All right, I came into Old Skies thinking it could be another Technobabylon (would highly recommend that, btw, easy cyberpunk classic), not realizing that Wadjet Eye is a publisher in addition to being a developer and Technobabylon is from another smaller studio.
Oh boy. Old skies, what subversion of expectations have I stepped into?
This is the single WORST adventure game I have ever played, and I don't say that lightly. I have been through a lot of trash, but this one piles it so high it's hard to know where to start.
There is a commonly used plot device, the twist ending, which requires quite a bit of setup. A good twist ending never comes out of the blue. It is foreshadowed in hints peppered throughout the story that may seem innocuous or incomprehensible at first glance but coalesce to force the viewer to reframe the entire narrative through another lens.
A good example of this, actually something of a benchmark for the employment of twist setup, is a film like the Shawshank Redemption where Andy Dufresne, the mc, who throughout the film is shown suffering and finding ways to accommodate his new reality of being an inmate, Then the escape scene happens, and all the little tricks that he pulled to dig a tunnel and avoid scrutiny are revealed as his long con. And then you realize all the things that led up to this moment that you didn't notice this before.
Well, Old Skies tried doing this. And it comes off as a deus ex machina. I will try to avoid spoiling as much as I can, but it involves faking one's death. Problem is, throughout the game, one of the core mechanics is this death rewind feature, and you go through many scenarios where you save yourself and other characters from impossible death scenarios through charting an optimal course through rote memorization - like Edge of Tomorrow's "Live. Die. Repeat."
In the end you are told that the rewind won't work. But not because you try and fail, as the game doesn't even let you try. Whatever scheme the main character, Fia, concocted works because it fades to black and you're told about some cool stuff happening in the epilogue.
The End.
To me it seems like they ran out of money or time or something and had to slap an ending on in the last month of production. But this isn't even the worst of it, oh no.
Look, I can tolerate a terrible ending like I can tolerate being forced to eat a piece of chalk after a fabulous 5-star meal. If 95% of the game were great and worth playing, I would recommend it even if it breaks its hip on the landing.
We don't get that. Beyond the terrible writing, the worldbuilding is threadbare and total ass. The main character works for ChronoZen, a combination of a timecop / tour guide government agency. We are led to believe in the first chapter that ChronoZen timeline interference protocols are extremely strict, where everything has to be meticulously checked for impact and that time agents are regulated and put under lock and key.
However, that couldn't be further from the road that Old Skies goes down. By the middle of this game we are seemingly taking requests from multiple people to rewrite a fortune 500 company. "Medium impact." (WTF?) When ChronoZen agents literally kill people for trying to, I dunno, prevent a person from dying, or a minor crime lord dying requires another to fill his place immediately or the timeline would suffer major damage? When you can willy nilly rewrite a Fortune 500 company? The whole concept of even having time regulation in this setting is so stupid that it requires a player to suspend all of his logical faculties while playing this dumpster fire.
Finally, there are other, smaller things about Old Skies that betrays a lack of care and attentiveness to the setting. A lot of the charm in adventure games happens in the margins, in scenes with enough points of interest extraneous to the plot that allow for the wonder of discovery as the player character comments on the things that he or she sees, to add convenient layers of complexity to the character and the setting. You get none of that here. Why are points of interest even clickable when Fia says nothing about them and the only thing you learn is from tiny popups with a pithy line describing the object. Even the somewhat entertaining looks at alternate timeline social media profiles is a gimmick that ends midway through the game because Fia just says she won't look.
I just call this laziness. Lack of time, money, or whatever just to deliver this turd.
