Time travel stories usually have to be either about the mechanics of time travel, or the feelings: Tricky puzzle boxes requiring diagrams and long conversations about paradox to map out, or hand-waves that breeze past obvious plot holes to get to meaty questions about what could be different, or might have been. It’s a rare story that can juggle both elements in ways that take them seriously, without losing track of either the heart or the head. But a rare achievement is exactly what time travel adventure game Old Skies is: The most emotionally rich and mature adventure to date from veteran studio Wadjet Eye, and one of the best time travel stories I’ve ever experienced, period.

Set (at least initially) in 2062, the game drops you into the sensible boots of Fia Quinn, agent of ChronoZen, the regulatory agency for government-authorized time travel. ChronoZen agents, you’ll quickly discover through the game’s six chapters, mostly work as tour guides, and sometimes agents of change: Ferrying high-paying clients into the past on literal nostalgia trips, or sometimes making minor alterations that have been certified not to wreck the timeline too badly. (There’s a whole system of “Time Impact Rankings” that algorithmically determine who matters, and who doesn’t, on the grand scheme of things; one of several bureaucratic and dystopian touches the game uses to smooth out its time travel rules.) One of the game’s most fascinating paradoxes has nothing to do with killing your own grandfather, then, and everything with how doing this kind of work might weigh on a human mind: “Chronolocked” against alterations, the CZ agents are forced to watch the world shift around them all the time, as minor fluctuations in the timeline ripple out. It’s a lifestyle that forces them into isolated, nomadic existences, a tiny fraternity of temporal orphans: Hard to make connections or fall in love, when the actions of some time tourist across the world can make it so that the person you’re chatting with was suddenly never even born.

Old Skies balances that existential melancholy by reminding you, frequently, how cool time travel really is. Each of the game’s chapters sends Fia (and, usually, her client) into another beautifully realized era, working through problems that are always several degrees more complicated than the initial briefing might suggest. As with creator David Gilbert’s last game, Unavowed, Wadjet is smart to rarely make the game’s puzzle solving elements too complicated: Solutions frequently require welcome leaps of lateral thinking, but the possibility space of your options is usually kept at least moderately limited; you won’t end up running around with an inventory of 30 objects, desperately figuring out how to combine rubber chicken A with broken pulley B to get across a gap, for instance. More often than not, the situations revolve less around using items than using Fia’s brain: Either talking to people in the right way, or using the game’s simple but engaging research system to look up publicly available knowledge from 2062 to help you suss out a problem in the past. (This is, I’ll note, a very good game for people who grew up watching Quantum Leap, and have always wanted their own Ziggy and Al to consult.)