Adventure game Old Skies is a must-play for time travel fans

From the creators of The Blackwell Legacy and Unavowed, Old Skies is one of the best time travel games we've ever played.

By William Hughes  |  April 23, 2025 | 12:00pm
Pictured: Time traveler Fia Quinn, and two of about a million things she's not allowed to change. (Image: Wadjet Eye)
Games Reviews Old Skies
Adventure game Old Skies is a must-play for time travel fans
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Time travel stories usually have to be either about the mechanics of time travel, or the feelings: Tricky puzzle boxes requiring diagrams and long conversations about paradox to map out, or hand-waves that breeze past obvious plot holes to get to meaty questions about what could be different, or might have been. It’s a rare story that can juggle both elements in ways that take them seriously, without losing track of either the heart or the head. But a rare achievement is exactly what time travel adventure game Old Skies is: The most emotionally rich and mature adventure to date from veteran studio Wadjet Eye, and one of the best time travel stories I’ve ever experienced, period.

Set (at least initially) in 2062, the game drops you into the sensible boots of Fia Quinn, agent of ChronoZen, the regulatory agency for government-authorized time travel. ChronoZen agents, you’ll quickly discover through the game’s six chapters, mostly work as tour guides, and sometimes agents of change: Ferrying high-paying clients into the past on literal nostalgia trips, or sometimes making minor alterations that have been certified not to wreck the timeline too badly. (There’s a whole system of “Time Impact Rankings” that algorithmically determine who matters, and who doesn’t, on the grand scheme of things; one of several bureaucratic and dystopian touches the game uses to smooth out its time travel rules.) One of the game’s most fascinating paradoxes has nothing to do with killing your own grandfather, then, and everything with how doing this kind of work might weigh on a human mind: “Chronolocked” against alterations, the CZ agents are forced to watch the world shift around them all the time, as minor fluctuations in the timeline ripple out. It’s a lifestyle that forces them into isolated, nomadic existences, a tiny fraternity of temporal orphans: Hard to make connections or fall in love, when the actions of some time tourist across the world can make it so that the person you’re chatting with was suddenly never even born.

Old Skies balances that existential melancholy by reminding you, frequently, how cool time travel really is. Each of the game’s chapters sends Fia (and, usually, her client) into another beautifully realized era, working through problems that are always several degrees more complicated than the initial briefing might suggest. As with creator David Gilbert’s last game, Unavowed, Wadjet is smart to rarely make the game’s puzzle solving elements too complicated: Solutions frequently require welcome leaps of lateral thinking, but the possibility space of your options is usually kept at least moderately limited; you won’t end up running around with an inventory of 30 objects, desperately figuring out how to combine rubber chicken A with broken pulley B to get across a gap, for instance. More often than not, the situations revolve less around using items than using Fia’s brain: Either talking to people in the right way, or using the game’s simple but engaging research system to look up publicly available knowledge from 2062 to help you suss out a problem in the past. (This is, I’ll note, a very good game for people who grew up watching Quantum Leap, and have always wanted their own Ziggy and Al to consult.)

That focus tightens even more in the surprisingly numerous situations where Fia winds up getting killed on the job, which activates a rewind feature that inevitably boots her back to just far enough back on the timeline to let you alter the outcome. (But not avoid it outright, because video game.) These narrowly defined death sequences, which function in part as mini-games or boss battles, don’t just allow the game to toy with more complex, if structured puzzles, or switch up its pacing: They also contribute to the game’s tone, which blends comedy and weariness in equal measure. Watching Fia grow increasingly blasé at getting shot in the head (while you might feel your own frustration mount a bit while picking away at the the tough, but never-too-taxing, trial-and-error solutions) helps ground players thoroughly in her “Been there, seen it all, seen it get changed by sudden ripples in the fabric of reality” vibes.

All of which is supported by the game’s aesthetics, which see Wadjet move from a more retro adventure game style to something more fluid and hand-drawn. This is nice when it comes to the lush backgrounds, but absolutely vital for the game’s character work: Ben Chandler’s animations give Fia and her friends a life and personality that a more simplified style couldn’t capture. That’s supplemented by strong voice performances, especially from Sally Beaumont as Fia and Edwyn Tiong and Wadjet Eye mainstay Abe Goldfarb as her closest workmates, who can be funny, fierce, and broken as the game’s plot demands.

As to that writing: As I said up top, this is some of Gilbert’s finest work, both in its long-term storytelling and the individual scenarios. Among other things, it’s one of the only video games I’ve ever seen tackle the topic of 9/11 seriously, allowing the uncertainty of the day to overshadow one of the game’s best chapters. (You’re not there to stop it, to be clear—the whole “Time Impact Ranking” thing is there specifically to stop the plot from devolving into that sort of counterfactual fan fiction. But the sense of standing on the cusp of some great and horrible change that no one else can see coming is central to many of Old Skies‘ themes.) It’s not all dour, either. A late-game sequence sees Fia skirt basically every rule ChronoZen holds dear in order to execute a seemingly impossible task from an increasingly irritating set of clients; by the end, I was laughing happily as the game executed a final scenario as complicated as anything from, say, Back To The Future Part II. And all of it’s supported by a script that makes its clear that its author has thought through just about every “Well, what would happen if…” or “Why don’t they try this…” question that’s ever plagued the mind of a time travel-fiction obsessed sci-fi nerd, packed with jokes and wry observations that make even its harshest moments flow.

What I come back to, as I think back over Old Skies, is that balance: In the way it tells a robust and mechanically fascinating story of time travel that nevertheless grounds every single moment in the human element. “What would it be like to live in a world where everything changes in an instant?” it asks—before reminding you that that’s exactly what you’re doing right now. If you have any affection for adventure games or time travel stories, you owe it to yourself to play it: It’s my favorite game I’ve played this year so far.

Publisher/Developer: Wadjet Eye
Available on: Steam, GOG
Price: $20

 
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