What is The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time?

Legacy of Time is the third installment in The Journeyman Project series. In all three games, you play as Gage Blackwood, Agent 5 of the Temporal Security Agency, a secret organization set up by the World Government to protect the world from those who would destroy it by abusing time travel. In the Journeyman universe, changes made in the past ripple through time as shockwaves, altering history and changing the present. In the originai Journeyman Project, you successfully defeated Elliott Sinclair, the inventor of time travel, in his attempt to prevent Earth from accepting the alien Cyrollan invitation to join the Symbiotry of Peaceful Beings, a galactic collective of races. In part 2, Buried in Time, you were framed by the rogue Agent 3 for crimes you didn’t commit. You proved your innocence, but at the last moment, Agent 3 escaped and was presumed lost in the time stream.

The latest chapter of the saga opens in the year 2329. A Symbiotry spacecraft on a routine patrol is destroyed by a mysterious alien fleet. As you watch in horror, the Cyrollan captain of your ship murmurs, “They have returned...”

Back on Earth, you receive a message from Agent 3. She has discovered big trouble in the past, which will result in the destruction of the present. To stave off catastrophe, you need to travel back in time to the lost cities of Atlantis, El Dorado, and Shangri-la. There, you’ll retrieve the Legacy, an archive of high technology left behind by a master race — and eagerly sought by both the Cyrollans and their adversaries.

Legacy of Time, with its rich story and beautifully rendered 3D environments, does a wonderful job of immersing you in the Journeyman world. Throughout the game, full-motion, noninteractive video sequences advance the plot and introduce characters. You travel through time in the Chameleon Jumpsuit, which lets you assume the guise of the different characters you encounter in your travels. This facade allows you to talk to characters in order to solve puzzles and find the Legacy. Arthur, a wise-cracking artificial intelligence sidekick, accompanies you in the suit. Throughout the game, he gives you background information, provides dues, and keeps up a constant stream of sometimes painful jokes. The interaction with Arthur and the other characters gives the game a vastly different — and more human — feel than do games such as Myst and Riven, with their gorgeous yet eerily uninhabited worlds.

The freedom of movement and sense of immediacy you get as a player are amazing. The view from your jumpsuit is like that of a letterboxed film: you can turn through a smoothly scrolling 360-degree panorama as well as look up and down. The game’s interface (the inventory of objects you acquire, controls to travel to different time periods, and so on) is always available but never intrusive. The puzzles you have to solve in each time period are challenging, but if you eat adventure games for breakfast, you’ll probably get through Legacy of Time without breaking a sweat. Unlike in the previous installments, your character can’t die in Journeyman 3, so you’re never rudely jolted out of the game.

Many adventure games have bragged that they provide a cinematic experience, but most of them are unbalanced in terms of either whiz-bang gameplay at the expense of a solid story or an overly intricate plot in which all the player can do is slog from place to place. The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time delivers on the cinematic promise.

Negrino, Tom. (July 1998). The Journeyman Project 3. MacAddict. (pg. 63).

Download The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.5

Compatibility notes

Minimum Requirements

• PowerPC @ 80 MHz
• 10 MB RAM available
• 70 MB hard disk available
• 640 x 480, 16-bit color display
• 4X CD-ROM drive
• System 7.5

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver