Old Skies
PREVIEW
“I did a game jam about three years ago,
when I was having a lot of trouble coming
up with our next game idea,” says Wadjet
Eye Game’s Dave Gilbert. The studio’s
most recently released project,
Unavowed, was a real stand out of the
point-and-click genre, telling a story
of demonic possession and urban
fantasy on the streets of New York.
But that makes it something of a
tough act to follow. “I entered a jam
anonymously as a way to remove that
burden. I created this game about a time
traveller, and it was very short, but I
enjoyed it. I enjoyed working on it and I
liked the character, so I decided to expand
it and turn it into a full game.”
The result is Old Skies. It puts you in
the boots of Fia Quinn, a time agent for the
ChronoZen agency. Capitalism has
reached time travel and, for a pretty
penny, travellers can delve into moments
of history or the future, either because
they have unfinished business, or just
want to observe a particular moment in
time. Your job is to babysit them.
But the focus is as much on Quinn
herself as it is the temporal ramificationsof her clients’ actions. “The timeline
constantly changes around her,” says
Gilbert. “I considered, what would that do
to your brain? What kind of person would
you be as a result? And so she’s kind of a
little misanthropic and nihilistic because
literally nothing matters. She can meet
someone, and they could disappear from
existence the next day. Part of her arc over
the course of all these missions is
becoming someone who cares. Finding
something she cares about and what
she’s willing to do to preserve it. “JUST IN TIME
The missions Fia will go on vary massively.
Just some of the examples of the times
you’ll visit include the Gilded Age, the
Prohibition era, and even the World Trade
Center on the eve of September 11, 2001.
While there was a time when sudden
death was common in point-and-click
adventures, these days they tend to be
much more forgiving. But Old Skies has a
unique approach to that philosophy. “It’s
sort of a tradition in point-and-click games
that you can’t die,” explains Gilbert. “I
decided to lean into that where you can
die, but she’s a time traveller. So she
has this mechanism that rewinds her
history by five minutes or so. Fia can
go through with the sequence again
but she keeps the memory of
everything that she did before.”
This will be the focus of many of the
game’s puzzles. For example, I got to see a
scenario where Fia needed to get into a
locked safe. Allying with a particular
character to get them to open it for you
reveals the last two digits as 42 – but once
they’ve done it, they grab a gun and turn
on you, killing you. That sends you back in
time, but now you know one third of the
combination. You can then try other paths
to finding the other two. It’s a pretty
simple example, but it’s easy to see the
mind-bending potential.
So when is Old Skies set for release?
Well Gibert says that development is
moving quickly and it should be about
another year before launch. Even with the
very small slice I saw, it looked pretty
wonderful. With charming voice over,
smooth animations, and clever humour,
it’s got me wishing I could travel forward
12 months and play it.
Imogen MellorT
ime travel is tricky. It’s never as easy as
popping back, saying hi to Napoleon
Bonaparte, and going home, is it? Sticky
situations are inevitable, and that’s as
true as ever in upcoming point-and-click
adventure Old Skies, which sees you working as a
temporal agent looking after rich patrons as they
mess with crucial timelines.Keeping the time-travelling rich
out of temporal troubleOLD SKIES
THE FOCUS IS AS MUCH ON
QUINN HERSELF AS IT IS THE
TEMPORAL RAMIFICATIONSRELEASE
TBCDEVELOPER
Wadjet Eye GamesPUBLISHER
In-houseLINK
wadjeteyegames.comNEED TO KNOWFIRST
LOOKFashionable in
any era.