What's Making Me Happy Today: Old Skies
May. 31st, 2025 04:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
delphiI spent the last two days playing Old Skies, the newest point-and-click adventure game from indie studio Wadjet Eye Games, and I ended up loving it!
You play as the employee of a time travel company in the 2060s who accompanies clients—wealthy people, or academics with grants—to the past for nostalgic or educational experiences. She is also often hired to change the past, within the company's algorithmically defined parameters for what can be changed while preserving the "important" parts of the present timeline. As a result of her job, the protagonist is one of the few people anchored in the timeline who is aware of the constantly flickering reality around her, in a world that's always rippling with the aftereffects of these commissions.
It's a way of living that the protagonist begins to have more questions about as some of the cases she's handling start to overlap with each other and with her personal life.
The game has a lot of elements that I tend to like in this studio's games, including many well-developed NPCs to meet, puzzles that are interestingly varied but not fiendishly challenging, a point of view to the story, and some clever mechanics. Wadjet Eye has always leaned toward having diverse casts of characters, but this is definitely the queerest game from them that I've played so far, in the best of ways.
My usual complaints about Wadjet Eye games persist on just two fronts: 1) the voice acting is generally great, but there's always one or two odd choices in the mix that sound jarring, and 2) they obviously care a lot about music when it comes to licensed or commissioned songs, but the background soundtrack often just loops around in ways that don't match what's going on in a scene. But those are obviously very minor issues, and this was overwhelmingly a well-made and thought-provoking game that I had a great time playing and couldn't put down once I'd started it.
You play as the employee of a time travel company in the 2060s who accompanies clients—wealthy people, or academics with grants—to the past for nostalgic or educational experiences. She is also often hired to change the past, within the company's algorithmically defined parameters for what can be changed while preserving the "important" parts of the present timeline. As a result of her job, the protagonist is one of the few people anchored in the timeline who is aware of the constantly flickering reality around her, in a world that's always rippling with the aftereffects of these commissions.
It's a way of living that the protagonist begins to have more questions about as some of the cases she's handling start to overlap with each other and with her personal life.
The game has a lot of elements that I tend to like in this studio's games, including many well-developed NPCs to meet, puzzles that are interestingly varied but not fiendishly challenging, a point of view to the story, and some clever mechanics. Wadjet Eye has always leaned toward having diverse casts of characters, but this is definitely the queerest game from them that I've played so far, in the best of ways.
My usual complaints about Wadjet Eye games persist on just two fronts: 1) the voice acting is generally great, but there's always one or two odd choices in the mix that sound jarring, and 2) they obviously care a lot about music when it comes to licensed or commissioned songs, but the background soundtrack often just loops around in ways that don't match what's going on in a scene. But those are obviously very minor issues, and this was overwhelmingly a well-made and thought-provoking game that I had a great time playing and couldn't put down once I'd started it.
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