Old Skies

There’s a particular kind of studio that survives on conviction rather than scale, and Wadjet Eye Games has been running that playbook for nearly two decades. Dave Gilbert’s outfit built its reputation on low-resolution, high-emotion point-and-click adventures — the Blackwell series, Technobabylon, Unavowed — games that treated pixel art not as nostalgia cosplay but as a working budget constraint turned into a house style. Old Skies, released April 23, 2025 on PC/Mac/Linux and ported to Nintendo Switch, is the moment that studio decided to stop apologizing for its resolution.

You play Fia Quinn, a field agent for the ChronoZen Time Travel Agency. The premise is quietly brilliant in its cynicism: time travel exists, it has been monetized, and Fia’s job is essentially high-stakes concierge work. She escorts rich clients into the past — to see a dead parent, to close an old wound, to satisfy a whim — and her actual mandate is to make sure they don’t break anything on the way out. It’s Quantum Leap reimagined as gig work, and the class politics baked into that setup do a lot of heavy lifting across the game’s seven missions.

Those missions span roughly two centuries of New York City: Gilded Age street gangs, Prohibition speakeasies, and — in the game’s most nervy swing — the World Trade Center on September 10, 2001. Each is a standalone case with its own client, its own historical texture, and its own tidy resolution. An overarching conspiracy threads through them, tightening as you go.

Market position is unambiguous. This is a premium indie adventure sitting at $19.99 against a genre where most competitors are either free-to-play mobile derivatives or Telltale-style cinematic experiences with the puzzles sanded off. Old Skies is neither. It’s an old-fashioned inventory-and-dialogue adventure game with a modern production budget bolted onto it — full voice acting, an original Thomas Regin score, hand-drawn art at native 1920x1080.

• Seven Standalone Missions Across 200 Years: An anthology structure that lets each chapter set its own tone, cast, and historical register. The Gilded Age chapter plays like a crime thriller; the 2001 chapter plays like a wake. This is the game’s single strongest design decision.
• Death as a Mechanic, Not a Fail State: Because history is mutable, dying isn’t a game over screen. Certain puzzles require dying, rewinding, and re-entering the scene armed with knowledge the character shouldn’t have. It’s a genuinely clever inversion of adventure-game convention.
• Knowledge as Inventory: Beyond the standard item-combining, what Fia learns in one timeline becomes a usable key in another. Dialogue trees unlock based on information carried across temporal boundaries, which makes conversation feel like a puzzle surface rather than a menu.
• Full Voice Cast and Original Score: Every line is performed. Thomas Regin’s soundtrack shifts idiom by era without ever tipping into pastiche. For a studio this size, the audio production is impressive.
• 1920x1080 Hand-Drawn Pixel Art: A significant technical leap over Unavowed, with detail density that makes the period environments read as researched rather than sketched.
• 44 Steam Achievements: Structured to encourage re-examining scenes rather than grinding.

The Gameplay Loop

Strip away the chronology and Old Skies runs on the same engine every adventure game has run on since Monkey Island: examine a room, collect the things that aren’t nailed down, talk to everyone twice, and combine what you have until a door opens. Gilbert isn’t hiding this. The interface is clean, the verb coin is gone in favor of a streamlined single-click contextual system, and there’s no pixel-hunting cruelty. Onboarding friction is close to zero.

The twist is temporal, and it works best when it’s structural rather than mechanical. The strongest sequences give a scene, kill the player or fail them, and then hand the scene back with a single new fact in your pocket. You now know the bartender’s brother’s name. You now know which of the two men in the room is carrying. The second run through the same physical space feels entirely different, and that’s the closest the design gets to conveying what it’s like to be a time traveler rather than a person operating time-travel-flavored machinery.

Here’s the problem: the game doesn’t do this often enough, and when it does, the loop can grate. Some of the death-and-retry sections appear built to devolve into replaying an identical scene while brute-forcing the intended solution. The mechanic is designed around insight, but when the insight doesn’t land, it degrades into repetition. That’s a real design gap. A single well-placed nudge system — a Fia internal monologue that narrows the search space after repeated loops — would have converted frustration into pacing.

The Linearity Question

Old Skies markets itself on temporal freedom and then hands you a corridor. This is the game’s central tension, and the design doesn’t fully resolve it. For all the talk of rewriting history, the actual structure is more constrained than the premise implies: most obstacles reduce to locating the correct item or selecting the correct dialogue option, and the “correct” is usually singular. There’s rarely a second valid path. You are not improvising your way through history; you are finding the one key Gilbert cut for the one lock he built.

