Old Skies Steam Charts & Stats

I enjoyed the story :) I appreciate games with a meaningful story especially these days

A classic 2D point-and-click adventure game. The game uses a classical 2D art, with a good resolution and animations, fitting the slightly retro feel. Voice acting is great. The gameplay is a classic adventure with conversations and item use. From time to time there are time loops that must be solved, serving as a larger puzzles. They are interesting, but can get frustrating if you get stuck. The game generally has a good flow and has an integrated hint system. The story deals with commercial time-travel, various ethical issues with it and pressure on people isolated from normal time flow. The characters were interesting, especially the main character and her slow cracking as jobs and her life keep getting derailed.

Unfortunately, I don't like this one. Having a hard time getting back to the game. Those death loops are nice at the beginning, but then they get really annoying, really quickly. It's just not as fun as their other games. The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, for example, is a way better game (at least for me). Maybe next time

A nice point-and-click about time travel. Well, not really about time travel [i]itself[/i], don't go in expecting a hardcore techno-thriller (and don't think too hard about how it's supposed to work). It's more about the people who time travel and how they have to cope with it. The game was an interesting take on this subject and did a good job putting us in the shoes of its main character and showing us the struggles she and her colleagues have to face. Gameplay-wise, it's quite light on the puzzles. Everything feels so logical to the point of being almost obvious and you never have to think very hard. Also, the game feels a bit... smooth? And I'm not only talking about it being at a higher resolution than other Wadjet Eye games. There's a certain naïveté and candor emanating from the characters and while I think it's kinda charming, it won't be everyone's cup of tea.

I've played a lot of adventure games. I've played a lot of Wadjet Eye Games, and I've enjoyed all of them, with Unavowed being my favorite....until now. Old Skies is a truly outstanding game. Wadjet Eye's best work so far, hands down, and that's saying something! The narrative, the design, the voice acting, the art and the animation, it's all fantastically done. The care that clearly went into this is evident, and it blew me away and captured my heart. I loved the quirks and interesting twists of the time travel, and I loved the world built around them. The story that isn't big at all, but focused and small (not to say the gameplay is short, cause it isn't, there's a lot of great game here!) and that's exactly what it should be. Fia doesn't need to be saving the world, because this isn't about huge stakes. It's about how important the small stakes are and how they, too, should and need to be treasured. The infamous day in history we visit in Ch 5? That was chilling and intriguing. And knowing the creator's background, it fascinated me to visit this time and place, and see the care with which it was done as well as the way it examined that day in new ways. Bravo, Dave Gilbert, you've created a truly amazing game. Again! But this one shows such a depth of storytelling and heart that I think only could have come after many years of honing one's craft. I can't wait to see what you come up with next. 10/10, 100%, A+, five stars, whatever rating you wanna use! I would not go back to change a thing about this one. ;)

Brilliant adventure, well written, loved playing every second of it. A few frustrating moments where I had to consult a walkthrough but otherwise it was a very smooth experience. I also liked the humor.

Wadjet Eye games are always an intriguing take on the point-and-click genre. This one does not have the most engaging gameplay in this developer's catalog, with some pretty linear puzzles and a sort of watered-down version of the "notebook" investigation technique from Wadjet Eye's excellent "Blackwell" series. But it does have time travel, some great voice work from many of W.E.'s usual suspects, and (most importantly) a genuinely touching story about "paths not taken" that emerges organically from the protagonist's adventures through time. That story definitely elevates the game over its decent but uninspiring gameplay, and makes it a clear recommendation for me.

