Oh no. Old Skies has opened one of the oldest and largest cans of worms ever known: time travel. The grandfather paradox and ‘don’t tread on anything’ tropes are well known, but as soon as you acknowledge that time can change, everything unravels. Cause and Effect isn’t a one-off event, after all. Every effect leads to a cause. If you change one link, then everything after changes. It’s impossible to predict. What if you change something that stops you making the decision to time travel? Does everything just loop forever?
You know what, let’s leave the headaches aside for one moment. Old Skies deserves more than rambling about time travel. Fiddling with chronology is just a vehicle, after all, that delivers us to some excellent and heartfelt writing. Old Skies excels in the character writing, to the point that the sight-seeing tour across history takes a back seat. It’s coupled with some sparks of genius in the gameplay, even if it does use time manipulation as a bit of a crutch.
Plenty Of Time
The figure at the centre of all this time related wibbly-wobbliness is Fia Quinn, an employee at ChronoZen, who looks disarmingly like Courtney Hope in the promo art. Her job is to take clients to a past date of their choosing and alter a single element, with the hope of getting a positive outcome in the future. There’s a book of rules behind it, of course, and you can’t fiddle around with the past of important people. Also Fia comes armed with a gun that can obliterate organic matter. In case you try and sucker punch your school bully, or something.
Old Skies‘ plot is structured across six acts, all of which take you to different time periods, at the behest of different people. It’s a cleverly laid out plot. Ostensibly, it’s six unrelated stories, but the nature of time travel – and Fia herself – starts knitting them together. Fia hops between time periods, and will occasionally stumble into characters who she helped decades ago. It’s tricky keeping track of who’s who. The story directly confronts the impermanence that comes with time travel. Things in the future can change on a minute-by-minute basis, as timelines are constantly fiddled with.
This sort of thing requires some definite finesse in the writing, and Old Skies has some excellent writing. All of the clients feel unique, with some feeling more comedic and others being quite brutally dark. It delves a lot into regret, understandably, but its time travellers become the more interesting characters. They are locked in time, unable to change their past. So everything around them changes instead. The writing explores their struggles with a world that, for them, is constantly in flux. How can you feel for anything if it might be gone the next second? It’s a deep theme, handled well.
Time, And Time Again
The gameplay fits in relatively well with this. On the surface, it’s a fairly routine point’n’clicker. You find random things on the ground, and stuff them into your cavernous pockets. Then you rub them on anything that looks promising. The key difference here is the introduction of time. We can hop between time periods, for one. Information in the past can be brought with us to the future. We also have access to an archive that allows us to see people’s altered timelines too, which can give us clues on how best to approach people and solve puzzles.
There are some strokes of absolute genius. The zenith is a chapter where three clients all approach us about the same thing, one after the other. If we run into our past selves, we paradox to death. So after we solve the first set of puzzles, we have to achieve a different goal while avoiding our past selves. Then, avoiding two of our past selves. It’s great. Still, these are excellent puzzles floating in a sea of dialogue tree puzzles. Quite often we solve problems by just exhausting dialogue trees, punctuated by dying and rewinding. The ‘death, then rewind’ gimmick feels like a bit of a crutch at times.
They’re not terrible. Most require you to read the relevant documents beforehand, but given the very first puzzle has us uncover a padlock serial number so we can scan it and put in the reset code? I was hoping for something more techy. My only other quibble is a very particular one: the characters look a little strange to me. The background art is absolutely gorgeous, but I find the in-game character art to be a tad peculiar at times. It’s in the faces, I think. Character animations are absolutely gorgeous though.
Old Skies – Fantastically Written
Old Skies feels like six clever vignettes that tell cautionary tales about time travel, with a big overarching theme connecting them all together. Ultimately, it’s unlikely that going back and fiddling with your past is going to make you happy. We then have to deal with the crippling loneliness that accompanies the time travel, along with a big handful of difficult choices along the way. I’m not sure how much difference the choices in Old Skies actually make, but they gave me pause for thought.
That’s a sign of good writing, along with the fact that the ending was one of those where you can vaguely see it coming, but there are loads of other places they could’ve taken it. It’s a great ending, by the way. Ooh, it’s been hard not to spoil this one. But Fia, and her colleagues Nozzo and Duffy, all feel very well rounded and so their stories have a great emotional punch. While there’s some cleverness in the gameplay, it takes a definite backseat to the story. Not necessarily a bad thing. If you want to delve into a time travel story, and twist your brain into an emotional pretzel, then you can’t go wrong with Old Skies.
