The Journeyman Project: Turbo!

The Good
TJP is an historical document of the first bold steps of game designers towards the field of multimedia and movie-making, thanks to the newly available CD medium. Jaw-dropping technologies are there: 3D rendered environment, FMV sequences and speech dialogues voiced by actors.

The game is brief compared to other adventures, and may seem outdated now, but has things to offer although it gives a promising scenario and an enjoyable experience, with an adequately rich backstory with some intrigue.

The controls are easy and pose no problem. Gameplay resembles the 'slide-show' of Myst but here you move with the cursor keys in invisible square positions and have a realistic sense of freedom.

The riddles and puzzles are quite straightforward and I guess they won't frustrate you much. Personally I solved the whole game without a walkthrough, which is generally a good thing. There is exploration and investigation for you to make, and several challenging trial-and-error points but nothing worse than that.

In the course of the game you obtain bio-chips which provide your gameplay with more features and help you solve some puzzles and pass some points, like retinal scanners. Some are optional, some are used only once. Furthermore, there are some arcade sequences, mind puzzles and mazes.

And there is more! When you finish the game you get your score. You will find out that there are two ways to defeat each of the big nasty androids. Can you find the way you did not follow? Did you explore all of the world? Did you find all the bio-chips? Did you try to complete the missions in a different order? In my opinion this scoring system encourages replayability and exploration.

Personally I liked the cheesy futuristic scenery, with a peaceful humanity, floating cities, androids, aliens, chip interfaces and A.I. bio-suits. The plot is centered around time travel and first contact with aliens, two sci-fi elements which are rarely combined.

The loneliness common in Myst games is also there. You will see no characters to interact with, excepting the three bad robots. The scenario is sophisticated enough to justify this unrealistic condition: your apartment is empty because everyone is out to meet the alien delegation. When you are back in time, you are obliged to be stealthy so that you won't interfere with history.

The Bad
The game suffers by the same flaws that plagued many early CD games of the 90s. One can see an over-enthusiasm for this new groundbreaking medium and TJP shows its cheesy ambition to be the forerunner of this glorious new era.

One of the consequences of that fad was the attempt to force the game into the movie genre. This silly notion urged the designers to have dialogues and cut-scenes with no text. "We now have enough medium to record whole lines of speech; so who needs typing and reading, right?" Well, couple this with the poor sample quality and you will have quite some trouble understanding what you hear. Especially if you are NOT a native English speaker.

The other problem is that the many adventure gamers won't be satiated by the short storyline, the simplistic interface and the less than challenging puzzles. Its philosophy is 'just find what you should do so that you can explore further our wonderful 3d world and story we made for you'. This lack of duration and depth is supposedly compensated by the sensual immersion in the (now outdated) multimedia experience. I just think that TJP uses ideas that other games have implemented in more sophisticated way.

And of course, not to forget the unavoidable animations. From the monologue video sequences to the slow-working inventory, especially the bio-chip slot, complete with this unfolding-folding animation. Can be a real pain when you are trying or repeating some moves.

The Bottom Line
Practically a Myst-clone, although it was released around the same time as Myst did. The main points that make a Myst game are there: slide-show first person interface, a nameless-speechless protagonist (although you can see your face in the mirror), a full 3D-pre-rendered environment, some FMVs, limited interactivity, moody loneliness and a backstory for you to uncover from clues here and there. The structure is also similar: you begin in the 'hub', you choose the 'world' you want to visit in an optional order, you return to the 'hub' etc etc

It won't impress you much; although groundbreaking back then, I guess it would be considered primitive by the next couple of years eg. compared to sequel Buried in Time. The story and the puzzles are not challenging or original and I was surprised when I realized how soon I completed my missions; by the time I had to find the bad guy, I thought that the missions I went to were too brief and few.

But hey, TJP is entertaining and replayable. Just try to visit eras in a different order and use bio-chips in places you haven't

All in all it is a must-see introduction to the Journeyman series. Novice adventure gamers will enjoy it as well as all enthusiasts of the early 90s multimedia games.

The Good
The optimistic future described in the game is very believable, and I found myself hoping it is possible to achieve. This stands in contrast to most other science fiction games, which usually describe the future as a modern, violent Dark Age. In The Journeyman Project humanity prospers, and has long ago put aggression and violence behind them. And in the game, you will generally avoid violence, and in fact, all your actions are directed to prevent violence. This, if nothing else, makes this game very special. But that is not everything. The graphics of this game, although not always technically spectacular, are one of the most imaginative I have seen. Every time zone looks unique, and although its the right look, it is never exactly what you expect. The game also features beautiful music from many styles, ranging from rock to new age. Each zone has its own distinctive theme, or style, enhancing the atmosphere of the game. The game has a strong background in the manual, which allows for a very complex story, with some interesting twists. The game is not entirely linear, allowing you some freedom in your choice of where to go next. Also, sometimes there's more than one way to solve a problem. In at least one place, choosing a more violent approach will result in the loss of helpful information!

The Bad

• The designers of the game wanted to make something fresh. Unfortunately the interface of the game suffered from this. It takes a lot of time getting used to it, and even then - it is simply not intuitive.

• The time limit are a hassle. I simply do not like time limits in adventure games, since it keeps you from exploring around. Luckily, the limit is not very strict and you usually have some time for exploring. Also, in the original game (not the turbo version), the loading of a time zone was so slow that the time limit expired before all the time zone data was loaded!
• The loneliness. In the entire game, the only "people" you meet or see are three robots, and even then you can't talk to them or in any way interact with them. This is excused as one of TSA's rules, which forbids you to interact with people from other times since you might change history. Logical, but I still don't like it.

**The Bottom Line**
A good time travel adventure, with very good music, original graphics you don't wont to miss and a story so good it should be on a cinema near you.

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.

The Good
The puzzles actually had a consequence if you didn't do them right, and some of the hallways really gave even the most experienced maze runner, a run for their money. Some of the puzzles were fun, especially the one in 2185.

The Bad
Some parts in the game--like the codes, for instance--are tough, because if you lose the manual, and you don't have a very good memory (no offense, of course!) you're stuck right when you get to the TSA's front door. Also, the many ways of perishing can get quite irritating sometimes. That and sometimes running into robots does get sort of monotonous after a while...

The Bottom Line
A recommendation, but only for the PC gamers who love adventure games, solving puzzles, and giant seven-foot-tall robots.