The Journeyman Project: Turbo!

The Good
A combination of interactive-movie and adventure game, JProject is an interesting sci-fi thriller where (in a similar manner to the film TimeCop), you are a special time-travelling agent that is sent to the past to make things right and prevent major space/time fuckups.

Unlike TimeCop however, the game puts an emphasis on puzzle-solving, exploration and peaceful adventuring instead of martial arts extravaganzas, gratuitous violence, nudity and drool... Mia Sara (though I can't help but think what a great game Journeyman would have been with all THAT!!). You have a series of small action sequences thrown in to spice up the gameflow, but they are just that and the main gameplay concept is that of a simple first person slide-show adventure game that combines inventory puzzles as well as myst-like color sequencing stuff and other mindteasers in a sci-fi storyline. Fear not my brain-challenged friends, as the difficulty is very simple and you'll have no problem solving each and every one of the challenges in the game, providing ample time to just enjoy the story and explore the limited but beautifully rendered gameworld which offers a small modicum of non-linearity in the form of different solutions for each mission as well as a scoring system based on the items you got, how you solved the missions, etc. etc.

Speaking of the storyline, the game places you in an interesting variation of the "happy-happy-joy-joy" utopic Star Trek future, where everyone is just dandy and society has finally embraced peace, love and all that crap. The first contact with an alien entity is about to become a reality, but some forces do not want to see that happen so they'll trigger some historic events in order screw our further dealings with E.T. The plot does have it's holes but it's essentially an entertaining sci-fi adventure which is told via the game with the aid of full multimedia whiz-bang.

That's right folks, Journeyman Project contains plenty of eye candy in the form of fully rendered items, backgrounds, creatures, etc. especially designed to make you forget about the plot holes and concentrate on the beautiful scenery. Sound effects are extremely well implemented, and the music is of superb quality, only adding to the already proffesional feel of the game. Small fmv clips and animations handle all transitions when exploring the locations in the game, and everywhere you click you trigger some small 3DStudio-powered gimmick. The game does look and sound VERY good, and it even holds up to todays standards in terms of graphical quality. If only for the looks, JP stands the test of time.

The Bad
Well, to the untrained eye Journeyman will look like one of those "multimedia experiences" that started popping up when the cd-roms appeared, with lots of multimedia and very little "experience" to it, and while JP distances itself from that definition by providing an actual game in it, it still falls under the category. The whole game just reeks of that whole multimedia fad, sprinkled as it is with millions of mini-action/puzzle sequences just to prove how "interactive" the whole thing is. Plus, the whole game treats itself as if it was the second coming in terms of technology implementation and development, pretty much like every other cd-based game at it's time (this one, however, going the extra mile by providing an appropiately cheesy making-of video and behind-the-scenes documentation).

To be fair let me stress that JP is not just a collection of pre-rendered slides and fmvs with the word "interactive" slapped over them, but the game does take it's roots from there, and while it is an entertaining and fairly decent game, it's still far from perfect. The interaction with the world is far from exciting since the whole game universe seems to be composed of you, the bad guy, a computer chick and 3 (count them) robots. The puzzles are of the "use key on door" kind, with little to no difficulty to them so, to put it simply: it's a simple, lightweight adventure game.

The Bottom Line
The Journeyman Project is and delivers much more than other cd-based multimedia bonanzas of it's kind. It's beautifully presented and has tremedous attention to detail, and to be fair it provides a very decent gameplay experience on top of all it's pre-rendered magic. But unfortunately the gameplay design never raises above decent, and while it's not going to hurt you to try this game, it's not going to rock your socks either.... Just plain vanilla.