If you’re a fan of point-and-click gaming, then chances are you’ve heard of developer and publisher Wadjet Eye Games. They’re a small indie publisher that puts out some of the most engaging point-and-click games on the market today. We’ve reviewed a couple in the past including Unavowed (review here) and The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow (review here) and they’ve been nothing short of spectacular.
Now Wadjet Eye Games is back with Old Skies, a sci-fi game with an interesting twist. You play Fia, an employee of ChronoZen, a company that specializes in time travel. But this isn’t your usual time travel experience, so don’t roll your eyes quite yet. Instead of playing around with the continuum or hopping multiple universes, ChronoZen specializes in selling time travel to ultra-rich clients. They can go back to any time they choose and change things, as long as they don’t have a drastic impact on the timeline. Commercialized time travel technology is something rarely seen in science fiction and this particular take is unique because it’s also, at least in theory, responsible. Sure there are some ethical and philosophical issues you could drive a semi truck through, but the overall premise is neat and feels fresh and new.
Fia works with Nozzo, her handler who stays in the future and communicates with her on missions. She also meets with her co-worker and mentor Duffy regularly and the interaction between the three is the core of personalities that the game builds on. Fia takes clients back in time to complete approved tasks, talking to someone, eating at a restaurant, change a life event, etc. All of these changes are diligently researched by ChronoZen in order to ensure that the overall timeline is preserved, even though small changes cause ripples in time that shift people, places and things minutely or drastically, including Fia and her friends. There are only a handful of ChronoZen agents in the world so one assumes that it is a very small, very expensive company with an elite workforce, a neat reimagining of time travel and its effects.
The plot is the whole point of course and each chapter of the game is broken down into different missions where Fia has a different client with new needs and problems each time. What makes Old Skies stand out is that not only does it address time travel in a new way, but the people and problems that are being worked on are utterly meaningless. Rich people spending vast sums of money to fix some perceived slight or ask an odd question is exactly how real people would use time travel and not at all like movies and books have typically led us to believe. Humans are petty, shallow creatures that rarely think about the consequences of their actions, so they pay a company to do it for them and just tinker with whatever they don’t like. It’s all very human, which is both endearing and surprisingly captivating.
Telling you more would of course ruin the game and if you want to do that, just go online and look, but you shouldn’t. Old Skies is spectacularly well-told so let’s take a look at the gameplay instead. This is a point and click but there are some GUI features that are a bit different. Naturally you can click on most things, and holding down the Y button lets you see interaction points, always a handy feature but not one that’s immediately clear. Clicking somewhere walks you to that spot and interacts with something if there’s an interaction point. Talking to people opens up menus that offer decision options based on the situation as well, all standard visual novel stuff. What’s different is the research menu.
You’re from the future and you have a direct line to your handler, so you can search historical records for any information you need, as long as you have the right key words. If you search for some guy named “Bob” for example, you aren’t going to find much, but with a first and last name, chances are the records are going to have at least a bit of information that you can then use to figure out what to do next if you’re stuck. Transition points have Fia walking with clients and chatting, sometimes about nothing, sometimes about events as they’re happening in the past. It’s a neat way to shift scenes and often you’ll find yourself stopping and listening instead of continuing on with the story. You can also travel back and forth in time sometimes based on the tunnelling technology that enables time travel in the first place, which allows you to change events and then see how those changes affect the futures of those involved. It’s a particularly neat way to tell a story, finding out what happens, changing it, then going back and tinkering more until you achieve the desired result.
As you might imagine, Old Skies is designed so that the straightforward path isn’t always the correct one. Time loops make for an effective interactive plot device and unlike many time travel stories, you can die in this one. Death is often mandatory in the game and on top of that, it hurts. Fortunately, ChronoZen has a device that allows them to essentially rewind time and try again when things end poorly, dropping you back into a set point before your death with all the foreknowledge that entails. Sometimes this is necessary to proceed too, so don’t think you’re going to skate through a scenario unscathed. Unlike previous games from Wadjet Eye, Old Skies expects you to learn from your mistakes to proceed and you’ll have to carefully and diligently use environmental cues, prior knowledge, and patience to figure out how to proceed and there’s definitely more potential to get stuck than in previous games with the number of non-linear location choices available.
Aside from choosing the correct conversations and items to use at any given time, there isn’t a lot of substance to the gameplay, but that’s to be expected for a point and click game. It’s all about the dialogue and the human interest here, but that’s just part of why Old Skies is so successful as both an interesting story and a good sci-fi tale. Just as important is the visual impact of the game itself. Rather than pixel art, there’s an effort here to take more of a cartoon-style approach to graphic design. It’s easy to see the visual parallels between games like Dragon’s Lair, older rotoscoped movies like Heavy Metal, and the artistic flair in Old Skies. There might not be the same level of detail as a Don Bluth movie here, but backgrounds in the game are highly detailed and the future noticeably visually fluctuates from scene to scene as well. The areas you travel to, while simplistic, also feel rather immersive and it’s easy to lose yourself in the game as you play, a high complement to the graphic design of both the locations and characters. The cleaner HD imagery helps differentiate Old Skies and it stands apart from other games in the genre for its smooth integration of sci-fi themes that also come across as surprisingly natural, even if close-in cinema style images seem a bit blander than the regular locations in the game.
The other thing that makes Old Skies stand out is the incredible audio work. The entire game is fully voiced with a number of highly skilled voice actors that bring the characters to life. Fia is a thoroughly realistic character, the entire supporting cast of the game is believable and interesting, and the sheer volume of voicework adds significant depth to the experience throughout the game. Merged with the engaging visuals that shift with each change in the timeline, the rich audio work creates a much higher level of engagement than you might expect and while some of us *cough* tend to skip or turn off audio in many games, you’re definitely going to want to hear everything in Old Skies. That goes for the background sound and music as well. There’s a solid soundtrack for Old Skies that includes music from a variety of eras (shocking, right?) made by excellent Thomas Regin who also did a great job on Unavowed. The sound effects are particularly impressive as well and add a much more realistic impression of each time era with background noise and bustle that seem almost alive.
As you can imagine, there aren’t a lot of negatives here. Old Skies is particularly well-designed and engaging and draws you slowly and effectively into the delightful web it weaves. Each piece slowly fits together and most of the story follows at least some common sense. There are a few slightly irritating bits in terms of figuring out what to do in some of the time loops when the answers are noticeably less than intuitive, but those are few and far between and a bit of perseverance will have you moving on through the story in no time, or at least not after too long. When playing in portable mode on the Switch, it is occasionally hard to tap the correct areas of the screen as well, but depending on the size of your fingers (steamed hams for some of us), that might not be an issue for you, though highlighting in the transition menu only appears when you put your finger on a location. All in all, these are extremely minor complaints and Old Skies is quite polished as well as enjoyable.
If you’re a point-and-click fan and you like science fiction (or even if you don’t), Old Skies is a fantastic game that leads you down the winding tunnels of time like Alice through the rabbit hole and when you come out the other side, you’ll have loved every minute of it. While it’s not a particularly long game, weighing in at around 10 or 12 hours, the journey and story are worth every bit of its $20 price tag and players who are particularly invested can always go back through for the achievements the game provides. There’s no question that this is a game you don’t want to miss out on, so don’t hesitate to give Old Skies a go if you get the chance!
This review is based on a digital copy of Old Skies provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well in both. Old Skies is also available on PC for Steam, GOG, and from Humble
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.