Game 12: Old Skies

Wadjet Eye Games, the studio that made Technobabylon and Unavowed (two excellent modern point-and-click adventure games that I very much enjoyed) has just released Old Skies - another point-and-click adventure, now featuring time travel. Let's dive in! I'm playing as a woman named Fia, the year is 2068, and I have a night off. Point-and-clicks in the modern era have some nice updates over their predecessors, and this one has a cool feature - there's no explicit 'look' command, you instead get a tooltip with a description when mousing over an interactable.

Tooltips - an elegant feature of a more civilized age.

On the other hand there doesn't seem to be (or I haven't been able to find) a 'highlight interactable objects' button so we'll see if that gets me stuck later. I get the handsome man at the bar to chat with me, buy him a drink, say some cryptic stuff about possibly not existing because I work for a time travel organization, it's going great...

I work for an organization called ChronoZen.

Fia and the guy she's just bought a drink for toast to being real! And then... the guy vanishes from existence as some purple wave effect passes through the bar. Fia simply says 'Blast it' and finishes her drink, as though this is merely an irritating thing to have happened rather than the way you or I might react to watching someone vaporize in front of us. I get the sense that we have a time travel problem. A big one.

Yeah that's definitely a problem.

Though I was apparently warned not to check my 'Personic' (Facebook) profile after a chrono-shift, I figure what the hell.

This is apparently who I am in this particular timeline.

Except Fia the Time Travel agent is not this, and appears to be immune to whatever is happening. Did I replace the Fia in this timeline or are there two of us? The news says nothing about timeshifts and appears to just be reporting on current events.

My personal messages, which appear to be ChronoZen slack chats, are more enlightening.

Fia is bored with time off so I go back to the company and ask if they have any open assignments. I get sent to April 14, 2024, East Village, to show some sort of 'Time Tourist' around.

I suspect he's not accustomed to time travel.

We're stopped by a locked door, apparently the higher ups do a poor job of scouting our landing zones. I get the client to boost me over the wall and find a combination lock, so the multitool we carry won't do the trick. The solution is a fun one - I contact Nozzo from HQ and he looks up the combination using historical records and the lock's serial number.

How it's not one of those locks that you can reset the combination to.

I have such mixed feelings about this. Our tourist, Joe, is making this trip... because he wants to eat at the diner he loved as a teenager. That's really heartwarming and I don't think I can fault someone for wanting to do that.

On the other hand I think I can surmise a big reason why there are so many chrono-shifts in the future.

Sure let's use time travel and all the risks that entails so you can have a meal.

Another innovation - screen transitions don't take you from screen X to screen Y. They take you to this 'travel area' where you can choose any screen in the zone, meaning you never have to just walk through a couple screens to get to the one you want.

They also took a moment to have character conversations here.

All the dialogue so far is voice-acted and the acting is solid! Joe has a hell of a moment when he sees the restaurant again, he reveals that he's been diagnosed with Skimien syndrome and has about half a year to live - and also that 'right now' he's a 19-year old student with his whole life ahead of him. Man I think this game is likely to get to me. Well, I got him his meal, and everything was fine until Joe decided - most likely pre-planned - to skip the tour, rip off his tracker bracelet and head off on his own.

Seems like the sort of thing that can screw up a timeline.

Good think Nozzo has a contingency plan for this!

The, ah, 'contingency plan' is.... severe.

I end up at Joe's dorm room in and figure out what the deal probably is.

It's about a girl!

Younger Joe is with a pretty girl (Lisa) on his laptop background and emails between them indicate that they're flirting... but it appears that older Joe logged into this computer and sent this gem of an e-mail....

He even sent it from Lisa's account, that jerk.

He's trying to change Lisa's past, seems like it could be a plot to prevent Lisa from doing things that would lead to her breaking up with younger Joe? Whatever Joe is trying to do, it's already been sent and the timeline's already been altered. Oh. Oh I'm wrong about his motivation.

The historical record.

Five years in the future from our current year, Adjunct Professor Lisa died in a Chemical explosion.

I think Joe's trying to save her by preventing her from becoming a Chemistry Professor. So now I'm all like 'Aw, that's sweet, I get it...' but the CHARACTERS are all 'But he's rich, and it's legal for us to just save her because her Timeline Impact is low, he could have just paid us to do that.'

And now I'm as confused as they are.

But I'm much less confused about what's going on with the fluctuating timelines - if we're willing to save people's lives because rich people will pay for it then of course everything is going to shift all the time! We're being extremely cavalier about the timeline here!

We are not at all worried about the Butterfly Effect, no sir.

