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The Journeyman Project 2: Buried In Time
REVIEWER/Diana Griffiths
PUBLISHER/ Presto Studios
DEVELOPER/Presto Studios & Sanctuary Woods
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OVERVIEW
Buried in Time (BIT) is the second game in the Journeyman Project series. Once
again, you take on the role of Gage Blackwood, Agent 5 of the Temporal Security
Agency (TSA).
It is the agents' responsibility to ensure that no unauthorized time travel takes
place that could alter history.
At this time, Earth is a member of the Symbiotry of Peaceful Beings. A conference
is taking place as to whether Earth's time travel technology should be shared with
the Symbiotry or not. TSA discover that someone has been tampering in the time
zones previously visited by Agent 5. He is immediately under suspicion of
committing these crimes and is arrested. Breaking house arrest, Gage travels back
ten years in time to talk to his past self. He quickly explains the situation and
transfers his time-travel suit (jump suit) to the younger Gage. The future Gage is
recaptured and you, the younger Gage, now inside the jump suit, jump forward in
time to start the investigation to clear your future self of the erroneous
charges.
You spend all of the game now inside the jump suit. This is a very clever
interface as you are now only able to see through the visor. Only a small area of
the screen need be filled with the scene, animated and scrolled. The game
instructions recommend that you plug in headphones and turn off the lights to
fully engross yourself in the story. I didn't do this for reasons I will describe
later.
As the adventure progresses you will find yourself in some interesting time zones
and places: the Mayan Chichen Itza, Da Vinci's Renaissance Studio, the medieval
castle of Chateau Galliard, a space station, the real culprit's lair and the weird
environment of an alien race.
STORY
I found the story line of the game rather ordinary. There should be some intrigue
in trying to figure out who the culprit is and why they are traveling to these
time zones, but it is actually totally unnecessary to do this. All is explained
toward the end of the game. The main aim of the game is to explore each time zone
and collect evidence to prove your innocence. This involves detecting and
photographing anything that is inconsistent with the time zone.
When you finally meet the culprit, you will receive a complete explanation of
their actions. I personally found their arguments pretty powerful. Their time
travel experiences had left them wary of the human race, for good reason, and for
some misguided reason, trusting in an alien race. This baddie was not an evil
monster . . . just a regular person doing what they thought best for the
Symbiotry. This game is more about politics, than good defeating evil.
PUZZLES
The game can be played in one of two modes of difficulty. Walkthrough mode has
fewer puzzles than does Adventure mode. None-the-less Walkthrough mode is not a
doddle! In Walkthrough mode, you must explore and observe as much as possible.
Doing so should supply all the clues you need to make progress. In Adventure mode,
there are a few logic puzzles, in which it helps to imagine what you would have to
do if you were really there.
GRAPHICS
The graphics are beautifully rendered, looking quite realistic.
You can walk around each location and move smoothly from scene to scene with a
full realistic sweeping motion. Some scenes have a great deal of animation and
this also looks completely realistic and flows beautifully.
MUSIC & SOUND
The sound quality was excellent. There is very realistic background sound like
wind and foreground noises. There is no volume control for music, sound effects or
dialogue probably as you should be able to adjust sound levels via Windows.
The scene above is an example of both sound and animation: The flags on top of the
siege towers flap in the stiff breeze while the wind howls around the walls of the
castle.
The music from the game is available on a separate soundtrack CD so clearly
Sanctuary Woods thinks the score is pretty good. For myself, I found nothing
special about the music, but neither did I ever wish I could turn it off. Clearly
it was in keeping with each the part of the game and enhanced the gaming
experience.
There are very few characters to interact with. Since you are supposed to be not
disturbing history, you must avoid the local people. However, at one point in the
game a companion will join you. He is an artificial lifeform with quite a
personality. He will, from time to time, offer humorous anecdotes and when
requested supply interesting background information. He will also provide hints
but these will deduct your points accumulation. It is possible to interrupt your
companions dialogue by performing an operation. The dialogue is not displayed on
the screen but you are able to replay the last piece of dialogue.
USER INTERFACE
Many operations are available on screen surrounding the visor display and you can
also examine and perform operations on the view scenes.
The screen is divided into various sections:
At the top of the screen is the message window. Messages from the equipment in
your jump suit will display, such as warning messages, detection of anomalies and
translations.
At the bottom of the screen is the inventory. You can store everything you pick up
in the inventory. You can scroll up and down through the inventory to look for
items, activate them by clicking on the image on the left of this window or
examine them using the magnifying glass.
When you examine an object, information is displayed in the view window, as in the
Cheese Girl product shown above.
