YMMV / The Journeyman Project

• Awesome Music: For example, Mars Maze, Coprates Minor, Plasma Rock, and the credits theme.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: "CHEESE GIRL!!!" Subverted both in that in the Adventure Mode in Buried in Time, this was a helpful item for getting to a space station, and that unlike most examples of this trope never being mentioned again, this was briefly shown again at one point in the alien spacecraft, no matter what mode you're playing.

• Fridge Brilliance: The problem with a Time Enforcement Agency is, how do you Set Right What Once Went Wrong when your memories have been altered by a time disruption? The TSA thought of that, and put a historical log deep in 200 million BC so they always have a record of what happened.
  • The TSA put a lot of other futuristic equipment in the prehistoric time zone in Pegasus Prime, but, as your AI Biochip explains, that too will be destroyed when the nearby volcano erupts, as the island everything is on is geologically unstable, so no humans except the TSA will ever get a hold of it. This explanation also works for the Turbo version.
  • The third game allows you to do a lot more with the people and scenery, including incredibly elaborate changes to Shangri-la, which would seem to violate the rules of the last two games. Until, of course, you realize all three will be destroyed in twenty-four hours and have no effect on history...
  • The Cheese Girl commercial mentioned above shows a Cheese Girl dispenser with a human head, and when it dispenses the cheese, the head/dispenser is continuously propelled backwards. Guess how you use the dispenser in-game to get to the space station.
• Fridge Horror: You meet a lot of nice, friendly, funny, and endearing characters while time-travelling in the third game. Every single one of them will die horribly in twenty-four hours' time when the warring aliens destroy the three ancient civilizations. Yes, even that cute kid in El Dorado.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In the first game, after leaving the first room in NORAD VI, you get a warning about a plasma build up. If you turn left, Poseidon shoots at you, which can cause a huge amount of energy being lost unless you activated the shield biochip first. However, after getting the plasma warning, turning right and walking backwards one space bypasses the trigger that sets off the event.
  • Also in the same time zone, running Turbo on newer systems creates a glitch where the sleeping gas never actually makes you pass out.
  • Buried in Time has a hilariously bad glitch that sometimes affects inventory items when the player moves them around the screen. When it happens, this results in the item's sprite creating a paint-like trail from where it was, to the point that it can fill up the entire screen if the player desires.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The game predates the post-9/11 founding of the Transportation Security Agency and highly visible "TSA Agents" at airports.
  • The Interactive News Network in the second game provides you with articles to read, with some important words highlighted which you can click in order to get to another articles that explains what that word is all about. Those articles in turn can contain more highlighted words. Essentially, the game contains a miniature Wiki Walk!
  • A similar point-and-click game called Timelapse also involves Atlantis, time travel, a hostile robot, and Sufficiently Advanced Aliens helping ancient cultures.
• Most Wonderful Sound: "Thank you for using Global Transport." *3-tone jingle*
• Narm: The acting in Turbo isn't that great, except for Elliot Sinclair. Geno Andrews did several voices, but spoke in a rather slow fashion, including the interface overview.
  • Most of the acting by extras in Pegasus Prime, especially the fake scientists at TSA and Sydney, is by clearly untrained actors. The AI is looking at her script instead of you, based on how her eyes move. Special mention to the Doc Brown-esque scientist who sees you when you try to leave Dr. Sinclair's office, especailly if you have Sinclair's antique gun on you when you see him.
  Scientist: "*gasp* You're not Elliot! Security! Security! Don't shoot the man with the glasses!"
  • The FMV scenes in Legacy of Time feature awful CGI and dramatic performances that somehow make Arthur look like the least hammy character. Thankfully the NPC in-game video clips are done with decent character actors and are far better.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Lots of it, particularly the underground section of Mars (scary ambient music, big scary robot that kills you in a scary way, the Shield Generator, with more scary background noise, that skeletonizes you if you take too long solving the puzzle, and the Maze with the music that slows down as your oxygen decreases, and finally fades to heavy breathing and heartbeats), and Sinclair's lab, where you get shot with a dart and are slowly dying, while creepy/sad music is playing.
  • Seeing the alarms in the TSA go off when a temporal rift is detected in the first game. The idea of you knowing that someone changed history and its effects are going to hit the present in the matter of minutes is scary purely because you don't know what has changed or if you will be changed in some way. In the best case scenario, you'll be a totally different person with a new life and no memories of your old life. At worst, you'll be uncreated and will have never existed in the first place. The Pegasus remake makes it slightly more terrifying with Gage's commander giving what could be his final instructions to the only agent that can fix the mess that is about to hit the fan. The commander hoping that the TSA will still exist by the time you return with the historical log only adds more fuel to the nightmare.