'How stable is a historical timeline' is a deeply philosophical question. We have no way to test this, so how someone believes time-travel can affect a timeline reflects a lot about a person's beliefs about the nature of history, reality, and how those can be shaped. Personally I'm of the view that even minor, seemingly insignificant changes in history will eventually have cascading effects that can significantly alter history in highly unpredictable ways. Even so much as squishing a spider in Ancient Rome will alter the lives of all the bugs that spider would have otherwise eaten, which themselves affect other bugs, which then begin to affect other animals and humans - months later a mosquito that originally didn't exist because it wasn't born in one timeline bites a human and infects them with malaria, and maybe they die before they otherwise would have, or maybe they don't step outside and get run down by a horse and live instead, and now their life and its events starts to change the course of human lives, and eventually major historical events. Bringing this back to the game and it's 'Timeline Impact', CZ seems to believe that what happens to some entire human lives will not significantly affect the timeline - at least to such a degree that they think it's ok to change the lives of 'Low impact' people. Regarding a person's impact on history, I'd argue that it might be possible to reasonably assess how much it might affect a timeline if you kill someone, because we have some idea of what they will do if they live and could make predictions about what will happen instead if they don't. Even that, in my view, is likely too unpredictable and damaging to risk if you want to preserve your timeline - and while CZ might not agree, this game well might because as we've seen, the timestream in the future is highly unstable. But saving someone from dying, especially someone younger, is actually far more dangerous to a timeline than killing someone, because you have no idea what they are going to do with the rest of their lives. Hitler's psyche was forged in no small part due to WWI, but consider that the French lost close to 1.5 million dead - any given French soldier might be rated 'Low Impact', but what are the chances that at least one of them was a particular soldier that, had they lived, might have been extremely bitter, rose to power, and governed France with an iron fist, conducted military reforms, and forged a 1935 French army bent on revenge against Germany? Many Einsteins and Stalins have been born that never made it past childhood - and I don't believe that's merely an opinion, given the rate of childhood mortality throughout history I believe that's a statistical certainty. Every child you save is a roll of the dice on whether or not they will eventually become someone great or terrible that has significant influence on events, all of which is to say that while I sympathize with people who might want to prevent someone's death in the past, it should never be done if you want to preserve the present. Back to the game - I've gotten a little stuck on this part. There's an implicit 'hint system' (another nice feature) in that you can call Nozzo and ask for his thoughts, but it's really a hint rather than a clear answer. For the Historical Record I can enter people's first and last names and look them up, but none of the people I've learned the names of - Joseph and Celia Anderson, and Lisa Sandman have moved me past this point. I suspect I need to find Foster's entry - they're the professor that old-Joe sent the email to - but I only have their last name and first initial, R. I found a clue in that email earlier - it mentions Foster's name is 'appropriate' because he's like a 'Virus', but this screen doesn't let me type manually so I can't just try random viruses that start with 'R'.

Come on Nozzo, just let me randomly guess it!

So I'm going to revisit other areas and see if I missed something. Found the name, just had to talk to a character after finding stuff from the computer.

new

Back on track, I found Lisa trying to break in - looks like she's seen the email (Joe sent it from her account) and is trying to prevent the professor from seeing it.

Lisa, have I got some unsolicited dating advice for you!

I help her break into her professor's office and delete the e-mail, thus re-condemning her to death five years down the road. That hits differently than when it's abstracted into a 'for the good of the timeline' argument, but I've done it anyway because it's still a good argument.

She thanks me profusely for this and tells me where she hangs out with 'Andy'. I surmise that that's probably where older Joe has gone.

Fancy meeting you here...

Oh, man. He was indeed trying to save Lisa from the explosion that will kill her. He tried to do it legally, but the board rejected it. Her Timeline Importance was Low.... but Joe himself is rich because he made some huge medical advances. His TI is 'Extremely High'.

Joe is a victim of his own success and ended up being too important to legally risk saving Lisa.

He believes that it's already done - that Lisa is safe now because of the email. He offers to 'go back quietly', not knowing that when he tore off that bracelet to escape he made it impossible for CZ to return him to our timeline.

It's too late for that, Joe.

I take the time to explain it all to him. He resigns himself to his fate, comforting himself in the belief that Lisa is safe... and then all that's left to me is to decide whether or not to reinforce or shatter that delusion before pulling the trigger. 

It only matters in the seconds between the words and the trigger, but for those few seconds it matters a lot.

Returning to my own time, my co-workers are kind enough to help me drink away that experience. Another chrono-shift happens while we're there and in this version my alter-self was part of a 'cluster' (married) and has a son, who has been waiting in the rain for over an hour for me to pick them up from soccer practice. I find this out when my newly-existing husband calls me and is angered to find out that I'm at a bar instead of picking up the kid. 

I'm a bad mother now and it really isn't my fault.

This indicates that as we chrono-shift, I appear to be replacing whatever version of 'me' existed in these other timelines. CZ employees, their apartments, and this bar are 'chrono-locked', meaning I suppose that they can survive the timeline shifts.

A couple seconds after deciding to ignore the kid / husband situation (because why interact with them when the next chrono-shift might just erase them?), another chrono-shift comes along and does exactly that.

