WordPlayer: Old Skies and the Story of Wadjet Eye Games
Old Skies, the latest game from Wadjet Eye owner and operator Dave Gilbert, is a point-and-click adventure game about time travel. Protagonist Fia Quinn is an agent for ChronoZen, a company that allows wealthy clients to travel back in time to meet their idols, lift their own status, or correct historical moments where things went wrong. The existence of such a company means that reality is in constant flux - but when the timeline shifts, only Fia and the other time agents around the world know about it. People, companies, and entire sections of history can disappear very suddenly. Across several cases and eras Fia changes history multiple times, with a level of personal detachment and aloofness that the job necessitates - until a series of interlinked discoveries leave her questioning the lifestyle she's long accepted.
Old Skies is Gilbert's biggest and most ambitious game yet, and definitely among his best. As a long-time fan, it's difficult to play it without thinking about the whole history of Wadjet Eye Games - this is, after all, a game largely about how the past informs the present. In 2006, Gilbert released The Shivah, a short point-and-click adventure game about a rabbi thrown into a crisis of faith when a former synagogue member dies under mysterious circumstances.
A few months later, Gilbert released The Blackwell Legacy, the first in a five-game series about Rosangela Blackwell and Joey Mallone, a medium and ghost who would go on to solve numerous mysteries together across the series' run. In the years since, Wadjet Eye has released 17 additional games, a mix of games developed in-house and external adventure games that they have published.
2006 was right in the middle of the point-and-click adventure genre's supposed dead period. It was a particularly low ebb in the constant dialogue about whether the genre is dead, alive, or floating free in some kind of genre bardo, waiting to be reborn the next time an adventure game lands as an undeniable commercial hit. Of course, those who love these games know point-and-click adventure games were never truly dead and never will die. But this was certainly a period where it seemed like the genre had at least a weak pulse.
I'm not going to say that Wadjet Eye Games has single-handedly propped the genre up because in truth the independent point-and-click development scene has been huge and exciting for as long as the term "indie game" has been around. But the developer has certainly been one of the most visible flag bearers for the genre across this time, publishing classics like Resonance, Technobabylon, Shardlight, and The Excavation of Hob's Barrow - unapologetically old-school adventure games that often feel like wonderful early-90s curios. Even the less-good ones are still catnip to genre fans like me. If time were to shift and Wadjet Eye ceased to exist, the point-and-click adventure genre would likely feel far more niche than it does now.
Old Skies does an excellent job of blending its mechanics with its narrative ambitions.
Old Skies - developed by Gilbert, whose last game was 2018's excellent Unavowed - feels a little more "modern" than many of his past titles, at least visually. The gameplay, though, is pure point-and-click: you talk to everyone, combine items, and solve puzzles that are just the right mix of obscure and solvable. There are a few wrinkles specific to the game's setting; Fia can access a future archive to learn about the fates of the people she encounters, and thanks to a forgivably sweaty "rewind" mechanic you can replay any moment where Fia is killed over and over again, using new information each time to eventually find a way to survive.
These are interesting mechanics, but, crucially, it never feels like Old Skies is trying to push adventure gaming in a new direction or figure out what the "next generation" of the genre might look like. There is nothing pretentious here - it's the exact sort of game that genre aficionados love, done well. There's a temptation to call Wadjet Eye Games' output a "love letter" to the point-and-click adventure, but I think that's selling them short. You're not really writing a "love letter" to something if, functionally, you are the best modern example of it. Perhaps it's more accurate to call this article a love letter to these games.
Old Skies does an excellent job of blending its mechanics with its narrative ambitions. Like Unavowed before, the game slowly unpacks its world as both a rich setting and one finely tuned specifically for the needs of the adventure genre. It's driven by specific rules that can't be circumvented, character dynamics spoken out loud, and stakes that are simultaneously human and heightened. It's silly if you think about it too hard, with a few logic leaps required, but within the magic circle that the genre has drawn around your actions, nothing here feels impermissible.
Fia Quinn is ideally attuned to being a point-and-click protagonist. Her disconnection from time makes her aloof and laser-focused on her job, personable but also distant at the game's opening - she's interested in the mechanics of solving puzzles more so than the unfolding narrative. Inevitably, she grows more invested in the increasingly personal story as the game continues - and so does the player as all of the game's moving pieces properly click into place, revealing a bigger picture that's both elegant and epic. In a game like this, you do not need to inhabit your character - you're guiding them through a story that is more theirs than yours, but it's hugely satisfying because of the level of careful craft evident in the storytelling.
I remember playing The Shivah many years ago and being astonished - not just by the game itself, but by the idea that this genre I loved could be propped up by talented indie developers using the Adventure Game Studio engine to craft small, compelling games and selling them fairly cheap (or releasing them for free in this case - The Shivah only picked up a price tag years later when Gilbert remastered it). My Steam and Switch libraries are filled with similarly small, sharp adventure games from tiny teams, many from folks who were themselves, no doubt, inspired by Gilbert's work.
Old Skies brings an old-school sensibility to its futuristic premise and uses the classic mechanics of the genre to tell a delightfully twisty, frequently surprising, and deeply emotional story.
Modernised takes on the genre tend to be more fair, accessible, and scrutable than many of the classics, rather than radically reinventing how these games work. While you could argue that Telltale's model - which focused on shaping story and player choices over puzzles - was a departure, the fundamental truth of the genre is that the puzzles are always in service of the narrative, not the other way around. Old Skies is no different, as much as the puzzles are entertaining and smart. This game appeals so much because guiding Fia through the story, working through the obstacles that stand between her and the next plot revelation while meeting and talking to the whole cast, is thrilling.
Point-and-click adventures are my comfort genre, and it has always meant a lot to me to have games where the quality of the writing and storytelling are the main determinants of whether the game works. Old Skies brings an old-school sensibility to its futuristic premise and uses the classic mechanics of the genre to tell a delightfully twisty, frequently surprising, and deeply emotional story. Wadjet Eye Games truly understands what makes games like this special, and seeing how Gilbert's style has evolved - but without ever losing track of what made those first few releases so interesting - is truly wonderful.