Old Skies is about regular people and encourages gratitude and living in the now, and that’s what makes it great.
Wadjet Eye Games is a New York City-based indie studio known for making point-and-click adventure games that are driven by stories. Dave Gilbert started the brand in 2006, and it has since become known for its great stories, interesting characters, and retro-inspired looks. I remember playing Blackwell Epiphany years back and still remember how the game’s story impacted me.
Dave is back again and this time with Old Skies, giving us a deep idea of how things are every day: histories change and rewrite themselves, timelines change, and memories change to fit the new “now.” This time, the studio digs right into this complicated universe and gives it some of the most memorable characters and mind-blowing experiences I’ve ever had in a point-and-click adventure.
In Old Skies, you are Fia Quinn, a time traveler who works for the ChronoZen international agency, which was set up to keep everything in order. Even if people are trying to control time travel, the technology to change the “when” of “now” is still… well, unpredictable. Because history is always being rewritten, buildings change shape and location, music and art come and go, and family and friends go from being real to being lost.
Fortunately, ChronoZen agents don’t work in the normal world. They are chosen through tough personality tests to determine their ability to do the job. No matter how many times history changes, they stay the same and have all of their memories. There are fewer than 100 agents in ChronoZen worldwide. Fia isn’t the only field agent, though.
Frank Nozzarelli, her handler and smart guy in the chair, and Duffy, her fellow agent and mentor, both keep Fia grounded while everything else around them changes. Fia and Duffy are in charge of doing fieldwork with clients at ChronoZen’s New York office. Nozzo stays in the present day to keep an eye on them and give them advice from the control center.
But like any other business, ChronoZen needs money to stay open, and people from all over the world look for it. Clients spend a lot of money to go back in time for whatever reason they need to. Time travel isn’t cheap. Not only is it pricey, but everyone has to go through a long psychiatric evaluation before the higher-ups at ChronoZen, who agents call “the brass,” will accept a client into one of their facilities. It’s not very subtle social commentary when people with a lot of money change history.
Fortunately, there are rules and procedures in place to make sure that history is changed responsibly, even if you have the money and resources to hire ChronoZen to make a time leap. Using huge computer algorithms, every individual in history is assigned a timeline ranking, which can be Low, Medium, or High.
These rankings show how important it is for that person to stay the same way they are now. If someone had a low ranking, the brass wouldn’t care if their life changed beyond recognition. However, if someone has a high timeline ranking, any change to that person’s past would have a huge effect on the globe as a whole.
While you play Old Skies, this is the world you are in. As Fia, you work with different clients at different times in history to do things with them. All of these things happen in New York City, but there are many different times when they could happen.
One customer will take you back to the 2040s, and another will take you back to the end of the 19th century, just one of the numerous historical periods you’ll see. You must go with each client to ensure they follow the rules and regulations and do everything you can to help them reach their goal.
Old Skies is broken up into chapters, and each one usually focuses on one client and one time in history. But you can leap between several periods that are close together (maybe six months apart or perhaps just a few hours) to modify something in the past that will impact something else later. At first, client requests are rather straightforward, like going to a favorite restaurant or asking someone a question when they are still alive. But this is time travel, so things are never as simple as they appear.
The time travel gimmick makes each chapter different from the others. For instance, at one point, you have to move around a lot of Fias to keep from paradoxing oneself out of existence. To go through this adventure in one piece, you’ll have to solve several hard puzzles that mess with time.
You will move the plot forward by looking around and solving puzzles, just as in most typical point-and-click adventure games. You’ll pick up things here and there, but most of what you’re looking for is information. During gameplay, your inventory is hidden at the top of the screen.
Most of it is just normal things. But Old Skies breaks the rules with its clever search function. As a ChronoZen agent, you can look through a huge historical archive that has information on every person, group, and event in all of human history. When you play Old Skies, it looks even better in motion. Fia will always be depicted wandering along a changing background that changes depending on the period you’re in.
Graffiti and ads on billboards are small things that help each historical period feel different. And every time you jump across time, you know exactly how far you’ve gone. Although you wander between two quite brief periods—months instead of decades—in a few instances, even that makes the backgrounds look very different.
The characters in Old Skies are just as professional, with models that are quite expressive and rotoscoped animations that make movements look real. Fia might smile slyly after making fun of Nozzo for saying something snarky, or a character’s eyes might dilate in astonishment when Fia points out something that only that person would know. There are also beautiful full-screen cutscenes at important points in the plot that show characters up close with full-face movements.
It’s very impressive that the art direction stays the same no matter where you are or when you are there, given how many different times and places you go. The music is just as different. For example, in 2062, the hologram-filled halls of a future bar play electronic music, and in the 1920s, you can hear smooth jazz saxophone while you race around the city’s sinister underworld.
A small pop-up will show on the screen every time you learn the name of a relevant person, organization, or event in each chapter. This means that a new search phrase is available in the database. Most people need to know both first and last names individually.