Family problems go away the moment the family goes away!

From the field manual:

'If your knowledge of history does not match this history, tell us right away' is such a great warning.

Interestingly, the alter-me is very different now, but the news remains as it was - so major events in the present haven't been changed. So far.

Can I stay in the timeline where I get paid to play video games?

A few weeks pass. Chrono-shifts have caused a building to appear next to mine, ruining the view.

I hope the rent is cheaper.

The current version of me was having quite a time.

So far the one consistency I've noticed is that I'm always unemployed.

A couple news items have changed, so even the major timeline events aren't all that stable.

CZ employees get to have some unusual cinematic experiences.

Next client: Chloe Sadar, newly retired boxing champion. We're going to 1871 because she wants to ask a famous boxer from this era, Simon Inman, about his retirement. 

We're actually stuck behind another locked gate but this time I have a badass client who can handle it.

Unless our antics have shifted a great deal of misogyny out of existence in this time period, I very much doubt that the lady here would be sizing up my companion as a fighter and asking her to go toe-to-toe against the guy training here. In 1871.

I bet Chloe could kick his ass though.

Actually, I take it back - it was more of a thing than I assumed. They don't like Simon much here at the gym, and they don't know where he is now.

Why can't people just be helpful by knowing whatever I happen to want to find out?

Ah, found Simon by running into him back at the bar! And he's a huge jerk!

He's working for a gangster or something and threatening the bartender.

Uh... lemme upgrade 'jerk' to 'murderer'. He shot all three of us!

What is this, King's Quest?

Oh good, Restart activates the "ERP protocol" where Nozzo rewinds our personal timelines enough that this didn't happen and we can try the scene again.

Having the reload function be an actual story-acknowledged capability is pretty great. Every game that can invent a plausible excuse should do so.

Ah, the game does have 'Hotspot' highlighting, I just didn't happen to hit 'H' earlier.

Seems odd that this tutorial didn't happen earlier.

This is cleverly done, there's things I can do and new dialog options and I've made the play out a couple different ways but I still get shot in the end. I have the option to shoot Simon myself but I don't want to resort to that yet because then Chloe can't meet him.

Oh good job me, I managed to not get shot by Simon this time.

Puzzle solved, everyone walks away alive. Chloe is nonplussed to learn that he tried to kill us, though only I remember the time loops.

Chloe I swear I worked it out on like attempt number two. Three, tops.

She isn't a 'quitter' though, she still wants to ask Simon about his 'retirement'. We track him to his father's home... or, well, where that used to be.

Nice house you got there, shame something happened to it.

Chloe finally gets to ask Simon her question - sort of. She wants wisdom, to learn from someone else who gave up boxing after being a champion, wants to know what to do with the rest of her life, how to live.

I'm surprised Chloe hasn't reconsidered her desire to get life advice from this guy. Sunk cost fallacy?

Simon doesn't have answers and now has the gun to his own head, because things haven't been going great for him. I've read the historical record of Simon - according to that he dies 20 years from now of cholera. But since we're here maybe we'll inadvertently provoke him to suicide, thus sort of accidentally killing him right now.

At least he's not trying to shoot ME this time.

This is pretty close to a worst-case scenario for a time-travel trip to ask someone a question.

CZ offering refunds when 'this sort of thing' happens is solid dark humor.

Chloe doesn't want a refund, she wants to re-do this and save him, understandably. That's a no-go, apparently 'our past and present selves will melt' if we interact with ourselves directly, but Nozzo proposes that we might be able to go back to the championship fight itself and change his life course at that point. Well, probably can't be worse than getting him killed. 6 months earlier, Chloe (being new to this time travel stuff) slips up when she talks to people she already 'met' six months from now, confusing them.

No Chloe he can't remember the future, let me do the talking.

Gameplay-wise this has been extremely light on the sort of 'get item, use item on thing' puzzles - most of moving the plot forward consists of either talking to the right people or finding new information via historical records. Speaking of history, we learn that the reason Simon's house isn't going to be there in six months is because of something they're referring to as 'the Gridiron project'.

Turns out that's a real thing - the original plan for the streets of New York City would end up destroying numerous homes. Simon's house isn't 'on' 83rd street in the sense that it's adjacent to that road, it's literally located ON where the street is planned to be. "The maps are replete with houses that are directly in the way of where streets were scheduled to run, and lots that would be bisected, trisected, or completely obliterated by the streets and avenues of the new grid." We aren't able to convince Brian or Simon to not fight, and all we know is that something happens after the fight that leads Simon into a life of crime. Oh cool, apparently we can still use the time tunnel between now and six months from now whenever we want for the next few hours, so we can go back and forth to see what we've changed.

Intervening in a second timeline will surely improve things.

Chloe is asking the right questions about time travel!

