It's been seven years since Unavowed, one of the best modern point-and-click adventures. If you were a fan, then good news: Wadjet Eye Games and Dave Gilbert are back with a new game, and this one has a time-travel twist.
Set in 2062 in New York City, Old Skies follows Fia Quinn, an employee of ChronoZen – an time-travelling agency that provides wealthy clients the opportunity to visit the past.
Fia is a time traveller whose job is to accompany the clients to fulfil their requests, as well as to ensure key moments in history aren't overwritten.
The story unfolds over seven chapters, each covering a different client and era – from a retired boxer who wants to meet her inspiration during the Gilded Age to a retired cop keen to prevent the murder of her friend on the day before 9/11.
It's a point-and-click that is mechanically put together well. Fia faces numerous setbacks and obstacles during every trip to the past, but solutions are always logical and never too obscure, while often providing just enough challenge to make solving the puzzles feel satisfying.
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Old Skies puts its own spin by making time travel an integral part of some of the puzzles.
Whenever Fia dies, time is rewound to a point moments earlier but with her memory intact, and in some segments, experiencing the same scene multiple times but with different actions helps you build up enough clues to figure out how to get through a deadly situation unscathed.
While a couple of these time-loop scenarios can be solved by brute-forcing, most of the time it doesn't feel like you're dying for the sake of dying as you're always trying to learn something new. In fact, the best examples make up some of the game's most memorable moments, raising the urgency of the scene while rewarding deduction or smart thinking.
Narratively, the seven cases are varied. Each client has their own agenda, sometimes initially hidden from Fia. They manifest in interesting ways that threaten to derail Fia's objectives.
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Altering moments in time causes ripples that change the present, and while the wider population is completely oblivious whenever this happens, as a ChronoZen employee Fia is hardened to seeing changes happening before her eyes including people being wiped from existence.
While the seven chapters each have their own story and are largely standalone, there are threads that tie them together as the assignments have a personal effect on Fia.
In ChronoZen's line of work, everyone is trained to be detached from reality and to only focus on the job. But just because anything can be erased from time at any moment, does it mean it's pointless to have meaningful connection with an event or a person?
Fia's overarching story plays a major part in keeping the momentum going across the 12 hours it takes to reach the credits, but the last chapter – which has the onus of delivering the final pay-off – wraps up the story in a surprisingly abrupt manner.
The conclusion has heart, but feels rushed at the same time. The final decisions that Fia makes perhaps could have felt weightier than how they are ultimately presented.
The chapter is over in just a handful of minutes. And while there's something positive to be said about the game not wanting to drag out the ending and avoiding unnecessary exposition, it might have been to its benefit to extend the segment to give the player more time to process the climactic events.
Old Skies is an engaging point-and-click. It may not deviate heavily from the genre's formula, but the way the game bakes the time-travel aspects into some of the puzzle-solving provides a number of highs, and Fia's touching story and the twists along the way are worth experiencing.
Platform reviewed on: PC
Old Skies is out today on PC, Mac, and Linux, with a Nintendo Switch version coming soon.
