Old Skies Review (Switch eShop)

If you're a point-and-click fan — particularly of the '90s LucasArts-y variety — then you're likely familiar with Wadjet Eye Games. This is the team that brought us back to the genre's golden age with the likes of The Excavation Of Hob's Barrow (on which it served as publisher), and its latest slice of nostalgia pie is equally concerned with turning back the clock, albeit in a much more literal sense.

Old Skies is another genre celebration with a clear iration for the past, yes, but time is integral to the story here too — time travel, to be specific. With a centuries-spanning plot that covers everything from prohibition to 9/11, the modern-day to the distant future, Old Skies is an ambitious undertaking. The journey to the end suffers from uneven pacing, and the point-and-click puzzle solving is a little more straightforward than we would have liked, but as we closed in on the finale to this 15-hour time-hopping adventure, we were impressed by how it managed to stick the landing.

Mere decades in the future, time travel is real. Rather depressingly, this means that the entire industry has been bent for commercial gain, with travel agency ChronoZen performing whistle-stop tours to the past and future for those whose pockets are deep enough.

Now, anyone with so much as a ing interest in Back to the Future, Doctor Who, or roughly one hundred other iconic sci-fi media will tell you, time travel is a risky business — stepping on butterflies in the past can have dire consequences on the future, etc. That's where ChronoZen's Time Agents come in. These are era-hopping babysitters, of sorts, who ensure that the spoilt rich types don't cause too much of a splash on their temporal travels. Of course, some travellers do muck about in the past, causing people, places, and other things being 'ChronoShifted' from existence.

You play as one of these agents, Fia Quinn, and accompany six of the nation's finest on their journeys to the past. The game follows a pretty straightforward structure: you meet the client, you travel to their chosen time period, something goes wrong, you fix it. How you fix it varies on a case-by-case basis, but this is a point-and-click we're talking about, so it will come as no surprise to hear that there's a lot of drawer rummaging, item pinching and NPC badgering along the way.

For a game about hopping timelines, it's a shame how linear some of the puzzles come across during the opening acts. Unlike the genre's greats, most of Fia's troubles aren't solved by elaborate, out-of-the-box thinking, but rather by finding a necessary item the floor, or navigating a dialogue tree correctly to get the right answer.

There's nothing wrong with this approach to puzzling, per se, and there are certainly some solutions that require a little more thought (particularly in the end game). That said, a smattering of some Monkey Island-style weirdness wouldn't have gone amiss in some of the longer chapters, where reaching the intended solution can feel like more of a clickathon than anything to scratch your head over.

Fortunately, each chapter is varied enough that it doesn't feel like you're doing exactly the same thing for every mission. The unique time zones add a nice bit of variety, and Wadjet Eye has managed to make each one feel genuine thanks to some neat dialogue (all fully voice-acted, we should add) and world-building.

One particularly memorable trip sees Fia travel back to New York on 10th September 2001, witnessing the city before it changes forever the following fateful day. It's a particularly touching segment about what can and cannot be altered, deftly handled with respect and awareness of its emotional weight.

As nice as it is to explore these different time zones with their painterly backdrops and suitably laid back score from Unavowed composer Thomas Regin, the leisureliness is pushed a little too far in the opening acts. Much like 2062, the timeline at the centre of the narrative, Old Skies' pacing is in a constant state of flux. With character introductions out of the way, the ensuing three chapters can often feel like a bit of a slog, repetitively clicking through dialogue options in the hope of moving the story along.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Old Skies' death sequences. As a Time Agent, Fia can die. And she does, a lot. Whenever this happens, Nozzo, our ChronoZen buddy and chief hint giver, hits a rewind button so we can play out the interaction again. Most of the time, you defuse the situation by interacting with the environment to disrupt the loop, Ghost Trick style, but it often takes multiple attempts to see the intended solution, and the rewind has a nasty habit of dropping Fia a little too far back. Hearing conversations for the fourth, fifth, sixth time doesn't do much to keep up the sense of brush-with-death intensity.

The juiciness might not come thick and fast in Old Skies, but this is as much a story about the toll of time travelling on agents like Fia as it is about her escapades. In a world where people and places are constantly being rewritten, what effect does that have on the agents who have to live through it? It's in the quieter moments between chapters that interesting topics like this are allowed a chance to shine. Old Skies doesn't necessarily pose the answer to these questions, but the smaller discussions around self-love, relationships, forgiveness and our relationship to the past make for a heartfelt ending, albeit one that felt like it took its sweet time coming.