REVIEW : Journeyman Project 3 - Legacy of Time
By: Robert Edvardsson

The Journeyman project by Presto Studios should be known to all Mac gamers. The graphics, storyline and characters makes you proud that, of course, it was made entirely on Macintosh computers. The first part of the Journeyman story was released in 1993, but unfortunately the price was to high to reach a large crowd, and since Myst was also released about the same time and was also available for PCs, journeyman was left with some few enthusiasts who played and loved it. Presto Studios, founded in 1991 has always been a Macintosh based company, even if their newer games also works on Windows95 based machines as well. The game is a "hybrid", which means that it works on both Macs and PCs. The Journeyman project 3, or actually 4, since there has been 3 previous parts of the story, comes in a nice CD box with room for 4 CDs. The box has much resemblance to the Riven CD box. Maybe because they are both published by Red Orb, a division of Broderbund.

Story and Characters
The story is very involved and well written, and reaches back to all previous games. The script was written by Eric Dallaire, a Science Fiction fan and writer for Presto Studios. The character you control is Gage Blackwood (the same character as in the previous games), also called agent 5. Other familiar characters are Agent 3 - Michelle Visard, Arthur - your always so helpful artificial intelligence unit, and timetravel inventor Dr. Elliot Sinclair. In the intro movie you can see Dr. Sinclair whisper something to a friend of his before he dies. Was Sinclair really crazy in the previous games? Should you really have stopped him from killing the Cyrollan ambassador, or was he right all along? As the story goes on and you've completed the first couple of tasks, sort of like a test of what's awaiting you, you see the earth's allies, the Cyrollans, destroying some of earth's most successful cities, including Atlantis and El Dorado - the lost city of gold. Of course someone must investigate, and of course this someone is you.

Graphics
Lets just say it. The graphics in the game are absolutely beautiful. 6 huge 3D rendered worlds in the same class as Myst and Riven. What's nice is that instead of a dissolve effect and you get a bit closer you can actually turn 360° like in Quicktime VR. And when you move beautiful rendered movies play smoothly until you reach the next stop. This is on thing I missed in Riven, it makes the world feel much more alive and actually 3 dimensional. One bad thing about the graphics though is that since the game contains hundreds of full 360° 3D images the quality of the images aren't at their highest possible quality. This is no major problem though. It still looks awesome.

Music
The original music for the game was composed by Jamey Scott, and adds a great depth to the game. Unfortunately the music is only on special locations, and not everywhere, which is a shame since it's actually very good. You can also order the CD with the music on from Broderbund for $9.95.

Gameplay
The game runs really smooth on my Mac, and all sounds and comments by Arthur (your helpful AI-guide) come flawlessly without having to load from the CD. If you've played games such as myst you know what this game is all about; images... really. In this game they have come up with an original idea of using virtual reality technique to enable the player to turn in any direction and look directly up or down. This makes you being able to see much more than in games like Riven and Myst, and it doesn't feel strange at all to navigate. The animations can get annoying, although they usually aren't, and a good feature is that you can turn them of. You can also hit the esc button whenever you want to skip an animation.

Bug report
Unfortunately there was a bug. It only happens if you hit escape during the ferryman sequence, the "arriving" movie before the ferryman says "we've arrived", and then try to timejump. Hitting escape at any other time does not cause the problem.

Judgement
"So how is the game.. really?" Well, I really liked it, and if you like adventure like games I am sure you will too. The game contains all necessary elements to keep it alive, and includes many long animations to weave the storyline together. If you want a fast action-paced game this is nothing for you, but if you enjoyed Myst and Riven and want a new world to discover, this might be the right option for you.

TIP!
We have reviewed two of the previous games from Presto if
you are interested. Pegasus Prime and Buried in time.