You will spend much of your time chatting with characters and looking about discovering new words for the archive, but there is also a lot of regular pointing and clicking to do throughout the fifteen or so hours it will take to finish Old Skies. You can only control everything with a single click (but gamepad controls are also available).
If you hover your cursor over a person or place of interest in the surroundings, you can chat with or interact with them. When you hover over something, a text bubble will come up with Fia’s thoughts on it. You can pick up some things, but not nearly as many as in typical classic adventures.
At first, Fia phones Nozzo on her communications to ask if relocating an old rag that is hanging from a sign can change anything in history. In this example, the answer is simply “no,” although it seems sensible that a time agent would want to be careful when toying with possible butterfly consequences.
Next to the search tool on your inventory bar is a call button. Nozzo calls it “subvocalizing,” and any ChronoZen agent can talk to their handler directly through their thoughts. Fia can call Nozzo at any time during the game and get advice on what to do next through a pop-up hologram. You can call Nozzo even when you’re stuck because the device is hands-free and doesn’t require you to talk.
This is a hint tool that can assist you in finding your way around the game. But naming Nozzo a hint feature is a big mistake. I like having the option of getting help in the game if I need it, but it can feel too gamey at times, which can take me out of the experience. Nozzo is an important component of the Old Skies experience, just like the search tool.
Fia may be the main character, but Nozzo is a great character in his own right. You can call him up to chat or ask him what he thinks about your current position. He’ll tell you where to look next based on what he knows in 2062. I never felt like I was being led by the hand throughout these conversations. When you contact him, it’s not a clear “do this and then this,” but rather a general idea of what might work next.
The death system is another big thing that makes this game different from any other I’ve played. For a long time, people have been arguing about whether or not players should be able to die in adventure games. Both have their pros and cons.
A game without death lets players try out new things all the time, yet dying in a game brings up certain stakes that wouldn’t work if a player knew they would be fine no matter what they did. But Old Skies, a game about changing histories and expectations, opens the door to a third option: What if you had to die to make progress?
Fia will die—a lot. Fortunately, Nozzo is watching your back and has access to the emergency rewind protocol, which is a piece of technology from the future. Fia and the client both have a Paradox Field Excluder or PFE. This gadget protects the user from time paradoxes. If Fia dies before her time, Nozzo can rewind time to bring her back to life (and the client, too, if they die as well) a short time before they die.
Fia remembers dying as a ChronoZen agent, and she won’t feel great wherever she was mortally wounded (you’d have a bad headache too if you got shot in the head), but she doesn’t forget what happened before that, which is important for doing well next time.
There are a lot of puzzles in Old Skies that are only about Fia’s death, and each time you die differently, you learn something new that you can only get by dying in that way. Fia will have to learn the combination to a safe in one frantic fight, but you can only learn one number before you die.
For the average safecracker, this would be deadly, but happily, Fia will recover, even if she is a little worse for wear, and keep coming until you figure out the whole combination. Another early example I like is when Fia fights a professional boxer and has to choose between dodging left or right.
You won’t get the appropriate sequence straight away, so your first (or first few) attempts will definitely end with you getting hit in the face. But when you learn the order of the punches through trial and error, Fia also receives more lines of dialogue and smart-ass comments to fire at her attacker.
These don’t change the fight at all, but they do provide some entertaining extra speech that you can find while you’re figuring out the dodge sequence you need. I laughed so hard at some of the lines that I fell out of my chair.
One boxer said something so ridiculous that it made me giggle. When Fia makes a snarky comment after being shot in the head or mowed down by bullets, the same thing can be stated. There are some really funny parts when Fia knows how many times she has died. I never felt like I was being punished for making a bad choice, and every death added more lines of great dialogue while keeping the story moving.
The voice cast of Old Skies does a great job of bringing the characters to life through their conversation. Every character is quite likable, or at least very interesting, but I have to note the great performances of Sally Beaumont as Fia Quinn and Edwyn Tiong as Nozzo. It’s a joy to see them work together to tackle time travel problems while jokingly giving each other a hard time.
I never doubted that these were two authentic ChronoZen operatives who had worked together for a long time. I laughed, gasped, and cried. I felt a wide range of emotions while playing this game, and they were all real.
You go back in time to September 10, 2001, in downtown New York City in this game, and it has all the weight that comes with it. But the game is never sad; every moment is about the people living their lives when you get there, and the intricacy of each character is treated with the same amount of respect.
Old Skies is about regular people, which makes it great. I find a boxer who is having a hard time making ends meet for his family much more interesting than another story that tries to create a new angle on historical figures we’ve seen hundreds of times before. You will look at family artifacts and pictures, and read letters and diaries that tell you about the lives of these people.
That makes it much tougher to accept when you think about how one slight push may change everything. It’s a game about living in the now and being grateful for what you have right now. We could all use a little of that in this world that is always changing. I feel like I’m stuck in a time loop, just like the game I’m playing. As soon as the credits rolled, I wanted to play Old Skies again.
