The Journeyman Project 
For a while, I had assumed that most people knew about The Journeyman Project, or at least heard of it. Turns out this isn’t the case. That needs to be rectified immediately.
Despite coming out the same year as Myst, The Journeyman Project may be the pinnacle of the first-person adventure game genre. It might lack the inventive logic puzzles that its contemporaries use, but in sheer density and immersive storytelling, few games can top it.
The game unfolds on a distant post-post-apocalyptic Earth, where the aftermath of a devastating global war gives rise to a utopian “unified world” with the floating city Caldoria as its centerpiece. With the colonization of Mars already complete, society has reached a new technological apex: time travel. Government bureaucrats quickly took control of the experiments, repossessing the only time machine and establishing the Temporal Security Annex to regulate the space-time continuum. The project was codenamed – you guessed it – Journeyman.
Behold, the future
Fast-forward several years. Humanity makes first contact with aliens. A decade later, on the day of Earth’s induction into the galactic Symbiotry of Peaceful Beings, three temporal anomalies threaten to rewrite Earth’s history and turn it into an isolationist, anti-alien stronghold. As the only TSA employee to show up for work that day, you get to plunge into the disaster.
That’s quite the story, and the gameplay comes with a few similarly inventive twists. Over the course of the game, you explore several futuristic locations, navigating between time periods at will and using elements and objects from each one to solve others. Wire cutters from a construction site, for example, come in handy backstage at a science convention. Unique to the game is its “Biochip” interface, which allows your built-in computer to load and run various programs such as retinal scanners, mapping systems, and digital uplinks. The game almost never uses these save for one-off puzzles, but the system grounds the game in its futuristic setting better than “click the map button” could.
Of course, The Journeyman Project is an artifact of the time it was produced, a relic of rigid structure and constraints. You can only move through the narrow, tunnel-like hallways in the four cardinal directions, and interaction with the world is limited to inventory item puzzles and the occasional computer interface. Whenever a screen animates, it’s slow. The few action segments are laughably hard to control without much direct input. For better or worse, like Myst, no other characters appear.
But looking past that, the game’s artistry is unmatched. The time travel setting opens paths to a variety of colorful futuristic areas, each with a distinct style. Past locations are gritter, less refined works in progress; you explore mines, maintenance tunnels, roughed up laboratories, and military bunkers filled with machinery that looks like the mech suit from Aliens. Once you hit the present, everything becomes slick and polished. One brief detour even transports you back to the prehistoric era, where the surroundings are appropriately dirty and untouched by human hands. The environments, puzzles, and story are incredibly tightly woven together without a blip or artificiality in sight. The giant maps and their optional content feel like lived-in spaces rather than environments purposely crafted around the gameplay. Even with all the Myst clones, few games rival this one for immersiveness.
This is Poseidon. He is strong, and he hates you. Have fun!
Don’t forget the game’s final trick: the plot is intelligent. Though most of the story involves tracking down killer robots through space and locating The Bad Guy™, a few scattered video logs give insight in to the villain’s thought process. One particularly chilling video near the end reveals that he isn’t trying to destroy the world, wreak chaos, or upend the government. His motivations are rooted in xenophobia, conjured by historic fears of benevolent invaders tricking unsuspecting people into enslavement. “Our alien ‘friends’ tell us that they come in the name of peace,” he explains. “A tactic used by all the worst offenders throughout history! And so I am left to do what I can.” His speeches are scary because they make sense. Unfortunately, the team at Presto Studios didn’t run with this, opting for the standard “defeat the enemy and save the world” ending. In any case, the late Graham Jarvis’s portrayal of the antagonist is convincing, memorable, and unmissable.
Put all that together and you have a clever, artful, intelligent adventure game with a creative story. Add in all the extra bells and whistles, like a killer synth soundtrack and the option to peaceful and violent solutions to each area, and The Journeyman Project deserves all the recognition it can find. Which, because it ended up on this blog, wasn’t nearly enough. No matter how dated its conventions might be, stick this one up on the trophy shelf.
Pointless Trivia!
The original release of the game was bug-ridden and slowed down considerably. In lieu of a patch, Presto Studios released several new editions, culminating with The Journeyman Project: Turbo!, which was the most widely distributed.
Video
Tags: 1992, 1993, 1994, 90s, Bandai, CD-ROM, first-person, futuristic, live action, Presto Studios, Quadra Interactive, recommended, Sanctuary Woods, The Journeyman Project, video, Windows, Windows 3.1
Posted on July 31st, 2010 by Shadsy
3 Comments
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Cool shit. I think I saw a demo of this back in the days but I was no adventure buff then, so…
/me is off to snatch a copy somewhere
Thanks dude.
Oh man, I just nostalgia’d. Had this game when I was younger, and the strange way the security door says “Your fourth late arrival has been verified and logged” will never leave me.
Rydian, yes!
The security door…
I’m posting here right now because of the security door. I sometimes use it in speech (if I’m conversing with tech savvy individuals) as something funny to say, however the real truth is that it is a phrase from a time that is very near and dear to my heart.
Journeyman came with my first computer back in 1995, it was a 486-DX at 66 MHz, 16 MB’s of RAM, and a 255 MB hard drive. It’s now 2011, and I’m still a bit behind the times, and I recently bought a used laptop that had a 250 GB hard drive and it made me think of my old 486 DX and how much progress we’ve made in so little time.
The 90′s… ah… those were the days.