Whether that bothers you depends entirely on what you came for. If you wanted a systemic time-travel sandbox — an Outer Wilds or Twelve Minutes where the world model is the puzzle — this will feel like a bait-and-switch. If you wanted a tightly authored story with puzzles as pacing devices, the linearity is a feature. We lean toward the latter, but the marketing oversells the former, and that gap is the likeliest source of the game’s negative reception.

Writing and Character

This is where Old Skies earns its reputation, and it isn’t close. Fia Quinn is the best protagonist Wadjet Eye has written — abrasive without being edgy, competent without being infallible, and carrying a specific brand of exhausted professionalism that makes her feel like someone with a job rather than someone on a quest. The client-of-the-week structure means the game constantly introduces new characters who need to become real quickly, and the hit rate is remarkable.

The 2001 chapter deserves specific mention because it’s the hardest thing in the game to get right. Setting a time travel story on September 10 is a loaded gun: the audience knows exactly what happens next, the protagonist knows, and the mechanic explicitly permits interference. Gilbert plays it with restraint. It is not exploitative and it is not maudlin. It’s the best chapter in the game.

Two things don’t stick the landing. The central relationship — the emotional spine meant to carry across all seven missions — is drawn more thinly than the standalone cases surrounding it, and it suffers by comparison. And the ending resolves the conspiracy plot more neatly than the ambiguity of the preceding chapters deserves. After seven chapters about how the past resists correction, a clean resolution feels like the wrong note.

Pacing

The first two chapters are the weakest. They’re doing necessary work — establishing ChronoZen’s rules, Fia’s competence, the stakes of a paradox — but the exposition load is heavy and the puzzles are thin. Push through. Chapter three is where the game finds its rhythm, and from there it accelerates cleanly to the end.

The jump to 1920x1080 hand-drawn pixel art is the most visible investment on screen, and it changes what the art can carry. In Unavowed, environments were suggestive — you read a room from a handful of high-contrast shapes. Here, the density is high enough that period detail does actual narrative work. A speakeasy tells you about its clientele through the state of its glassware. A 1900s tenement tells you about its residents through what’s stacked in the hallway. That’s not decoration; that’s environmental writing.

The character sprites are more variable. Animation frame counts are modest, and a few of the supporting cast move with a stiffness that the voice performances outclass. It’s the one place where the budget shows.

Technically, the design is conservative in the best sense. This is an Adventure Game Studio–derived engine running 2D art — a light load for any modern hardware, with no shader compilation, no streaming, and little that can go wrong. Regin’s score is mixed cleanly against the dialogue by design, which matters more than it sounds — a fully voiced game with a muddy mix would sink, and this one is built to stay crisp.

Steam (PC/Mac/Linux) is the definitive version, and it isn’t a close call. Point-and-click is a mouse genre. The cursor is the interface, and every design assumption — hotspot size, inventory drag-and-combine, the rhythm of scanning a scene — was built around a pointer with pixel precision.

Nintendo Switch is the more interesting port, and Wadjet Eye appears to have handled it about as well as the form allows. Handheld touch input restores the directness that a cursor provides, and the chapter structure makes it a natural fit for short, portable sittings. The problem is docked play, where you’re driving a virtual cursor with an analog stick. Wadjet Eye mitigated it with hotspot snapping and a highlight-all-interactables button, which is essential and worth learning immediately. It works. It is not as good as a mouse.

Text legibility in handheld is the other consideration. On the smaller standard Switch screen, the smaller UI text is readable but not comfortable for extended play; OLED owners fare better.

The $19.99 price is identical across both stores, and there’s no meaningful content difference. Buy on Switch if portability matters more to you than input precision. Otherwise, Steam.

Old Skies is the most expensive-feeling game Wadjet Eye has ever made and, not coincidentally, the one where the seams are easiest to see. When the writing is driving — and it’s driving for most of the runtime — this is narrative adventure gaming at a high standard for 2025. The September 10 chapter alone goes a long way toward justifying the purchase, given how easily that setup could have gone wrong.

The reservations are structural, not fatal. The time-travel premise writes a check the puzzle design only partially cashes; a game about the malleability of history shouldn’t have exactly one solution to every obstacle. The loop sections need a mercy mechanic. The ending ties a bow on a story that earned something messier.

But the criticism here is the criticism of ambition falling slightly short, not of laziness — and after twenty years of watching studios ship less for more, that distinction matters. Dave Gilbert made a game about a woman with a bad job in a beautiful past, gave it a full cast and a real score, and charged twenty dollars for it. We recommend it to the audience above — with eyes open about the linearity.