Found the asshole that turned Simon's life around for the worse - his Uncle, Eddie, runs the Breakdown Boys gang. After the championship fight (which I suspect he may have rigged in Simon's favor) he started teaching Simon the family business. He's an asshole but he has a remarkable ability to throw cleavers accurately. Not that that ever happened to me (in the eventual timeline).

He's also a huge jerk, no sympathy at all for Simon's suicide.

But what also happened the night of the fight was that Simon's sister Paula died in the woods near the house. Fia surmises that that's the main cause of Simon's eventual suicide.

She was attacked by a rabid tree in the woods.

We manage to save Paula's life and get her back to the house.

Nozzo isn't sure if this has saved Simon or not.

Surely we didn't mess up the letters in his name? We didn't go back before he was born... or did we?

He lives! We stopped his suicide! He stands up to his Uncle!

He stands up to his Uncle!

Did I mention that Uncle Eddie is good with a cleaver?

DAMNIT EDDIE WE JUST SAVED HIM AND HIS SELF ESTEEM

Ok, so now I'm trying to save Simon from Eddie. I find out that Eddie did indeed rig the fight. I confront Ida, the gym manager with this, and Brian, Simon's opponent, overhears it all and he admits that he took the fall. You know how the road to Hell is paved with good intentions? That's a good summary of how the 'interact with both timelines' thing is going. Now Simon's dead six months earlier and I got our client, Chloe, killed as well.

I'm feeling like I'm not good at this job.

But we have the advantage that time travel affords us. Finally, I arrive in time to save them, weapon in hand before Eddie does the deed. I have the option to stun him or vaporize him... Now, normally I'm against altering the timeline more than we absolutely need to - but Eddie is a straight up murderous asshole that keeps killing Simon in multiple situations and times. I think it would be nice for Simon to at least live to the ripe old age of 36.

Eddie deserved it.

And that only leaves the Championship fight that originally put Inman's name in the paper and inspired a young Chloe to become a professional boxer - but now Simon's not going to fight tonight. Ida is at the bar desperately looking for a replacement...

There's only one trained fighter in this bar, lady.

When I return to my time, Chloe isn't there - Nozzo says she was tired after all this and went home before I got here, but I wonder if that's the truth. Was young Chloe inspired by the woman in the paper that shared her name the same way she was inspired by Simon? I'll see if the news has anything.

I'm married with children again.

Relief! Chloe Sadar is still a retired boxing champion. She managed to not paradox herself out of existence. Duffy (my co-worker / mentor) is feeling down tonight, apparently the version of him in this timeline is already dead. He tells us not to check on our Personic profiles but that temptation is strong - how could you not?

That's a conversation killer.

Hey buddy, it's your funeral.

Next client! Art Curator Imani Cameron has a painting with no signature, but it has a date - August 1923. She's confident due to her art expertise that it was painted by someone under the pseudonym 'Pie Sycamore', who is now a famous artist after their paintings were discovered in a warehouse, but historians have been unable to determine who the person actually was. She wants to verify that the painting was done by this artist. Her only information about where to possibly find this painting is a photo of a different Pie Sycamore painting she found of this shop. The shopkeeper is pretty unhelpful but eventually reveals he does have it in his office.

I will throw every dialogue option I have at the problem until something works!

Imani is thrilled and enthralled to be able to see this masterpiece in person. Shopkeep thinks it looks like some crayons melted and Imani is displeased with him.

Please don't needlessly wreck the timeline, I'm sure we'll get to that without trying to.

We trace the painting to someone named Jackson Grant's house where we find another. Imani starts complaining about a strange smell when we arrive, but nobody else smells anything.

Eventually she identifies Grant himself as the source of the smell and all her politeness goes out the window.

Imani, maybe just quietly excuse yourself?

She leaves and Nozzo calls, saying that Imani has 'Precursor syndrome'. Maybe she's related to Grant and that's bad for the timeline? He tells me to get Imani and go back to the landing point, I think we're aborting this one. Precursor syndrome - interacting with blood relatives before you were born causes your mind to recoil from it because it's so dangerous, and manifests itself as smells, tastes, nausea - anything that triggers a fight or flight response.

Not sure how humans acquired this particular 'instinct'. Maybe it started showing up when we fucked up time itself.

I convince Imani to go back to her time - CZ has rules on this. I'm going to stay and continue the mission without her. Unfortunately a couple passer-by actually see her enter a time portal when Imani leaves.

Damn it, if only there were a locked gate at our landing zone this wouldn't happen.

Ah, they're not random - the woman is Grant's daughter Elizabeth, the one who bought the paintings. And they're very drunk.

Much of the adventure consists of trying to follow the two drunkards around and get them to reveal painting info.

You'd be amazed by how much ammunition she's carrying.

Eventually the man reveals that 'Pie Sycamore' is his mother and gives up her address, and here we are.

A true artist sacrifices their security deposit when they run out of canvas.

