Thoughts on: Old Skies

If you like point and click adventure games, you have seen the Wadjet Eye Games logo at least once or twice in the past 15 years. They have developed and published some of the best adventures of the past decade and have been one of the most prominent users of Adventure Game Studio. And ever since I’ve decided to try the Blackwell series back in 2013, I was never disappointed with a release developed by them since. Even when it was short and simple like The Shivah or The Blackwell Legacy, or as rough around the edges as Blackwell Unbound. Their Unavowed from 6 years ago is easily one of my favorite adventure game titles ever. So to say that I was excited about Old Skies is to say nothing. And yet, somehow, this game was easily the least enjoyable title from Wadjet Eye Games I’ve played.

There are things that are as good as they ever were if not better. It’s almost expected now that the story and storytelling in a Wadjet Eye Games would be good and Old Skies almost doesn’t disappoint there with a clever premise and interesting moral questions to raise. I mean, the idea of playing as a character who can travel and change the past but has to see how almost everything around them (including their own past) gets constantly shuffled and changed is very cool and the way things develop from there is great as well. The visuals are incredible and constantly surprise with some new interesting presentation ideas and transitions. The soundtrack is, as always, fantastic.

So… what’s the problem then? The biggest issue lies purely with the gameplay. For the most part, Old Skies flows well from one problem to solve to another and while it is quite streamlined, it isn’t bad or boring either. But then there are two major sticking points. One is the fact that you have access to the database of all historic events and people at your disposal that you need to use from time to time to progress. Yet even if we lived in a world without Her Story or Return of the Obra Dinn, the way that database functions never feels good. You are given search terms you can use based on unknown criteria, as sometimes you’d have names and titles of things that at the moment are irrelevant, yet lack names and titles of things that you’re actively researching. There’s no breadcrumbing either, so if you find someone’s biography with the names of their family, you won’t get those names as search terms. Even if later on you will need them, but the way to get them would be from some otherwise pointless discussion with an unimportant NPC after performing an unnecessary task. This whole mechanic just feels off, which is especially sad, since it’s clearly based on the clue gathering mechanics that were successfully used in the Blackwell games.

The second problematic point is that almost every time the developers tried to use time travel as a mechanic or core of a problem to solve, it’s either very bad or barely needed. There’s precisely one curious usage of the idea during the very last “puzzle” of the game. Most of the time the game instead tries to do a time loop problem, where you have to relieve a certain sequence of events until you get it right. Which can be done in a fun “trial and error” way in theory and there have been a few games to pull that off. But Old Skies isn’t among them – every such “puzzle” feels like blindly stumbling through options, none of which make sense, until the game lets you continue instead of suffering through the same dialogue options or unskippable parts of scene over and over again. Maybe the developers simply wrote themselves into a corner with the approach to time travel they took, but either way, the end result is mechanically not good.

Overall, I just didn’t enjoy my time with Old Skies. It’s well made, beautiful game with great soundtrack and well written and told story. Even if a lot of the characters feel one-sided and there’s a strange disconnect between what game usually allows you to choose for the characters and where they fully take control. But playing it was simply “alright” at best, and outright frustrating at worst. I think the game is worth checking out, but I also think that basically any other game developed by Wadjet Eye Games would be a better choice.