I hate to say this, but I do not like Old Skies. I enjoy Wadjet Eye's games a lot, developed or published, but this is the first I've played so far that I just quit out of halfway. I really tried, but it's a rather dull experience overall. I'll try to keep it brief. I strongly dislike the new art style. The amorphous blobs they use as sprites just don't look good. They remind me of Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force with even less detail. Backgrounds are hand drawn and detailed causing this jarring contrast between the two. It's not a particularly impressive looking game, but the old style of pixel art sprites with dynamic hand drawn portraits looks better. The soundtrack is unexceptional, but the voice acting is good. The puzzles are nonexistent. The instances of being caught in a death loop were more tedious than fun and clever. You have to die a few times to get all the info needed to get out of these loops and it's just not very engaging when there are so few interactions to begin with. For an adventure game, there's no real exploration to speak of. Every area is compact often being contained to a single screen with no more than three things to even interact with. The game deceives you showing potential things to interact with, but you never do at any point almost like the game is pulling a Chekhov's Gun. You backtrack a lot. There's so much going back and forth between areas that it felt like padding. You basically have to exhaust every dialogue tree in order to progress the narrative and boy do conversations drag on at times. I wasn't invested in the characters. They're all so plain and short lived. When every chapter (so far) is a self contained story, it's hard to get attached to anyone when you won't see them again in the next chapter. Fia has almost no personal connection to anyone or any motivation beyond just doing her job, so there's little room for character development. She's not bad. No one's bad. They're just not that compelling and after three chapters, I gotta throw in the towel. Maybe the story does get better, but it needs to be good NOW, not later. This isn't an adventure game. This is basically a visual novel and I don't particularly enjoy those games. There's no exploration and few puzzles. I get Wadjet Eye were never great at puzzles, but it's like they're not even trying here. Even for a story driven game, I'm not impressed. The dialogue always sounds like modern American English no matter if it's the 1800s or 1920. No one questions Fia's English accent ever either. The first chapter of the three I played was the best despite being so short thanks to the shocking conclusion the next couple chapters lack. Chapters 2 and 3 are just too overly sentimental and seemingly unconcerned about potential time paradoxes for me to take them seriously at all. For a time traveling agency, they do not care at all about keeping a low profile. I loved Unavowed and Technobabylon, but this one was just too boring to hold my attention any more. I respect Wadjet Eye and want them to keep making unique and creative games in this forgotten genre, but I also want to hold them to the standard they set for themselves with their previous games. I just cannot in good faith recommend a game I don't even like. This is a game that is more fun to watch than it is to play.

This was the best adventure game I’ve played in a while. Great story, clever puzzles.

This is a painful review to leave, as I've never played a bad WadjetEye game until this one and the premise is superb. It's just so, so, sooooo boring that it beggars belief it was developed by such a seasoned presence in the point and click genre. Even calling it a "point and click" is a stretch, since this is more of a vaguely interactive walking simulator wearing the skinned corpse of a point and click than it is a case of stimulating mental work-out. I get it, the genre is about story-telling, and this has story-telling. So, so, so, soooo much story-telling. But, you know, I also expect this thing called PUZZLES...and in three or so hours of playing this it has hardly had any at all, let alone any that give a eureka moment of reward for "solving them" In fact, it's had large stretches of mind-numbing dialogue and one extremely tedious groundhog day-esque example of a time loop that played out so often to get to a solution that I contemplated killing all of the characters (except you can't) It's a shame, because the premise can be quite intriguing (time-travel is allowed as long as any effects only distort low-level events in the time-line, and people pay to make spurious trips into the past with your character as a guide) and it can be quite amusing. But the lack of mental stimulation, and the second chapter being incredibly dull as it concerned something I couldn't give two sh*ts about, it really wore down my will to keep "playing" something with so little game-play or appeal. Before this I played Whispers Of A Machine and I thought it was great but a bit lacking story-wise. I honestly thought this would be much better by comparison, but sadly it's both worse for the game-play, which is almost non-existent, and is frankly quite boring. That's not a response to one of their games that I've ever had, even when they had weaker game-play (such as Blackwell 2 - I think, which was equally flimsy on the puzzle side of things) there was still a hook that kept me interested. The premise here had me hooked. The execution....clearly not so much.