The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time

It had been about four or five years since I'd last played this game, and I was expecting.to have some nostalgia broken by poorly-acted, live-action FMVs and Arthur's terrible jokes. I was surprised to see how much better it had held up. Only a few characters have downright awful acting, and Arthur is actually funny to me again after my sense of humor has matured (and I understand more of his references than I did when I was 10). Overall, this game has matured well, with perhaps only the low-definition FMVs being the sole aging dinosaur of the game. The story kind of picks up from Journeyman 2, but you don't need to play JP2 to get it. Enough vague references are made that you can get enough of a basic gist of what's happened up to this point that you can follow the story. I can only describe the plot in one way (said in sort of a long sigh tone): "ehhhhhhhhhh." There's some story of an unseen evil alien race taking on your allied race of bird aliens, a conflict millenia in the making, yadda-yadda. The whole overarching plot is dull but provides enough of a backdrop for the gameplay that it does its job, just not as fantastically as it thinks it does. Your goal is to be spending most of your time unraveling mysteries behind the conflict and collecting a magical Macguffin in three distinct historical locales: Atlantis, El Dorado, and Shangri-La. Early on, you'll meet your buddy Arthur from JP2, who is now a Human AI/Virus who fits himself into your suit. Throughout the game, Arthur provides contextual, gameplay, and historical information, as well as being the comic relief/hint system. His voice actor does a very good job, outpacing the rest of the actors in the game by a mile. I can understand impatient people getting annoyed by him, so you can set the game so that he only provides commentary when prompted to, so at least there's that. While the plot is lame, Arthur isn't the only interesting narrative hook. All of the locations you visit are unique and well-realized. The characters you meet in each location are acted as well as could be expected. Even the semi-accomplished D-llist actors can't work up much enthusiasm for a video game green-screen. The acting isn't bad at all-just mediocre,, and the actors all at least try to have a little fun with their roles. Gameplay, as in any standard point-and-click affair, takes the form of puzzles. These essentially follow two types: Conversational and mechanical. The former is accomplished through disguising yourself as various characters to gain information to then use on other characters to help clear your path. The latter is the simple faire you're used to in this genre. Use Item A on item B to get a solution. The best part about this, though, is the puzzle logic. Finding that sweet spot in point-and-click adventure games puzzles is difficult. Often, puzzles are too mechanically easy and sound, and even more often, it's difficult to jump onto the same logic chain as the game's creator(s). This creates frustrating scenarios where you are literally just taking everything in your inventory and rubbing it against everything else in the game, trying to jump onto the same thought process as the developers. Sierra games would dole out death or point-of-no-return sequencing for daring to not be as smart or talented as Roberta Williams, and Lucasarts would try to keep you in a good mood with quirky, fun writing to ease frustration. I've played Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time several times over the past 15 or so years, and while there have been times where I've been stuck, I've never really been frustrated. All puzzles follow rules of logic and basic mechanics, and some items even have multiple uses (without that Sierra crap of ruining your game). I remember almost being shocked that Arthur said it looked like a rope could be cut, and when I used my knife on the rope, it cut the rope! No frustrating crap like having my character say "But I don't want to break the knife" and finding some convoluted, nonsensical way of cutting it that no human could have figured out on their own. It sounds like I'm obsessing over something simple and pointless, but you have to understand that as this was near the end of the point-and-click genre's popular run, most games up to that point were pretty much just guessing and wild chance to solve, while this game challenged players to think logically. There's a lot to like here. The gameplay is solid (with a built-in hint system if you need a push), each of the locales is fun to visit, and Arthur's company is note entirely unwelcome. If you can forgive some of the basic faults of FMV era games, I can recommend this as one of my favorite PC games.

Probably the best Journeyman game, although it left me a little cold. There's nothing groundbreaking in the story, the histories you visit are more fantasy than fact, and the resolution opens up some big questions about the direction of the whole series. The original Journeyman actually came out before Myst, so this game is best described as Myst style rather than Myst clone. The panning environments are detailed and often beautiful. The mood is lightly serious. The puzzles fit well with their surroundings. Nothing seems too arbitrary. Exploration and story are a big part of the game. It's not jammed full of puzzles, and they aren't extraordinarily difficult. Excellent game if you enjoy first person adventures and the fantasy time travel theme.

It may be difficult for people who got started gaming in the age of X-Box's and PSIII's to appreciate the greatness of this game because they don't have a context to put it in. In it's time it was a great story based adventure game of the sort that dominated the PC CD-ROM gaming market at the time. In fact it was one of the finest in its genre ever. It was really the evolution of a style of game that began in earnest with the Myst/Riven series. This game never tries to give you adrenaline rushes from waves of attacking enemies, but rather leads you calmly through fabulous envisioning of different places and figures of history.

The game is generally good and I'm old enough not to need AA let alone AAA graphics, and I quite like video footage for the NPCs. Considering that you're looking out from inside a full suit you can imagine all that as a limitation of the suit's internal video display if you need to rationalise it... Anyway, I was initially put off by the look of the suit's cartoon-like little AI buddy (you see in the corner of the screen) but actually he's funny, and one of the best things about the game is his comments - perhaps the only thing that kept me playing sometimes - he's a blast, for a 1990s game. Other than that you're faced with a fairly straightforward game of that era/type, with a good story but sadly let down by clunky unforgiving gameplay a couple of times. Trying to explain them without spoilers is difficult but for example there was an inconsequential item in one location that could only be obtained if I'd bothered to go to that location a second time after triggering certain very-indirectly related events, before leaving that time-zone altogether. Much, much later in the game that item turned out to be required but there was no getting it by backtracking - if you didn't get it that one time you're out of luck. And it wasn't even a special thing, it was a simple household item for which any number of other items could fulfill exacly the same job (in fact many other items would've done a better job!) much later on when it turns out you need it for a critical task. So annoying. Get it on sale if you're bored and fancy a laugh or a trip down memory lane to what was 1990s gaming. Enjoy.