On the upper right of the screen is the Biochip interface. In your inventory you
will collect various biochips. Many operations are accessed through the biochips:
time travel, translation, evidence identification and photography and several
others. First you have to activate the appropriate biochip from the inventory,
then access the biochip interface. This usually fills the view window with
pertinent information. For example, accessing the evidence chip enables you to
attempt to locate evidence or review the evidence already collected as below:
In the lower right of the screen are the navigation controls. Clicking on the
direction arrows will move you in that direction: up right, down, left and
forward.
Each direction arrow will only light up if that direction is available.
SYSTEM OPTIONS
The system options are available through the interface biochip:
Because this is a Windows game, you may save as many files as you have disk space
for. Flicker disables some of the animation effects like flapping flags. When I
turned transition speed way down, as you change direction and move, the scenes in
the view window change sharply. I preferred smooth transitions so left the setting
as above.
Now you probably think I have been rather laborious explained all the above like a
user manual, but I have done this to illustrate my next point. Due to this heavy
duty user interface, which displays many different types of information in five
areas of the screen, the game plays very slowly. As you select a new biochip or
operation, each area redisplays and appears to do so more than once.
Materialization when you jump to a new location lags behind the rest of the user
interface. All of these issues may be minimized if you play on a Pentium with a
Windows 95 version of BIT. However the worst slowness of all is movement, because
there is no way of zapping from place to place once you have explored the area.
You must retrace your steps, step by laborious step, completely!
The game is distributed on three CD-ROMs. This is another thing that slows down
the user interface. When you jump you will often need to load a different disk.
This also makes the playing in the dark option somewhat awkward. Many operations
are under keyboard control. Not being a touch typist I couldn't find the right
keys in the dark either!
Occasionally you will die in BIT. If you are seen by any local people and fail to
escape in time, you will be captured and the game will end.
At this point the end game display will explain what happened and will display a
breakdown of your accumulated points. Unfortunately the only other way to see the
points accumulation is when you complete the game. I think this was a rather
stupid oversight, as the points awards would actually have been quite useful to
measure your progress even if you don't die. On the plus side, you can usually
continue to play from just before you were killed so you don't have to restore a
saved game.
It is good idea to save regularly, because you can end up trapped. Although you
can usually jump out to another time zone, you will have to retrace your steps
which may be very time consuming.
INSTALLATION
BIT installs very straightforwardly.
The game can be played in either 256 colors or thousands of colors. Other players
have claimed that the thousands of colors remove any graininess. I played in 256
colors and have no complaints. However, when I changed to thousands of colors the
graphics were so dark I could not explore effectively.
The installation sets up a Buried in Time group and creates several items that may
be invoked from that group: The Buried in Time Game, Buried in Time demos like the
trailer and gallery, some marketing hype and demos of other Sanctuary Woods games.
RUN-TIME BUGS
I only had one crash in BIT that I could directly attribute to BIT (Windows being
quite capable of hanging things up on its own!) but annoyingly or thankfully it
was right at the end of the game. If there was an interesting end game sequence I
have no idea.
HARD-COPY DOUMENTATION
There is a small glossy color instruction booklet stored in the CD box which is a
fairly comprehensive set of information. Some game features and other pertinent
information are only available in the readme which is accessible from the Buried
In Time program group. The only other hard copy documents are the license
agreement, registration form, and product merchandise advertising and order forms.
There is actually a reasonably extensive selection of Buried in Time merchandise
ranging from refrigerator magnets to leather jackets.
SUMMARY
One interesting last point before I close. I tried to purchase a used copy of BIT
via the CompuServe Gamers Trading Post to no avail. I posted a 'want to buy'
message three times on both the Gamers and Action Games forum and finally posted a
'why won't anyone sell me BIT?' message. This last message finally received a
response: 'This game is so good, no-one wants to part with it!'. Well, I must
admit it does have some replay value. If you first play in Walkthrough mode, you
will want to play it again in Adventure mode and it is a long game (for good and
bad reasons!).
I think it's main claims to fame and glory are the graphics, sound, music, smooth
motion and completely realistic animation, all of which help the player become
fully emersed in the game. The slowness, tedious retracing of ones steps and
irritating refreshing of the user interface screen, is quite damaging to one's
enjoyment. The story is also a little weak as most of the plot is uncovered all at
one time. The concept of time travel to the interesting locales is exciting and
interesting. The politics within and between races makes the story background more
subtle than a regular fantasy or sci-fi adventure game. Is the game good value? I
guess so. This is a good game that could have been a great game if more thought
had gone into integrating the story into the puzzles and more effort had been put
into the speed of play.
