Old Skies: How Wadjet Eye Wants to Reinvent the Point 'n' Click, Again

Dave Gilbert isn’t a huge fan of the “retro throwback” tag his games have been slapped with for the last 16 years. His studio, Wadjet Eye (The Blackwell Legacy, Gemini Rue), may trade in the point ’n’ click adventure space, but his own games tend to stubbornly refuse to stick to the conventions of the ’80s and ’90s games they resemble. His latest, Old Skies, is yet more proof that Gilbert’s games are forward-thinking, not backward-looking.

Sitting down with Gilbert at London’s WASD games convention, I’m quickly shown how. Old Skies adopts a similar structure to Gilbert’s last game, the fantastic Unavowed, showing its characters’ journeys across six self-contained episodes. But where that last game innovated by investing more in branching, BioWare-like dialogue paths than classic puzzling, Gilbert’s early-in-development new game is a whole new experiment.

At Old Skies’ heart is a narrative conceit, woven throughout the game’s mechanics, plot, and even visuals: In the future, time travel is real, but it’s used essentially just for tourism. The game’s lead character, Fia, takes paying customers on trips through time, allowing them to visit periods they could never have experienced, or revisit treasured moments in their lives. Things go wrong very quickly, as things tend to in time travel narratives, and Fia is left to solve problems and paradoxes through a mixture of deduction and sci-fi tech.

The brilliance, even in the short, early sections Gilbert shows me, lies in how time travel is built into how you play. One puzzle asks you to open a safe amid a tense standoff in a Prohibition-era jewellery store robbery – but no one person in the room knows the entire code, and they won’t share their pieces of it with the others. Instead, Fia can demand each of them to help out, learning their sections as they do so – but inevitably ending with her (or sometimes everyone) dying in a hail of Tommy Gun bullets. When Fia dies, however, we don’t see a Game Over screen, but time rewinding, leaving her back where she began, with new information to use, and an increasingly painful headache from being shot so many times in one evening. Eventually, you open the safe yourself, to the room's astonishment.

Gilbert says the unexpected benefit of using time loops as part of puzzle solutions is that it means he can build around less expected solutions – something closer to the infamous adventure game ‘Moon Logic’ of older games like Monkey Island, while retaining fairness in how it’s solved. Players will piece together puzzle solutions over multiple different loops, each with entertaining conclusions – rather than being sat in one place, clicking everything in a static room before brute-forcing the intended goal. One example Gilbert gives is realising Fia needs to stop a stalking enemy and, because the player knows exactly where that person will walk, dropping a nearby billiard ball on the floor to have them spill over in an undignified mess. You likely wouldn’t work this out on a first go, but with multiple passes at the same situation, you’re given the context clues to arrive there on your own.

It’s not just a different game to play from Gilbert, but a very different feeling game too. While it might be a sci-fi yarn, Old Skies is a dark comedy first and foremost. Gilbert tells me an early section includes a moment where Fia decides whether to accept a drink from a date, or buy them one – before a change in the timestream sees her partner erased from history (for reasons I’m not sure of yet, Fia’s immune from such fluctuations). Fia’s reaction depends less on watching someone cease to exist before her eyes, and more on that tiny decision: if you bought them a drink, you get to drink theirs too. If you had one bought for you by a date that no longer exists, the drink no longer exists either, and Fia’s left irritated by the whole affair.