The Journeyman Project

The Journeyman Project is a science fiction-based interactive adventure game with a time travel theme. The game was developed by Presto Studios, founded in 1991 in San Diego. The game debuted in 1992 on Macintosh, and in the following year, it was converted to Windows 3.x PCs. In 1997, the creators of the original prepared its complete remake, called The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime.

Plot

The game takes place in a distant future where thanks to the titular Journeyman project, mankind has discovered a way to travel in time, creating the world's first time machine called Pegasus. After a series of tests, in fear of misuse of Pegasus, the project and the machine itself were taken over by a specially created government organisation called Temporal Security Annex. We play as one of the agents of that unit, using Agent 5 code name.

The first mission begins in 2308, when a foreign ship of the Cyrollan race arrives on Earth, offering the people of Earth to join a coalition called Symbiotry of Peaceful Beings, in which civilizations exchange their cultural and technological achievements. Ten years after the event, on the eve of people joining the coalition, there is an unexplained disruption of time, which can be catastrophic for the whole race. When there is a suspicion that someone might have wanted to exclude Earth from the alliance, Agent 5 uses a time machine to move into the past to explore the nature of the disturbances and find out who is behind these mysterious events.

Mechanics

The Journeyman Project is a classic adventure game in which the action is observed from the first-person perspective. Movement is done in a classic dungeon crawler way - we move forward or backward in jumps and rotate 90 degrees to the left or right. Agent 5's goal is to explore successive three-dimensional locations, collect clues and solve various logical puzzles with the help of objects found in the game. Among them, the key role is played by seven gradually acquired bio-chips, which improve the abilities of the main character in various ways. Depending on your needs, these devices can be activated or deactivated at any time using the quick menu on the side of the screen.

Technical aspects

In terms of binding, The Journeyman Project combines static, prerendered backgrounds with full-motion video (FMV) sequences, while also being one of the first video games in which live actors were used. To ensure smooth gameplay, however, the game area only takes up about half of the screen, and the rest of the screen is filled with interface elements such as energy level, current date, inventory menu and cursor arrows.

Additional information

Due to the use of early versions of the Macromedia Director engine, the first editions of The Journeyman Project suffered from a whole host of technical problems, such as slow loading of locations and poor quality and smoothness of animations. This situation was improved only by an improved edition of the game called The Journeyman Project Turbo! which was released in 1994 for PC and Mac.

Last updated on April 2, 2019