Oof, haven't had as much time as I hoped to play this week. Oh well...
I did manage to complete
The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime however. It doesn't hold up the best after all these years, but I did enjoy it quite a bit. (As previously mentioned, I'm a sucker for time travel stories, good and bad.)
The acting is pretty decent when held up to its contemporaries. I mean, it's not going to win any Oscars, but no one really embarrassed themselves either, except for a few of the direct encounters. You're supposed to avoid contact with anyone in the past, so these are very quick reactions to your presence followed by a game over screen. These are pretty cheesy and you can tell that the actors were having some fun with it.
You can die in the game, but it's extremely well telegraphed (your AI warns you before you're about to trigger death, and you can resume just beforehand), so in some ways it's kinda fun to see all the different ways that you can be killed. However, there's one really cheap death early on: you're supposed to use the transporter to work. I expected to have a nice little shuttle ride, but instead it turned out to be a molecular disintegrator. However, due to some glitch or something, I respawned at work rather than getting the usual game over screen. I continued along my merry way with with my new doppelganger character.
As far as the story goes, it's fairly interesting but has some big plot holes you need to be able to overlook. Time travel is discovered and, fearing the consequences of timeline alterations, the government sets up an agency to monitor the timeline for disruptions. They also sent back a record of the timeline back to the prehistoric era so that an unadulterated history can be kept if any timeline alterations do occur. I especially liked this idea, since the concept could open up a lot of interesting plots (like forging a new timeline by replacing the record, or the moral decisions of finding out that the altered timeline is better than the original).
But for the first game, it's much more standard fare. In this story, someone altered 3 points in history in order to prevent humanity from joining an alien union called The Symbiotry of Peaceful Beings, and so it's up to you to set things right. (Apparently, one complaint of the game was that all the times visited were still in our future. I honestly didn't mind this, as visiting major points in our past has been fairly well tread at this point.) You have a limited amount of time to solve the time discrepancy before your battery runs out and you're trapped forever. Most of the puzzles are of the get item, use item in the correct place type. There's no strong logic or heavy thinking in the game, but some of the puzzles are still obtuse and they added a built-in hint system if you get stuck.
The game is almost entirely in pre-rendered CG with human actors in it. The view is a little small, but it's large enough that it doesn't feel terribly constrained. Walking around must have been impressive back in 1997, and it still holds up okay today though retreading areas does get tedious after a while (if you get stuck or needed an object from another time). When you turn from side to side, the video doesn't play a rotation but instead just pans to another view (which could be a still frame if it's against a wall or the first frame of a new video if you can walk forward). It's a little strange at first but I got used to it quickly. The UI interface gave me a strong
Babylon 5 vibe, though I'm not sure if it really was influenced by B5 or if that's just the 90s sci-fi style.
Each area had its own "first person ride" segment, including the obligatory mine cart ride seen in many 90s games. (The other two were an underwater navigation and a space chase.) These have little interactivity beyond "press the correct direction to not die" of the
Dragon's Lair variety. These were obviously meant for show but are easily the weakest parts of the game. (Apparently, if you play in casual mode you can't fail, but I'm sure they made you sit through them anyway.)
This game is a remake of the original, which didn't have any real FMV and was much more straightforward. In the original, each time period could be solved in a self-contained manner; in
Pegasus Prime, some puzzles required you to visit other times to get the required items. Also, apparently the original was quite straight-forward, making a bit more movie and than game. Perhaps someday, I'll try to track down the original and give it a go.
I enjoyed
Pegasus Prime a fair but, but unless anything I mentioned above really grabs you, it's kinda hard to recommend. I definitely plan to give the sequels a go, at some point (in the GoG wishlist on the lookout for a sale!)
Next up is
Riven. I'm fairly stoked, and I'm going to try to beat it without a walkthrough. That being said, I'm not sure I'll finish it before the month is out. I'll give it a good old try!