Old Skies

Genre: Graphic Adventure / Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

Old Skies, released in 2025 on PC and Nintendo Switch, is a game that combines Graphic Adventure and Visual Novel elements in a time-traveling story dealing with topics of finding one’s life purpose, the impact you have on history, and the legacy you leave behind, among other things. Just as a warning, this game touches on some pretty heavy topics, including suicide, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and coping with past trauma.

This game takes place in a world where time travel is not only possible, but it has become a business where wealthy customers can pay to visit the past, or even change past events, so long as these events aren’t deemed of vital importance to the overall timeline. Players take the role of Fia Quinn, whose job it is to escort these customers, protect them during their trip, and help them to attain their goals, while ensuring their client doesn’t do anything that greatly impacts the timeline.

That’s an interesting twist in this game’s story that you don’t often see in time travel stories – not only are changes to the timeline not seen as anything particularly bad to those running the time travel organization, but these changes are so commonplace that Fia comments about how she doesn’t bother to remember the names of local businesses or follow sporting events because they get rewritten by history so often. The only changes they see as taboo are massive changes to politics, world-changing scientific discoveries, and so on.

Fia is a fascinating lead character. She’s charming and has a witty sense of humor, but you can tell that this life is weighing on her, and she’s starting to question the ethics of some of the choices her company makes in what it will and won’t allow. It certainly helps that she’s well-written and wonderfully voiced, as are all the game’s characters.

The game’s story is more or less episodic in nature, though throughout each of the game’s chapters the game is building an overarching story. Each of these “chapters” follows a different job Fia takes for a different client. Succeeding in these jobs will require a bit of traditional Graphic Adventure gameplay (both of the “talk to everyone about everything” kind and at times the “use every item on everything” kind), but players can also make use of a searchable future database to gain access to information about people or organizations, and she has a few futuristic tools at her disposal too.

Having said all of that, things don’t always go according to plan, and players will often find that they need to come at problems with a different approach, or take on new problems as they come up. The game does offer a bit of a hint system in that they can contact their handler at any time who will give a vague suggestion as to what to do next, though this isn’t always as helpful as I’d like.

Finally, the presentation here is quite good, with nicely-detailed 2D backgrounds and 2D characters that, while their design isn’t especially great, they are often fluidly animated in a really impressive way that reminds me of Jordan Mechner’s rotoscoped visuals. This is backed by a good synthesized soundtrack that does an excellent job setting the mood for this game, with the tone at times reminding me a bit of the Blade Runner soundtrack, particularly when Fia returns to her present (our future).

Overall, I liked Old Skies. The characters and story here are strong, and built around a clever central idea, with a time travel story that has hints of Back to the Future Part II and even Timecop. I think it can be a bit clunky at times with its Graphic Adventure elements, and it would have been nice to get to know its central characters a bit better, but overall this is an excellent choice if you’re craving a satisfying time travel story.

tl;dr – Old Skies is a game with Graphic Adventure and Visual Novel elements set in a future where the wealthy can pay for time travel services, with players taking on the role of Fia, whose job it is to accompany these time-traveling tourists. The characters and story here are great, though I do wish the game’s Graphic Adventure elements weren’t quite as clunky. Still, this is an excellent choice for those craving a good time-travel story.

Grade: B+

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