We’ve been following Old Skies, the time-travelling point-and-click from indie powerhouse Wadjet Eye Games (Unavowed, Primordia, The Excavation Of Hob’s Barrow), for a good few years now. Initially revealed in 2022, the game was supposed to launch on Switch and PC today, however, the developer has had to make the last-minute decision to delay the Switch launch following what it describes as a “frustrating” Nintendo certification process.
Wadjet Eye founder Dave Gilbert shared the news in a video posted to BlueSky, explaining that the team began preparations on the Switch approval months ago, but a later patch has caused things to take much longer than expected.
We’d recommend checking out Gilbert’s explanation for the full details, but in short, the dev submitted an unfinished version of Old Skies for approval “months ago,” followed by a pre-launch patch that would fix the missing assets, bugs and do everything else you’d expect to get the submitted build in launch order.
This is a perfectly normal process, Gilbert states, but a problem with the patch meant that it was breaking save files left over from the initial build. Given that no customers would play the game as it was initially presented, the dev understood that this wasn’t a problem, but Nintendo asked that a “special waiver” be submitted to clarify the patch’s purpose.
Despite this waiver, Gilbert states that Nintendo has repeatedly rejected the patch. “They didn’t quite seem to grok what was going on,” the dev continued, “it was very frustrating”.
After a process of back-and-forth rejections and explanations, the team was forced to cancel the initial submission and reapply for the Switch version with the patch added. While the studio founder couldn’t give a precise date for when he expects this resubmission to be approved, he said that the team is hoping it will arrive on Switch in early June.
“I’m sorry to everyone who was expecting and hoping to play the game on Switch on launch day,” Gilbert stated, “we really tried, but it is what it is”.
We’ll be keeping an eye out for more news about Old Skies on Switch in the coming weeks. Following its PC launch, the game currently sits at 80 on Metacritic, with early reviews praising the story and time-travel puzzling.
