ways old skies is similar to unavowed: self-contained episodes that gradually build into an overarching narrative and of which the first few are kinda shit. end of chapter 2, I was not enjoying myself. the art looks good in stills but the animation is - going out on a limb here - awful: it often looks like they used a flash morph between certain keyframes, there are scaling issues so characters' heights appear to change when they move into and out of the foreground, fia's head floats one pixel above her neck whenever she enters the art gallery (or maybe that's a rendition of how it feels to experience provocative modern art, in which case, mood). the dialogue is frequently mid. the game's worst puzzles are frontloaded, something of a wadjet eye signature it seems. and there are a number of wonky design decisions, like swapping control to other characters for isolated conversations, that don't feel cohesive or necessary and are dropped less than halfway through.

and then, dangit, chapter 3 won me over, and it was great from then on. which is roughly around the time unavowed won me over as well. in fact, the first "good" chapter of both games centers around artists. I don't know how it is dave gilbert can be so good at making games but so bad at opening them. if you consider the blackwell series one big-ass project, the first two entire games were kinda shit (though I gather the special editions are improved), but the last two were absolute knockouts. does he write them linearly, and it's not til a few chapters in he really knows what his game's about? does he not go back and rewrite the opening chapters? explain yourself, david.

anyway! it does not quite approach the levels of unavowed because the ensemble is nowhere near as lovable. that is, in fact, thematically relevant: the whole deal with old skies' premise is that time travel means history is being changed all the time, and the main character is a professional time traveler, so she is preserved from change in the timestream but her surroundings are not. everything that exists, save a few other preserved coworkers and institutions, may be erased from existence at any time. people, historical events, entire art movements, they wink in and out of having ever been real. she and her coworkers can't have relationships or hobbies, there's even a running gag about favorite movies still existing but starring different actors. yeah, fia and her compatriots are a little thin on personality, that's the nature of the job.

but, like... I'm still playing a game with largely uninteresting characters, when my last dave gilbert joint gave me a fire mage with daddy energy, a hot-and-aloof djinn, an italian firebrand lady ex-cop, and my dear and darling logan whomst I would die for. so, you know. thematically relevant blandness is nevertheless a drop-off.

but it is good. game tackles its time travel hook with gusto, thinking of all the funnest stuff it can do with its premise. it's not always consistent with how time travel works - there's a very fun mid-game chapter where you keep doing the same mission while overlapping with your previous attempts, and how that plays out with the timestream does not make a lick of sense if you think about it for thirteen seconds, but it's crackerjack plotting if you stop thinking after twelve!

but it's the growing theme about the cost of disappearing into your work that won me over. this is a game about transience, amped up to scientifictive levels: yes, we're all going to die someday, and nothing is permanent, and the passage of time takes things from us before we're ready. but what if nothing ever existed for more than a few days? what if no one but you even remembered it? what if people didn't die, but ceased to have ever been born? it's an opportunity to look at something we all contend with after running it through a still a dozen times. and... it meant something. and I'm gonna read it for you now in a fashion that may or may not involve some projection.

I like to think dave gilbert sees himself as an artist. his great skill is less in the programmer side of things - his games are well-programmed so far as I know, but where he's flourished over the years are in writing, in voice direction, in collaboration between teammates. to that last point, it's not just that he has a stable of actors and artists he likes to use again and again, it's that, with this game at least, he's letting his lead actor co-write the character. his talents are in bringing out the best in people, or at least his idea of what the best is (no clue what he was thinking with the character animation, good golly dave). and that's a very intuitive art compared with the mathy way we often consider programming. dave creates from his gut. and I don't think it's a coincidence that he's written chapters about artists into his last two games and they're both where things take off. I don't think it's an accident that his games have always involved musicians, even just in the background, from the ghostly saxophonist in a middle blackwell game to the random flautist in washington square park in old skies.