Oh that's a fun twist! Pie Sycamore walks in and recognizes me... from fifty years ago. Her real name is Paula Cameron - but her maiden name is Paula Inman. She's Simon's sister who we saved in the last adventure, so her art career came into existence only after that, because in prior timelines she was dead.

I, on the contrary, had no idea I was coming back.

We suspect that the painting we wanted to confirm may currently be the blank canvas in her studio now. I leave her and let her get to work. In the lobby, I'm talking to Imani when she suddenly cuts off. Nozzo comes in to explain that she's 'paradoxing' - something we changed in the past threatens to erase her from existence (Meaning, of course, that this whole trip was a terrible idea and we should generally just stop messing with time) - the drunk couple are her great-great-grandparents and our interventions have altered their night. They're planning to rob the jewelry store that we originally showed up at, and history currently says that they get shot dead here.

You'd think it'd be easy to stop a robbery before it starts.

Alas, they're extremely stubborn and it appears my only option is to help the robbery happen without getting them killed.

In my defense, the shopkeeper here is a jerk.

I help them rob the place and they get out of town with their loot, declaring they'll go straight - but they change their last name to 'Nash' since they have to hide their identity now. Back to the future! We've confirmed that it's a Pie Sycamore painting... only we inadvertently changed it.

Paula painted me that night instead of her daughter.

There's no Personic profile for me now. It appears I don't exist in the current timeline, or there wasn't a version of me. Imani Cameron is now Imani Nash. Fia and ChronoZen personnel are 'chrono-locked' which renders them immune to the effects of shifting timelines but our clients don't have that luxury - CZ's waiver must be one hell of a legal document.

Oh shit.

Tragedy strikes - Duffy didn't turn on his protective chronosuit when returning from his last mission. Fia can't believe this, he's a ten-year veteran. Nozzo says that because the death was due to the timestream itself it's irreversible, so no easy time-travel fix here. Fia spends some time back at the art gallery processing this. But after that it's back to work, with Duffy gone she's the only one in New York handling clients. And the next client is Benjamin Pasamon. Like CZ, he's very cavalier about the change he wants to make in the past. Back in 2043, he was late to an investment pitch for his company, and someone else filled in for him and got a major investor to buy in. That investor assumed the substitute was the person in charge of the company, one thing led to another, and then she WAS in charge, and grew the company into a large and successful business. The dialog lets me warn him that we could easily undo all that but he's as unconcerned as CZ is about the risk, he wants me to make sure that he's at that meeting and the person who got the deal is not so he can be properly recognized and shape the company the way he wants.

Seems like a pretty obvious path to disappointment to me, but here at CZ the customer is always right!

It's a solo mission this time because the client isn't allowed to directly interact with their younger self. I'm delighted, the company starts off with this 'Drone Delivery Salad' pitch. This is Madison, the woman Benjamin wants to screw over.

All Hail the Coconut Drone!

This game just released and they are very active about updates / hotfixes, I think I've updated the game almost every time I've launched it. We've already inadvertently changed things - Young Benjamin is quite taken with this guy, Sam. In the normal timeline, Sam was hired as a temp for the company. I ended up taking his place and leaving him on a bench outside (but that's fine, the temp agency was conducting corporate espionage and poor Sam was going to do 10 years in jail for it, so I didn't feel bad about saving him from that). But now instead of interacting with Sam as a temp worker, he's just a guy that Benjamin met..

Seems like Ben is quite taken with Sam.

This is part of a very clever word puzzle - Benjamin developed a gel that explodes when you say three key words (he wants to market this instead of salad stuff). I can help Madison with her speech and change some of the words she says, but the keywords themselves don't fit - but phonetically some of the keywords are audible within the word options that I have for Madison's speech.

Can we just add a bit about 'Green Flavor Explosion' please?

And... it all works, more or less. Madison is covered in salad dressing and has to miss the presentation, Benjamin Pasamon becomes CEO of Pasamon Industries - but it doesn't sound like the business did too well after that - but hey, that's on him. I head home, job well done. I like how our CZ office is incredibly unassuming, just another business on the street.

The other businesses on this street are constantly changing due to the Chrono-Shifts.

Actually, I was wrong about Pasamon Industries - it's actually doing great! But as a weapons manufacturer instead of a maker of great appliances...

So Benjamin got what he wanted, but his efforts today are directed at killing people.

Fia now refuses to check her Personic profile after Duffy's death, which makes me sad, I was enjoying those. Fia has started to be a regular at the art gallery - she keeps going back there to talk to Imani and look at the paintings, including the one of herself. Nozzo calls all of a sudden with a hot client, so it's back to work.

OH, oh, this is so good!

The new client... is Madison!

She's bitching about how she has to work for Benjamin at his company!

Well Madison let's just go change the past for you... Oh that's bad, Nozzo screwed up. I originally returned to my time 50 minutes before the presentations started, so Nozzo should have sent me back after I left, and I'd have that interval to try to get Benjamin out of the presentation and Madison back in. But I run into Madison with a clean suit, just as the temp I'm about to replace - and who's ID I'm currently using - is walking towards the building. Which means I arrived just before I did the last time, and very soon my past self will be walking through that door.

