Alright, so, I vaguely remember cluelessly crashing through some small portion of this when I was about 10 years old, on a cousin's new Gateway computer sometime around when it apparently first released. After that memory surfaced all these years later, I decided I needed to dig around and get to playing the Journeyman Project trilogy as a whole.
The gameplay style is like no game I'd ever played through before, kinda like Myst as I understand it, in that you travel through a 3D world, with a directional cursor, only stopping at certain junctions of your movement directions to spin in place, investigate your near environs, and interact with what you can, y'know, picking up items and using them on other items to solve puzzles and unlock areas and whathaveya. I've played a good handful of point and click adventures, and that last part is highly reminiscent of that point-and-click problem solving method with aggravating solutions that sometimes feel so out of left field that you may find yourself using every item available on every other item available just to make something, anything at all, happen. Luckily, we live in the internet age where solutions aplenty are available online with a quick search, but that doesn't mean I won't make myself suffer for at least half an hour of aimless wandering in-game before breaking down and resulting to google. I like a *good* puzzle, but 90's "adventure" type games can be awful that way, in specific.
There's not much in the way of character interaction, as you are a time traveler and interacting with inhabitants of the past is strictly forbidden. Your in-screen AI avatar doles out warnings and advice off and on, to keep you from a bevy of instant death outcomes you could otherwise walk facefirst into. The deaths don't amount to much though, as it just forgivingly respawns you right before you made your fatal mistake. They are usually accompanied with a well illustrated image of yourself being fed to machinery, or chucked off a cliff, or lasered to death in a number of ways. Some can be pretty humorous, so I found them worth walking into at least once to see the result. SO yeah, there is no combat really, as your time agent status disallows that, but there are a few environmental opportunities to harmlessly incapacitate the people who might get in your way.
The story is fun, just revolves around a secretive government agency tasked with making sure time travelers don't tamper with the past in any big way. This, of course, happens from the get-go, and without spoiling too much, the story explores some fun thoughts on diplomacy, proliferation, bureaucracy, and sure, why not, the nature of time travel.
The graphics are what this upgraded version seems to have improved most on, having seen some pretty gnarly screenshots from the previous versions. They're still considerably dated by today's standards, but there's just a good nostalgic feel to them. The live action actors are pretty enjoyable, and I didn't find their performances lacking, though it can be a bit sci-fi cheese at times, but I think you should understand that sci-fi cheese is what you're in for. I can only hope the cheese will sustain you as it did me.
This is definitely a niche game for reaching that nostalgia itch, if not for this IP particularly, but as a relic of its time. It was worth the $10 to me, but I can fully understand it wouldn't be everyone's cuppa tea.
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In other news, The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time, and 3: Legacy of Time, never received the pampering remake this first part did, but they are available on GOG and run great on modern machines. They really are great quality if this one's up your alley, and the time periods they explore are more modern to near past, as well as some fun ancient lost civilization delves. Dirt cheap, to boot!
