I never much liked Primer. The film was recommended to me by several people while in college. It's a time travel movie with an extremely convoluted time travel mechanism and set of loop interactions. You would need to watch it 4 or 5 times to even begin to unravel it all. I couldn't stand it.

I felt nothing while watching the film. The characters displayed no emotion at all. The puzzle of unraveling what was actually happening was all the film really had. The few actions that were ostensibly motivated by some kind of feeling never felt that way. It was a pure logic movie, and rather insufferable.

The best time travel stories don't get bogged down by this. They use time travel to explore feelings. Old Skies is unusually dense with feelings.

In Old Skies, time travel is monopolized by the rich, because of course it would be. Individuals and events are ranked by their timeline importance. Someone rich can go back into the past to make a change, and it's fine as long as it doesn't disrupt those deemed protected. The rich often literally erase the poor from existence just because they want a nostalgia trip to their childhood, or because they want to change some aspect of their past.

The agents at ChronoZen (the time travel company) are locked into place in the timeline, but very much exist outside of it. The world constantly changes - Chrono Shifts, as the actions of them and their clients in the past ripple around them in real time. Businesses around the headquarters constantly shift as changes to the timeline alter the trajectory of events, and even people will disappear.

The agents themselves have versions of themselves outside in the world that constantly change. On the whole, that's what the game is about. How does one deal with a world where nothing is permanent? Locked in a temporal orphanage so to speak. Having nothing to attach to or love because it could Chrono Shift out of moment at any time around you. For everyone else, the changes to the timeline aren't felt because they don't exist outside of it. But to the agents, nothing is permanent.

You guide clients through the past in 6 chapters. Each tells its own story, but they all play together in the game's larger narrative. Each on is well written and affecting. The motivations vary from someone wanting to become CEO of a company they were pushed out of, to wanting to meet a sports hero who died before they were born, to an art dealer wanting to authenticate a painting, to a cop wanting to solve a murder of their friend 5 hours before 9/11.

The ending is for me an all timer. The story itself is quite good, not just for an adventure game. It's multifaceted, dealing with tons of things for each of the characters in the chapters, plus the overall arc.

Yahtzee would tell you it's a problem that all the characters have the same body type and basic animations. Technically this is true, but the game is not a comedy where a wide variety of body types and poses and animations would benefit. It's not Day of the Tentacle relying on visual humor.

The biggest divide will be the linearity and puzzle design. This is not an adventure game with non linear puzzle design, or one that is heavily based on object puzzles. It's fairly like Full Throttle in the sense that you'll have access to a few smaller areas in sequence, and the puzzles are never that many screens apart. I'd say it's on the easier side. I wasn't stuck at all, ever. It's just a tradeoff you get with a more heavy narrative. I found it fine, but some purists would disagree.

Between this and Rosewater we have had quite a month for point and click adventures. But Old Skies is better.