instinct for fine-tuned design to optimize the experience (the descriptions of 'looking' in passing are a nicely efficient touch) and then build from there, introducing elements of clue-gathering, cross-referencing, and reasoning that offer an unexpected investigative focus.

You'll collect items, converse with characters, scrutinize emails, decipher codes, and collect useful objects to uncover new clues. And at the center of it all is the Historical Archive; a massive database of literally everything that ever was or ever will be. 🧩🔍

This repository of lives, deaths, notable achievements, and family ties can be accessed using keywords obtained throughout each journey and provides a focal point, in a sense, for Fia's investigations. There's a bit of smoke and mirrors here—the entries you can search are always strictly regulated, and the archive is used in a limited way—but it's brilliantly incorporated into the puzzle's slick logic.

It thrusts you into new conversations, new places, new possibilities, and eventually back into the archive, with Wadjet Eye frequently designing situations where you’ll have to solve puzzles to uncover new keywords—perhaps decrypting a first name that matches a surname found on crumpled paper in a dumpster—before you can move forward. It feels like proper detective work, and from a narrative perspective, it lends an unexpected sense of weight to your actions each time you log back into the archive and discover that a person’s entire timeline has changed. 🔐📜

Old Skies also plays with time in other entertaining ways. There's a touch of paradoxical puzzles, for example, and some chapters that split across multiple timelines as players jump between past and future versions of the same locations to manipulate events and achieve their goals. Old Skies finds an effective balance between different modes of puzzle-solving, and while it's never a particularly difficult adventure, eschewing friction in favor of a consistently fluid narrative, it's generally rewarding—offering a clear sense of logic to the puzzles that leads to satisfying solutions. 🤓🧠

Where things start to fall apart a little, however, are Old Skies' big time-loop moments. Fia and her clients are essentially trapped in time while traveling, meaning fatalities are easily reversed by ChronoZen HQ. And with death no longer an obstacle, Wadjet Eye positively revels in danger, intermittently interrupting Fia's adventures with a hail of bullets or a well-thrown kitchen knife. Conceptually, these climactic moments are delightful things, building puzzles around foreknowledge acquired after the fact, in classic time-travel fashion.

By observing, interacting, and exhausting dialogue options before Fia's death, players can gain new knowledge to exploit in their next cycle, perhaps finding a hiding place or setting a trap for where the killer will step. It almost works, but Wadjet Eye struggles to counter the inherently grueling repetition of these trial-and-error sequences, and aside from a cleverly structured closure—one of the few with a decent checkpoint system—they can feel a little tedious. Thankfully, these moments are relatively sporadic and only a small blemish on an otherwise strong game. 💥🔄

Old Skies may not reach the dazzlingly ambitious heights of Wadjet Eye’s remarkable Unavowed, but it doesn’t try either – instead it builds its quieter, gentler adventure around some bold narrative twists. It doesn’t always work – its enthusiastic cast sometimes struggles to bring emotional authenticity to Old Skies’ more challenging moments – but it succeeds far more than it fails over its roughly 18-hour running time.

It's beautifully written, intricately structured, and displays true design elegance; that it does all this while turning its existentially bleak premise into a beautiful, deeply human, and surprisingly moving story about love, loss, and the legacy we leave behind is all the more impressive. ❤️🌟