Latest news with #Unavowed

Irish Independent

Old Skies review: The loneliness of the long-distance time traveller

But what if you could visit any era, any place? What if you could alter history in subtle and major ways? What if you could save people or kill people? What if you couldn't even die yourself? Wouldn't that make you a god? Or at least very lonely? Old Skies ask these heavy moral questions and more with a thoughtful and cautionary tale of the future set in New York across two centuries. This point'n'click adventure by genre specialist Wadjet Eye Games speculates on what would happen to the world if the invention of time travel had only loose rules about what's off limits. In this hypothesis, it creates something of a plaything for the rich, albeit with government regulation via the prosaically named ChronoZen Time Travel Agency. Some clients of the agency just want to indulge in nostalgia, others have more urgent needs. But less understood is the effect on the time-straddling chaperones who accompany every customer's excursion into history. You play Fia Quinn, a ChronoZen agent who lives a strange existence in New York of the 2060s, where places and people are liable to shift and vanish according to the effects of time travel manipulation. Ably voiced by British actress Sally Beaumont, Fia struggles as much with the logistics of her clients' requests and deeds as she does with her peripatetic lifestyle. At one point, she takes a phone call from her husband only to realise seconds later he doesn't exist and it was all a glitch in the time matrix. Or something. Old Skies can't fully explore the near-infinitive possibilities of a universe where people will meddle ad nauseam with time. So it settles instead for a series of seven chapters based on clients who want undo errors in their past selves or find meaning in their present lives. You encounter locations as diverse as 1870s slums and the Big Apple the day before 9/11. Initially, little more is asked of the player than to exhaust all the dialogue trees for clues as how to progress (find an address, spot a password, etc). But in chapter two we're introduced to the concept of rewinding time, where you fail in a situation but can try again armed with new knowledge. This being America, the failure is often related to being shot dead by an anguished third party. Your challenge hangs on working out the sequence of dialogue or actions to head off or dodge the calamity. Sometimes you're even operating in two different parts of the timeline related to a particular event, which can end up all kinds of headwrecking. Old Skies may not be as pioneering as Wadjet Eye's revered 2018 adventure Unavowed (which still comes highly recommended). Secondly, the tension of any high-stakes scenes also suffers because repetitive trial and error functions as a viable if hardly inspired tactic when the logic of a solution doesn't stand out. But by teasing out Fia's emotional muddle amid the intricate cause and effect of time travel, it finds its own place in the history of cerebral puzzle games.