I solved the puzzle of getting through this door quickly so I hope that doesn't mean I have a very short amount of time for this now.

In the end, Madison and Ben give the presentation together. The company today is still called Leaves and they end up as co-CEOs. They're inability to compromise with each other ultimately results in declining profits and the company today has been bought out. The game's over-arching narrative is about the difficulty of trying to live when everything can change for no discernable reason. Fia has been going to the art gallery between missions, talking with Imani, looking at the paintings. Imani tries to empathize, and says that it's not so different from just being human - after all, anyone could get hit by a truck tomorrow, and lose their whole world.

On the bright side Fia, if not for CZ you wouldn't currently exist.

Fia disagrees and tries to explain... but another chrono-shift hits. Imani is someone else, or perhaps never existed at all, but she's gone along with Pie Sycamore's paintings.

Aw hell. Imani stopped existing and the art sucks.

She rushes back to CZ for another client... focus on the job, focus on the job. The next job is... Leaves! Again!

This is the office manager, now SHE wants to change something.

Sure. Why not. What does it matter anyway? Tomorrow the Janitor will show up to become head of R&D

All right, just have to avoid my other two selves and it will be fine!

Some earlier moments of confusion from the other characters are revealed to me instances where they saw 'me' in one room and then immediately walked into another room and saw a different 'me'. Easy enough, we get Madison to fall asleep, Benjamin goes out on a date, and neither of them are around for the big Presentation so Cassie gives it - she's in charge now, the company is Cassanetics, and NOW it has a high timeline ranking so we're not allowed to mess with it anymore. I guess Cassie was really the best option for the company after all. I go back and Nozzo kind of.. freaks out? And immediately sends me back here again?

Nozzo I was joking about the Janitor, what the hell are we doing back here?

Oh, well we have fucked ourselves. Both Madison and Benjamin have some residual memories of THEIR timelines and they are not happy with us for changing them. They've barged into CZ and killed Nozzo (or rather, will kill him in about a minute).

Nozzo's own ERP is activating but he can't find a way to stop them, so he sent me back again to try to figure something out.

A little sabotage in the past changes this recording's outcome for the better for Nozzo. So, Cassie's timeline stands for now, and Madison and Benjamin will be going to jail for attempted murder. Nozzo reminisces about the early days of time travel, when things were apparently 'really bad'.

The version of reality where people routinely stop existing is the 'under control' one.

Next client: Hanna Tanaka. She found her friend, murdered, over sixty years ago - on 9/11, as it happens.

Now she wants to stop it from happening. Not 9/11 of course, that's a timeline ranking nightmare - just her friend's murder.

Tomorrow is a bad day.

This should be very easy. We've arrived on September 10th, so really all we should have to do is find her friend and make sure she's elsewhere when the murder would have otherwise happened. Ah, ok, it appears that she's been intentionally targeted her for murder - so this guy Nick Chord is actively hunting her, and us just moving her somewhere else won't necessarily do the trick.

What a lovely morning show segment this must have been.

Unfortunately Chord's timeline ranking is 'Medium', so we can't just kill him. Remember kids - if you don't want the future to screw with you, do something impactful today, like kill people. But we CAN go to where he lives, punch his lights out, and tie him up!

I approve of this plan.

Unfortunately according to Nozzo, the murder still happens despite what we just did. I end up putting him to sleep with some drugs I found in his apartment. Many years later this guy would confess to hundreds of murders, including Hannah's friend Yvonne's, but that's really the only evidence we have that he did it - and knocking him out for the next 12 hours hasn't stopped the murder. It looks like someone else killed Yvonne and we don't know who. Oh, someone really really hates Yvonne. Nick Chord DID kill her, and we have stopped that. But now his confession changed - since Nick is indisposed, someone else got hired to do it.

New plan: Just focus on protecting Yvonne.

I'm noticing that Skimien Syndrome keeps popping up - multiple characters in my era have died of it, and the first client, Joe Anderson, was going to die of it had I not shot him. Nobody has actually talked about it, but purely on the basis of it being a new thing I'm speculating that it could be an illness related to all the chrono-shifts humanity is experiencing. Surely that can't be good for us?

Time fluctuation might be a slow killer like lead poisoning.

Yvonne's answering machine indicates that she was invited by another woman to a very nice dinner at a restaurant at the top of WTC1. That woman turns out to be 'Em' Nash, I presume the younger version of the art curator who, in this timeline, is not an art curator. Yvonne isn't here and apparently either walked out or stood her up, so she's making a move on me now, which is a bit awkward for me.

Hello I know what you'll look like if you make it to 70 years old.

