Old Skies Review

In the specialised yet popular genre of point-and-click adventure games, Wadjet Eye Games has established a solid reputation. The studio's last game, Unavowed, was a standout and solidified their name among genre lovers due to its snappy writing and throwback gameplay sensibilities.

With Old Skies, Wadjet Eye continues this legacy by embracing high-definition visuals for the first time while retaining the soul of their past games. Set in an alternate-future New York, this time-travel tale explores human fragility, corporate morality, and shoulder posture with remarkable finesse.

You play as Fia Quinn, a time agent working for ChronoZen—a future corporation that makes money by selling trips into the past. Rich clients get to relive personal moments, fix regrets, or ask the big questions, as long as their actions don't cause massive ripple effects.

In this world, time travel is less of a government lockdown situation and more like marijuana legalization: legal, but under tight regulation. ChronoZen isn't the utopian tech startup its name suggests. It's more like a dystopian travel agency for the ultra-rich—complete with legal loopholes, historical applications, and deeply unsettling implications.

Fia's job is to shepherd these clients through history and ensure things don't go sideways—no butterfly-effect orgies, no ancestor-wooing, and no time-looping narcotics dealing. The game spans a variety of temporal slices of New York: the speakeasies of the Roaring Twenties, the gaslit alleys of 19th-century Manhattan, the present day, and the days surrounding 9/11—an inclusion that's handled with an odd mix of reverence and narrative tension.

Over time, Fia's role shifts from passive observer to active agent of change, mirroring her own frustrations with a system that demands she remain neutral even as history bends and morphs around her. Wadjet Eye's strength has always been its writing, and Old Skies continues that tradition. The stories tied to each client lean into different emotional tones—mystery, romance, regret, even murder.

While this was the beginning with mostly simple and straightforward requests, the ending has almost never been predictable. Fia's emotional baggage slowly unravels throughout the story, ending with a rather apt meta-commentary on agency, control, and self-development. And it is at that moment that Fia publicly rebukes her very own role in all of it.

Old Skies' gameplay goes through the old paradigm of point-and-click, but does so with simplicity and much thought.  It's your usual affair, but done well. You mouse about, interact with items, and talk to characters. Clues are cleverly intermingled with conversations and environments so that they guide you without forcing you into an intended direction.

You'll hunt down tiny environmental clues, talk with historical characters, and sift through newspapers. One very interesting feature is the Historical Archive, a game mechanic where you can look up real dates, people, and clues to help solve the puzzles. You'll be looking for minor environmental clues, conversing with historical personalities, and sifting through newspapers. 

The historical archive, a gaming tool that allows you to look for actual dates, people, and clues to solve puzzles, is one really intriguing aspect. It gives Old Skies a detective feel, making you feel like you're genuinely researching rather than just running fetch quests.

The puzzles are usually very well-thought-out and logical, a new contrast compared to the infamous "moon logic" of many such adventure games. Old Skies build gradually in complexity without becoming overwhelming.

Many involve using knowledge from one time to affect events in another—a simple but satisfying use of the time travel mechanic. There's also an enjoyable layer of timeline manipulation; for example, you might plant a clue in the past to make your job easier in the future or sabotage a device years before it becomes a threat.

However, the game stumbles when it leans into time loop puzzles. Fia can't die, so some segments play like Groundhog Day with death resets. The idea is clever—you learn from failure and repeat the sequence armed with new information—but it quickly grows repetitive. One or two of these segments are engaging, but most just drag, killing tension rather than building it.

The puzzles are also perhaps too focused. The game often narrows you into a single room or a tiny slice of the timeline, where your only option is the next intended solution. Any attempt to think creatively or interact with your environment outside that very tight box is met with Fia bluntly shutting you down. "I don't need to worry about that," she says. "I'm done with that thing." How do you know you're done, Fia? Maybe the bucket used earlier could also knock out a cop or double as a fashionable vintage hat.

XP grinding isn't a factor here. There are no stats to boost or levels to climb. Progression is tied entirely to puzzle-solving and narrative choices. While this keeps the focus tight, it does contribute to the feeling of constraint and linearity that sometimes makes the game feel like it's on rails.

Visually, Old Skies is Wadjet Eye's first venture into HD, and they make great use of it. The backgrounds are clean and atmospheric, and the characters are expressive, though they do suffer from copy-paste syndrome.

Every single person in the game seems to have been created using the same animation rig: same stance, same walk, same weird posture that suggests they're sleepwalking through a midnight baby-soothing session. The animation is smooth but lacks individuality. At times, it's hard to tell if you're supposed to recognize a character from earlier in the timeline or if it's just the same face with a new haircut.

This lack of visual distinction makes some of the time travel story beats confusing and occasionally undercuts the emotional depth. For a game so rooted in identity and historical divergence, having every character strike the same "jeans model" pose feels like a missed opportunity.

The soundtrack is another high point. It leans into a jazz noir style that drifts through time along with you. From the soft saxophones of the 1920s to the uneasy ambiance of early 2000s Manhattan, the music enhances the mood without overpowering the moment.

It's subtle, atmospheric, and rarely overused. The voice acting is competent across the board, though not always memorable. Characters speak with the same cadence and tone, which sometimes feeds into the already mentioned "interchangeable" feeling.

Old Skies does not seek to be the sprawling, ambitious epic that Unavowed was. Instead, it leans toward the tighter, more introspective experience of character- or emotionally driven storytelling. The game lives in regret and control and in letting go, both in the literal and metaphorical senses. While the loop sequences bog things down and the character animations feel like they've been ripped from a Unity tutorial on posture, the core of the game remains strong.

Fia's arc—her frustrations with living in a world that changes without her, her desire to take control of her fate, and her ultimate rebellion—makes for a satisfying narrative thread. It is a very rare instance of a point-and-click game in which the protagonist grows beyond player actions, and that is something to be noted.

While Old Skies may not necessarily proceed to revolutionize the genre, it massacres the issue with modern ethics, emotional maturity, and witty script. Wadjet Eye knows what it's doing, and while it may reuse a few character models along the way, it tells a story that feels both personal and timeless. In a world of contrived time loops, corporate overreach, and jazz-soaked nostalgia, Old Skies manages to find its voice—and that's worth traveling for.