Old Skies is the newest game from Dave Gilbert’s Wadjet Eye Games; in some ways it is very typical of his oeuvre and in some ways quite different. If you don’t know his work, he’s been delivering point-and-click adventure games as an indie developer for 20 years now. This is an astonishing length of time for any indie developer to survive, and a duration that makes Wadjet Eye one of the longest enduring publishers of adventure games.
In Old Skies, you play as Fia Quinn, an employee of ChronoZen, a company that has a monopoly on time travel, and is charged by modern governments to ensure the continuity of the time stream. Not perfectly – everything is subject to time change, and the world in which you live is subject to constant, modest alterations in reality. But on your missions, people you meet are rated anywhere from minor to major importance to time continuity, and even though you may make changes in the past (and often must do so to progress), you’re required not to make big, important changes. No assassinating Hitler, in other words, as appealing as that might be.
The “present” (meaning 2060 something) is where you live, and from which you depart for your missions; it does change around you, the skyscape visible from your New York apartment window is altered over time, as are the businesses down the street from your office, as time travellers make changes to the past. You, however, as a ChronoZen employee, are “chronolocked.” So your memories and experiences do not change, even as mutable reality transforms around you.
ChronoZen is a profit-making enterprise (apparently late-stage capitalism persists into the late 21st century). Most of your missions involve shepherding clients into the past, who want to do such things as rescuing a boxer from the 19th century, investigating a murder on 9/11, or changing the dynamics of a 2040s startup. All missions are based in New York city, where Gilbert (and I) live, and the historicity has some resonance (with reservations: the Five Points slum around Collect Pond was far more dire than he portrays it in the game; Jacob Riis, and Gangs of New York will give you an idea). Five Points was, in the mid-19th century, New York’s most notorious slum, and today is the municipal district, home to many government buildings, paved over and sanitized (and still not any place you’d want to hang out; I’ve done jury duty there several times). And the game’s portrayal of post-9/11 New York does not match my recollection. (I live two blocks from Ground Zero, and watched the towers fall, but have no recollection of jingoistic graffiti, and remember thinking “our pain does not justify your unnecessary wars of aggression.”)
One way in which Old Skies is similar to Wadjet Eye’s previous work is in its excellence of voice acting; all characters are fully voiced. To be sure, one of the (few) advantages of developing games in New York is the ready accessibility of talented voice actors, who (I presume) can be induced to provide voice talent at a relatively modest price, for the exposure and credit they receive. The protagonist, voiced by Sally Beaumont, is particularly excellent; an actress with an obvious British accent is in some ways an odd choice for a tale set in New York, but the game does provide a justification – ChronoZen has sent her to the New York office precisely because she is unlikely there to encounter family on her time jaunts, and therefore less likely to produce time paradoxes.
One way in which the game departs from predecessors is that this is the first time Wadjet Eye has not used Adventure Game Studio as its platform (Update: we learned the game -is- created in AGS!) – not sure whether it’s a Unity or Godot game, but it does not have the pixelated look of previous titles. The graphics are, in a way, reminiscent of the work of Moebius, a seminal artist in the history of bande dessinée (the French version of what in English we would call comics or in Japanese, manga), but France has its own tradition and tropes for the marriage of linear art and story. Like Moebius’s work, characters have black, hard-edged outlines but are somewhat stylized and cartoonish. Old Skies’ backgrounds are not as sweeping and pastel as Moebius’s art, but the influence is obvious. (Bande dessinée has had a surprising influence on adventure games; Benoît Sokal, also a bande dessinée artist, created Amerzone and the Syberia series.)
Old Skies does not have a lot of “combine this with that” puzzles, although item combination does happen sometimes; mostly, puzzle-solving involves navigating dialog trees, and exploring the environment to provide hints or solutions is important. Two other systems matter; you can always contact “Nozzo,” who is your mission monitor back in 2060, and quite often can provide hints if you’re having problems. And there is a database of information about historical figures you can access to learn more about characters you encounter in the past, which can spark ideas about how to solve puzzles.