Turns out she also works in the WTC, a few floors down, so I think we can see why she's not curating art in 2062. So we've learned that Yvonne was cheating on her husband, and turns out the husband Dion knows about it and he's done with her. Still no idea why there are hitmen after her, Dion's an artist who seems to be dealing with this via dumping Yvonne and painting. Ah, motive! Imani's young self is working for a company that is involved with the mob!

Yvonne is a reporter, and The Mob Does Not Like That.

Our client, the 'hero detective', is more involved in this than she let on. She's on the list of people Winera laundered money to. She was on the take!

Hannah knew WHY Yvonne was killed all this time and lied to us.

Nozzo orders the mission scrubbed. He orders us both back to return home. Hanna does not take this well and decides to try something risky to get away from me.

I recommend against ever doing this. Yes Hannah ended up in jail.

Well this is a mess, we don't want to leave a time-traveler here, but we also don't want to try a jailbreak. Nozzo solves the problem by putting a field around Hannah that will turn her words to gibberish except for a few authorized phrases so she can't try to stop 9/11 or affect anything else. We're going to leave Hanna here to serve her sentence, then travel back and pick her up when she's released.

Hanna I had to vaporize a client who went walkabout, you're getting off lightly.

We're back in New York two months later.

The city has changed in the interim.

Unfortunately, Hanna isn't here.... and worse, the officer she punched doesn't remember being punched.

Like it never happened - and maybe it didn't.

Yvonne is alive!

Looks like Nozzo's speech field wasn't enough to stop Hanna from doing something.

And Hanna managed to get her younger self killed in the process, thus paradoxing herself. So she's not around now.

This is arguably a form of suicide.

Looks like it wasn't something Hanna actually did, maybe something we inadvertently changed?

Nick's confession is different now too, now it looks like Hanna herself was told by the mob to kill Imani Nash, but Nash killed her instead, possibly in self defense. I got stuck for a bit on this section, and part of that is because Nozzo uncharacteristically didn't know what to do either. It's interesting - one of Nozzo's dialogue options is essentially a 'give me a hint' button, but I've used it quite a bit if I'm generally unsure of what to do next. I'm much more willing to use it than I would be if there were simply an actual 'hint button' as some games have - I refuse to touch those unless I am well and truly stuck, having tried a lot of random things and feel entirely out of options. But give me the context of it's asking an in-game coworker for advice and I'm all ears. Progress! In November it's now Imani Nash in jail for killing Hanna.

At least Imani didn't die in the towers.

In a slightly frustrating turn of events, I think the solution now is to go back to Imani Nash in September and basically change the course of her night so she's not in her office when Hanna tries to kill her - which is something I wanted to do when I first learned she was going to be attacked, but the game wouldn't let me do it until I had gotten to this point in the plot. I get Imani out of the office but the mob really wants her dead, we get shot by someone else near her place.

I have never personally had to fend off the mob but this seems like a lot of assassins for one target.

And now we come face to face with the shooter - it's Hanna. The young, corrupt one.

I'm discovering that my own clients want to kill me at statistically unlikely rates.

Hanna saves me from Hanna, who technically suffers a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Not sure how she got out of jail though.

By my count I think we're about 50-50 in terms of actually helping our clients.

There's more than one way to resolve a paradox.

Ever since we tied up Nick, young Hanna became the killer instead, and that led her life down a dark path. Old bribe-taking Hanna was able to escape that life and still become a detective, but for young killer Hanna, there was no turning back. Old Hanna is in time-flux, shifting and changing, able to walk out of prison and nobody noticed her.

And she does not want to fully become what she is becoming. To anyone reading this, do not employ ChronoZen, it's a bad idea. But I don't let her kill herself in the past, she's done enough damage to the timeline for one day. Besides, even if the future looks bleak for Hanna now, there's always tomorrow, where she may well not exist at all. Well, if nothing's stable anyway, maybe I'll change the future again. For me.

I... uh... convince Imani to sleep in the next day and not go into work.

Back to the future, the paintings are still not Pie Sycamore's... But Imani is back as art curator!

She's gone from being dead to merely having poor taste in art.

Back for now. For a few moments. Until the next chrono-shift, maybe. And she's gone again.

This time in a fire in 2029.

Fia has had it. This time, Fia wants to change the past and bring Imani back again. For herself. Nozzo won't go for it (and Fia can't do it on her own). The warehouse fire is tied to Joe Anderson (client 1's DO NOT INTERVENE life), it's off limits. Sorry, Imani.

I can't even be mad at Joe since I already vaporized him.

Focus on the job. Next client! Nathan Knox, son of Otix Knox, who's an author Fia's never heard of but is apparently famous in the current timeline. He has a high timeline ranking so we can't interfere with his life, but he disappeared 70 years ago on July 4, 1993, and his son just wants to know what happened to him.

Oh sir don't worry I'm sure we will simply discover what happened and won't ruin you or your family's life.

