Old Skies is a point-and-click adventure game by Wadjet Eyes Games, involving a time travel agency that lets paying customers visit the past.

The point-and-click adventure genre has seen something of a renaissance in recent years, with indie studios proving that there is still a lot of love for one of the oldest types of game. One of the most prominent of these is Wadjet Eye Games, which has produced the excellent Unavowed on modern platforms, as well as games like Primordia and The Blackwell Conspiracy. Wadjet Eye's latest game is Old Skies, which is a time-traveling point-and-click game, centered around New York City at different points in history.

Screen Rant had a chance to play a demo of Old Skies, which covers the first of the game's seven cases. The player takes on the role of Fia Quinn, an agent working with the ChronoZen agency, which specializes in allowing people to visit the past. Fia is escorting a famous doctor, named Joseph Anderson, whose contributions to medical science make him one of the most important men in history. Anderson wants to visit the diner that he frequented as a college student, but he quickly makes his escape, removing the device that allows him to return to the present day. Fia is tasked with stopping Anderson from changing time and is given permission to kill him before he can deal irrevocable damage to the timeline.

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The gameplay in Old Skies is that of a traditional 2D point-and-click adventure game. Fia must interact with the environment and combine items to solve puzzles. There is also a word-related puzzle system, where Fia can access the massive information database in the future, but she must learn certain words/names in the present to be able to use it properly, often needing to combine them to get the desired result. She is aided along the way by Nozzo, who resides in the present day and can send information back to Fia, acting in a similar manner to Sam from Quantum Leap. The full version of Old Skies will also have a Help system, but this wasn't implemented in the demo version of the game.

The visuals in Old Skies are mixed. The backgrounds look gorgeous, with beautifully drawn backdrops and colorful locations. The character models are more of a mixed bag, with their animations seeming like oddly-drawn rotoscoped characters. The audio, however, is the real standout, with some soothing blues & jazz tunes playing throughout, as the player explores the empty streets of New York City. The voice acting for the characters is also terrific, with great performances all around.

The puzzles in the first case of Old Skies are very basic adventure fair. The word searching mechanic is an important part of the game and the player needs to ensure that they're always talking to available NPCs, as the game won't always let the player find out basic information without hearing it from another character. A lot of the progression is tied to finding the right keywords, based on clues in the environment and from other characters, and these mostly work well. It's probably for the best that the game takes this approach, as purely item-based puzzle solving would soon become nonsensical when the game is set in New York City, as an early puzzle involving finding lubricant in a puddle almost turns into. It will be hard to repeatedly justify a puzzle where the player needs to find a specific item when the game is set in one of the biggest cities in the world, so the keyword approach makes the most sense.

The real selling point of Old Skies is the story. The first case is really well done, as the player gradually unveils Anderson's reason for going off-script and risking the entire future. The final decisions that the player makes are also really interesting, though it remains to be seen if they will have long-running ramifications in the final version of the game. Old Skies establishes that people have different effects on the timeline and taking out one piece will send ripples throughout the rest. The full version features character death (which can be undone via time travel), hinting at far more dangerous things to come.

The gameplay loop in Old Skies will be familiar to point-and-click adventure fans, but it's the visuals, soundtrack, and most importantly, the story that helps this one stand out. A time-traveling story set across different iterations of New York City throughout history has the potential to be very interesting, and the demo of Old Skies has left a strong first impression. Wadjet Eyes has a proven pedigree in the genre and it will be exciting to see how the rest of the story plays out in the full version of Old Skies.

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Old Skies is currently in development for PC, Nintendo Switch, Mac, and Linux. Screen Rant was provided with a digital code for the PC version of the game for the purposes of this preview.

Scott has been writing for Screen Rant since 2016 and regularly contributes to The Gamer. He has previously written articles and video scripts for websites like Cracked, Dorkly, Topless Robot, and TopTenz. A graduate of Edge Hill University in the UK, Scott started out as a film student before moving into journalism. It turned out that wasting a childhood playing video games, reading comic books, and watching movies could be used for finding employment, regardless of what any career advisor might tell you. Scott specializes in gaming and has loved the medium since the early ‘90s when his first console was a ZX Spectrum that used to take 40 minutes to load a game from a tape cassette player to a black and white TV set. Scott now writes game reviews for Screen Rant and The Gamer, as well as news reports, opinion pieces, and game guides. He can be contacted on LinkedIn.