Old Skies - Thoughtful Art Perfectly Frames This Time Travel Story
Great complexity can arise from within sparseness and limitation. Consider desert ecosystems, fractals, or accidentally embarking on an existential crisis during meditation … (Just me?) Wadjet Eye Games’ new point-and-click adventure, Old Skies, tells an exquisitely intricate, yet never overwhelming, time travel story. I am convinced that this is only possible because art and interactivity remain purposefully lean.
You’re a ‘time travel agent’; Fia, who accompanies clients on indulgent jaunts to the past. Some want to meet their heroes, while others have a niche historical interest to explore. Or, the client may be altruistically motivated, like to save an innocent life, which is OK if the target’s ‘timeline impact rating’ is low, but not if it is high. (Unregulated time travel got pretty messy in the late 2040s, by all accounts.)
So, which theoretical framework for time travel is being used here? In fact, several weave together, via a sequence of personal vignettes; moments of fate, butterfly effects, ripples on a river, and more. Understanding the nuances of how Old Skies’ time travel works captured (almost) all of my attention, which is why I appreciated that the aesthetic and gameplay elements (generally) played more of a supporting role.
As such, it would be too easy to only briefly refer to the game’s art with words like ‘understated’, ‘beautiful’ or ‘evocative’ without reflecting more deeply on why colour, composition, contrast and coherency became such an integral part of this experience for me. Instead of writing a basic review or unpacking time travel, I want to approach Old Skies from a visual perspective, with insight from artist and animator Ben Chandler. (I’ve interviewed Chandler about his work several times, and it has been interesting to observe his process and ideas change over 15 years.)
When asked about his overarching creative philosophy, Chandler says, “I generally focus on trying to build atmosphere, and to keep things consistent. Unity within the art, and the moments the player is experiencing, is very important to me.” Time travel obviously presents unique opportunities to explore how things change, as well as how they stay the same, so Chandler was definitely the right person for this gig.
For example, although the scene pictured below (the first time you see it) seems unremarkable, the paintings alter, or are explained, as you explore certain pasts and clumsily create new futures. Behind the paintings, the room’s colours create a non-prescriptive emotional environment, compared to the harsh blues and browns, and comforting oranges and reds, of other time periods and locations. This allows for a variety of contrasting emotional beats to take place here, and for the player to decide how they feel, within a kind of ‘blank but fluid narrative container’.
In Old Skies, art frequently supports story in these clever ways, and gameplay intersects, too. Given the surprisingly few inventory items and hotspots, puzzling is usually a matter of understanding and influencing time, or applying (impossible) knowledge across successive time loops. Further, there are also moments where you’ll find yourself visiting different, but chronologically close, time periods, which are usually distinguished aesthetically by day versus night. Each era has a unique feel, even while elements for composition, like the familiar comfort of a lit window, or signs with fixed locations but variable messages, create coherence across the game.
Chandler says, “In a night scene in the prohibition era, everything is a little smokier, a little more film noir. In the gilded era there’s less illumination from street lighting and more from moonlight.” The ‘gilded era’ scene pictured below was one place where art, story and gameplay converged, for me. I stared at it for a while because I was stuck, then (without spoilers) the simple, organic warmth of this house, in contrast with the foreboding, moonlit, blue forest, catalysed my knowing the required solution. And, when I noticed how this forest light was captured again later, in a new context, I was surprised to have recognised it immediately.
After getting used to the dignified, restrained colours used in the early eras, the mish-mash of purples and greens in the 2040s was a shock. In addition to depicting a kind of tongue-in-cheek, corporate dystopia, they garishly accompany the amusing farce that plays out when Fia has to avoid a surprising number of herselves (which also makes for clever puzzling). Although I was already enjoying the many character costume changes, an overabundance of Fias is why I started to appreciate how distinctively each character moves. Chandler has conceptualised each with care.
“I knew very early on that I didn’t want to do rigged 2D animation. I don’t think that style suits the feel we were going for. So I knew I had to come up with a style that was able to be animated frame by frame, which meant fairly simple shading. I went for angular designs rather than the very round designs you often get in this style because I felt like the more angular look feels a bit more ‘serious’, and I like the work of artists such as Peter Chung and Carlos Meglia.” That the characters take themselves seriously made this particular vignette all the more funny, before the tone turns dark again in the Y2K era.
Possibly because I’m not American, or just because it’s genuinely uncommon, I can’t recall ever watching (or playing) fiction set explicitly before and after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York. In the context of time travel, Old Skies raises ethical-logistical questions around why it should be acceptable, even good, to intervene and prevent one murder, but the same may not be true for a mass murder with such weighty global ramifications.
The Washington Square scene is one of the sparsest, in terms of interactivity, as you can only talk briefly to one character. Given the composition, however, which sets the twin towers under the Washington Square Arch at sunset, I paused in this place with nothing to do, to appreciate what the game describes as ‘timeline malaise’ and the empty feeling that comes from never being authentically, resolutely connected to a physical and temporal reality, come what may.
Chandler describes approaching this scene “as faithfully as possible, using photographic references”, as well as the designer’s wish to have the “the towers in the framing and not in it when you visit later”, a sight that was, or still is, presumably quite disturbing for normal tourists (and locals). Also, on a technical level, Chandler says, “Any time you’re trying to show an iconic monument and do it justice, and fit it all in one composition, but also have 2D characters not look like they’re completely out of scale, that’s rough. The Washington Square Park scene was a bit of a battle.”
After unpacking these examples, it occurs to me that Old Skies’ art isn’t really as ‘sparse’ as I’d initially imagined. It’s not that I hadn’t noticed details, or thoughtful, thematic decision making, more that Chandler’s intended ‘unity’ began building the background of my experience, before becoming incrementally more compelling. In my head, I even eventually attributed the evocativeness of the (extremely satisfying) ending to that one specific shade of blue. And, in terms of ‘sparse’ interactivity, the game may have a smaller than average number of inventory-based puzzle pieces, but solving puzzles by thinking about time travel is extremely fun.
If I could be a time tourist, I’d like to watch my teenage self solve Day of the Tentacle. I’d be interested to remember whether that was the precise moment I fell in love with time travel stories, because I am so very in love with them, including Old Skies. I presented Ben Chandler with the same goofy hypothetical and he says he’d want to go back in time to make sure he spent “as much time looking at things” as drawing; “I think my work would have more natural solidity and elegance because I’d be starting pieces from a stronger foundation.”
Trust the dedicated game art professional to want to (further) improve his practice. Indeed, many of Old Skies’ time tourists want to explain, change, or improve something about themselves. And so, this intricate story circles back to simple reflection and an appreciation for the one, committed life that is our own.
We played Old Skies on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