We were supposed to find Otis via his last known photo at this book signing, then discreetly follow him around to see what happens to him, no contact. Only I go to the bookstore and it's closed, there's no signing on July 4th. Nozzo decides to try searching for him at his house.

There's no signing but I still have this photo of it?

No luck at his house, so we investigate the photograph in this article - it's a photo of a book signing that we know didn't actually take place. Nozzo figures out that it was taken by Adam Cole.... who also 'just happens' to be the guy that Knox's wife re-marries. We don't think it's a coincidence. Nozzo starts getting defensive about the integrity of the historical archive when we arrive at Adam's addres and at first it looks like it's not inhabited, but inside we find a computer and evidence that the photo was manipulated. Nozzo is extremely releived for that to be the case.

That's some damn fine photoshop work for 1993.

Something else is going on here. The 'Trivia' on the computer has a Time-Travel related answer - 'PFEs' are the bracelets we wear to protect ourselves from paradoxes and other bad time travel effects.

Why does the pre-time-travel computer have time travel jargon on it?

Cole also had a key to Knox's house, so he's real high on the creepy stalker scale. And he has a cobbled-together quansonic device in the basement.

There's another time-traveler involved here!

We try to get more about Adam Cole from the client but he's having none of he, doesn't want us to bring up his stepfather's past. He walks out, threatening to sue.

If your stepfather had something to do with your father's disappearance, don't you want to know?

So normally we'd abort if the client bailed, but CZ is essentially the whole regulatory agency for time travel and can't let unauthorized time travelers go mucking about.

Imagine, what if someone were to irresponsibly mess up the timeline?

I eventually find Knox on the beach. He looks like someone I know.

Attempts to research Adam Cole hit a wall, but discussing Otis and Marla with people reveals that around when he published his first book, Otis changed - went from being a mean drunk to not drinking at all and being a good husband practically overnight. Given that there's another time traveler involved we decide to go there and see what happened.

1977 - Knox was a total jerk.

Otis Knox is also totally dead. In 1977.

Modern Otis is not the real Otis Knox! Modern Otis is..... !

The third option is the correct one.

Duffy killed Otis Knox, and took his place. Later he'll change his identity to Adam Cole's. He's both, and he did it all to be with Marla. The body we found that went through the timesteam and got all messed up that was assumed was Duff was actually Otis' body. Duffy then wrote successful books to make Otis' timeline ranking 'high' to protect himself. Duffy murdered a man who arguably deserved it to get himself fifteen years of stability, a family, something to hold on to.

Your plan was really creative but you had to resort to plagiarism for the books?

And now Duffy won't let go of what he's got.

I'm taking him back to the future when he does something to me, or did something, and I die.

Apologies don't cut it when you've literally killed me.

Clever - Duffy poisoned me just over half an hour before I actually died, and the ERP only rewinds you about 30 minutes at most. So I'm still pointed, and the antidote is in the future. Duffy says the only way for me to survive is to run back to CZ - by which point he will make himself scarce and escape, to eventually resurface as Adam Cole.

The clock is ticking!

At the landing point, Fia decides she wants to catch Duffy no matter what. The medicine needs quansonic particles, but Duffy's makeshift time machine has those. If I can cure myself without returning to the future, then Duffy can still be caught, and now I'm mad at him for sort of murdering me.

This antidote is not a trivial thing to make.

LET'S DO THIS

GOT MY BLOOD

INFUSED IT WITH TIME PARTICLES

ADDED INCREDIBLE CHEMICALS STOLEN FROM A DEAD MAN

JAM IT INTO A TREE BABY

WAIT 15 YEARS

AND EAT A LEAF

I feel better now.

Time to deal with Duffy...

He's not wrong but I'm still mad about being elaborately murdered.

Fia has a choice to make. What would you do?

Home again. Now we're playing as Nozzo, the next day.

Would absolutely play a sequel as just Nozzo.

He enters to find the jump system already engaged. Fia got here before him. She went to 2029... the warehouse fire that needs to happen, the one that kills Imani in the current timeline.

He has to prevent her from stopping it. Timeline rankings and all that.

Nozzo sends himself back.

He finds her. She saved Imani without stopping the fire, but she's badly hurt... and Fia says we've done this before.

She always dies when Nozzo tries to save her.

Fia's ready to give up, nothing works.

Nothing except turning off the PFE and letting the rewinds stop.

Imani lives. The paintings survive.

Fia is still gone.

But not in the way I assumed. Fia faked her death that night, and spent the rest of her life with Imani.

Frank Nozzo knew it at the time and let her go.

In the end, she did the same thing Duffy did, and found something she could hold on to.

And yeah, you better believe that I chose to let Duffy go earlier. Couldn't blame him - or Fia - for making that choice. I very much enjoyed it, it was well written. It leaves a lot unresolved in terms of what happens with CZ and the timestream and focuses much more on the human experience of living in such ephemeral circumstances. Also, how does ChronoZen actually keep the money it makes when many of its clients probably never existed?