On the whole, Old Skies is an excellent graphic adventure of the sort we have become accustomed to from Wadjet Eye; but I’d be remiss if I didn't explain that in more detail.
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Dave Gibert first appeared on the scene some years ago with The Shivah, a game featuring a crime-solving, fist-fighting rabbi from the Lower East Side. Gilbert (and his company) are best known for the Blackwell games, featuring a hard-bitten female detective and her ghost sidekick from the 1940s. If you haven’t played these games (and are an adventure game enthusiast), you should totally check them out.
Twenty years ago, adventure games were dead. They had never sold more than a few hundred thousand units, and while that was plenty in the 1980s, by the turn of the millennium it meant nothing. Games were mostly sold off the shelves of GameStop, and shelf space was limited, and unless your title could sell 1 million+, it meant little. Whole genres died and went away, including RTS games, turn-based strategy – and adventure games.
That’s why The Shivah was such a refreshing breath of air; Dave Gilbert was a brave creative making an adventure game because he loved adventure games, and was either naive enough or committed enough to not care. This was the kind of game he loved, and what he wanted to make.
It turns out, he was doing so at exactly the right time. Digital distribution was burgeoning. And so a passion project turned into a 20-year career. Shelf space at GameStop doesn’t matter anymore; mind-share online is what matters, and 100,000-unit sales at brick-and-mortar retail…underwhelming in 1999…now looks pretty good if you don’t have to compete for shelf space, and the revenues are yours.
When people talk about the resurgence of adventure games, Telltale is the company they mention first. But you know what? They should be thinking about Dave Gilbert and Wadjet Eye Games, too. This is a true believer in the genre, who had pursued his passion even as the market changed, and despite all the odds against him, has made a difference to the field.
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Old Skies has several episodes at different points in New York history; I’ve already mentioned the 19th century and 9/11, but there are others set in the 1970s; my favorite sequence deals with a tech startup set in the 2040s. A cofounder of the startup feels badly treated by his cofounder, and contracts with ChronoZen to change the past so that he winds up on top of the company – which you do. And then his cofounder shows up, feeling ill treated by her cofounder, and wants you to change the past again – which you do. And then employee number 3 (not a cofounder but with substantial equity) shows up wanting you to change the past again because she has spent 20 years holding the company together while the cofounders fight like cats in a sack, making her life a living hell, and thinks she could have done a far better job. This is humorous in itself, but what I like best about it is the dialog; all three characters, over the course of the episode, spout entirely believable business babble, including the kind of investor presentations that I, in my previous life as a serial entrepreneur, can easily imagine using to convince venture capitalists to fund my startup. I mean, in general, Old Skies' writing is quite well done, but this particular episode I thought was most excellent and well observed.
Old Skies’ puzzles are not hugely challenging; I got hung up only once, and one of the disadvantages of reviewing an unreleased game (it’s out now), is that you can’t rely on walkthroughs. Easily solved; I contacted Gilbert on Discord and got sorted out. But the fact that I only got stumped once means you should be able to navigate the game pretty easily.
On the whole, I had a blast with it; I do think that Wadjet Eye’s previous game, Unavowed, was a bit more ambitious and innovative, but I can heartily recommend Old Skies to any adventure gamer.
Our Verdict:
Old Skies is a wonderfully written, charmingly animated adventure game with excellent voice acting and accessible puzzles, firmly upholding Wadjet Eye’s legacy in the genre.
The Good:
- Top-notch writing
- Excellent and diverse voice acting
- Interesting exploration of New York history
- Appealing animation
The Bad:
- Don’t expect head-scratching puzzles, just go with the flow
GAME INFO
Old Skies is an adventure game by Wadjet Eye Games released in 2025 for PC. It has a Stylized art style, presented in 2D or 2.5D and is played in a Third-Person perspective.