and I think the malaise old skies speaks to is endemic to the modern "creator economy." I'm attempting to draw only an appropriate number of parallels here, but what hits about old skies, for me, is that feeling of having a job that kind of consumes your life but doesn't fit easily with having a life. you're never really off the clock, but it's hard to talk to anyone about it because it kinda-sorta sounds like you're just chilling all the time. fia's job, often enough, is a kind of nostalgia tourism: letting people eat at long-closed restaurants, witness historical events, and the clients often spend years saving up shitloads of money for it but fia is doing them every day, and getting paid for it! it would be hard to explain how this as a demanding and exhausting career, even without the risk that the person you're speaking to will wink out of having ever existed mid-sentence. and I think about what it's like to be at a party with people I don't know and deciding how honestly I want to answer "what do you do?" - am I saying "I'm a youtuber" this time, or going with "freelancer"? - and I wonder what it's like for dave to answer that question. does he say "I make niche video games in a genre most people think died a quarter century ago"? if he just says "I'm a game designer," do people assume he does ui at blizzard? if he says he runs his own company, do they assume he's a millionaire? if he says he works out of his apartment, do they assume he's a failure? do they see the games - 2D things made in a freeware engine for a niche audience - and figure it must be easy? I mean, people churn out games in adventure game studio over weekend jams, what do you mean you spent five years on this? do any of them see him as an artist? and how often does he get invited to a party with people he doesn't know, anyway? you don't meet a lot of fresh faces working out of your apartment.

so, like. I get it. the feeling that you can't really touch things or let them touch you the way other people do. the way you focus on the job because it's the one constant in your life. the feeling that the world is churning like a malfunctioning milk steamer around you but none of it can pierce your bubble. knowing the only people you can talk to about it are the people who do the same thing you do, and there's only one thing you have to talk to them about. and the sense that the only possible way you could have a "normal life" is to not do the only thing you've ever been good at.

and that's a surprisingly rich theme for... a 2D thing made on a freeware engine for a niche audience, programmed in someone's apartment. and one thing the game offers as a salve to that malaise is the bit of joy one can take in creation. not to get into spoilers, but fia, without intention but not entirely by accident, is responsible for a few beautiful things coming into existence. and - being as vague as I can be here - the game climaxes with the desire to do that again on purpose. and that tension, that feeling that the job is killing you but it allows for the thing that saves you, that the labor part is isolating but the creation connects you to something, maybe not the world or people around you but something, is powerful. and that other people, people you'll never meet, can connect to that something as well, and you get your connection that way. and the feeling that it's not enough, but it's all you've got, and it does matter. it's not nothing. and there's this radical acceptance that this, too, is transient, and maybe it's not about lasting forever but embracing the fleeting nature of it all. it's not enough. it's never enough. but it's something.

it's a good game.

Pretty mixed feelings on this one. While Wadjet Eye developed games have always been mainly narrative driven, this one really took the genre to its limit.. nearly feeling like a visual novel. The Wadjet Eye published games have always been more enjoyable than their in-house games for me, like Technobabylon, The Excavation of Hobs Burrow, Shardlight… and this one is no exception.

At times though, I found moments to be quite brilliant and unique. For example, in the third chapter, there is a puzzle where the answer itself had real emotional impact. The intertwining of emotional depth, puzzles, atmosphere, and in this game, time travel paradoxes makes their catalogue quite unique and memorable.

But I can’t help but feel it’s a downgrade from Unavowed. I don’t really enjoy the non-pixel art style as much. As I said, it felt a lot more narrative and sparse in the puzzle department. The puzzles do have very good logic, but the process of exhausting dialogue trees to find the answer is very tedious at times. The puzzles that are more classic, like using inventory items or solving riddles, are often on par with the best of the genre in my opinion.

As Kathy Rain 2 released while I was playing it, I kind of felt myself rushing to finish because I was so excited to play that. I think that kind of sums up how I felt about it - it’s a unique experience that does things most games don’t, with its classic New York wadjet eye atmosphere and emotional storytelling. But the heavy narrative emphasis and meandering pacing often balances the scales and makes it a pretty meh experience. I would recommend their published games that I mentioned over this one (as well as Unavowed), but it’s not the worst game they’ve put out. Here’s hoping the next one will shake things up a bit.