    • After Gage retrieves the historical record in Pegasus Prime, he returns to a changed world with a much more militant version of the TSA. After his commander grills him for a bit, he acknowledges the validity of Gage's mission, but refuses to let him use the time machine again, because allowing Gage to continue with his mission would erase the world he knows and the person he is. Even though history was tampered with, you have to admit he has a point.
  • Pegasus Prime’s Mars Maze has scary atmospheric music that is not the one from Turbo’s, and while it does not slow down to the point of hearing Agent 5’s Heartbeat and desperate breathing, instead the Mars Maze has Robots that have spiked rollers on their front, and if they see you, they will try to make mincemeat out of you. There are also doors that you can’t open and you don’t they are locked until you try to open them.
  • Sinclair's time-travel plans in the first game to prevent humans from establishing relations with Cyrollans in the first game are, in order of least to most drastic: assassinating the person who's trying to convince fellow scientists to support cross-relations with the aliens, destroying an alien ship and the nearby Mars colony (and making it look like the aliens did it), and firing a nuclear missile in order to keep the countries of Earth from achieving world peace and thus being seen as viable candidates for the Symbiotry (apparently, World War Whatever is the Lesser of Two Evils in Sinclair's eyes!). His last-ditch plan is to assassinate the delegate in the present, and if you fail to stop him, you get to hear the crowds scream in horror as he kills the poor sap, before opening fire on you for a Game Over.
  • The Krynn spaceship at the end of Buried in Time. It's devoid of visible light, filled with unfamiliar technology that could get you killed if you don't have the Translate biochip to understand it, and you navigate by swimming through a liquid-filled space populated with aliens that could capture you at a second's glance. Then when you finally locate the tampered historical artifacts, the room you're in has unsettling alien noises going in the background. It gets to a head when you're about to head back to the teleporter and leave, when Ambassador Icarus comes in just as you are about to do so. He then proceeds to trap you in a mechanical arm, which stuffs you in one of the teleporters in order to strip you of your Jumpsuit, which would drown you if you don't fight back.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In both the original game and Buried in Time, you always start in the same location when traveling to a specific time period, mainly to prevent the game from becoming unwinnable from the player being trapped. This makes significant backtracking a minor issue in the original, but a major annoyance in Buried in Time and Pegasus Prime, which requires more time jumping and interlinked items. Legacy Of Time removed this mechanic, locking in the location you last left a time zone from, (helped by the fact that Legacy has no game over states and can't become unwinnable)
  • Players of Turbo may be miffed to play Pegasus Prime due to the latter introducing superfluous walking and turning animations that dramatically slow down the game pace. As an example, opening doors now requires pressing forward to do so, rather than clicking on the door itself like in Turbo.
• Replacement Scrappy: One of Pegasus Prime's largest problems is the AI Biochip you're given at the start. It replaces the less invasive text message window from Turbo and the woman in the TSA videos. The problem with this is that in-game, this version's warnings and such are much more harried, inconvenient at times, and sometimes fall into Captain Obvious territory, especially if you've already played Turbo.
  HUD: "Oxygen Mask: Empty"
  AI Biochip: "This oxygen mask...is empty."
  • Fortunately, or unfortunately if you actually need to hear the information, pressing any movement key cuts off what she's saying mid-sentence. And an Easter Egg where a copy of Arthur can be found has controls to toggle both him and the other AI on or off.
• Series Continuity Error: While Pegasus Prime did a good job connecting with the fleshed out storyline which Buried In Time kicked off following the original game, it still makes a couple of minor points look confusing and out of place.
  • The intro cutscene of the second game shows that Agent 5 kept the maintenance key from Mars, when in Pegasus Prime, there was no key available. Weirder still, this same intro goes unedited while tacked onto Prime's ending as a cliffhanger.
  • In Buried in Time, the Interactive News Network shows video footage of the original game.
• Squick: In Turbo, hidden in a corner next to Elliot Sinclair's video log in the World Science Center is a viewer that shows the first stages of Bio Tech devices, in an endoscopic view of a rat's brain being worked on WAY up close.
  • And it can be seen as an Easter Egg in the 2014 Pegasus Prime rerelease.
• That One Puzzle: The bomb defusing puzzle on the Mars Colony. It consists of Agent 5 disarming a bomb before removing it from the base's core before it explodes. The puzzle requires guessing a combination of three nodes (red, yellow and green) in the correct order. Level 2 adds a blue node for a total of four, and Level 3 adds a purple node for a total of five. What makes this puzzle so difficult is that there is no strategy involved, and looking up a guide won't help. The three-node combination is random every time you enter a level, and all the help you get after entering a combination guess is how many nodes are in the correct places. The game doesn't tell you which nodes are correct, just how many are correct, and that's all. This isn't so bad on Level 1, since you get enough chances that guessing every possible combination of red-yellow-green will eventually produce the combination. But Level 2 and Level 3 could potentially end without you guessing a single correct node before you run out of chances. And if you fail at any level, you go back to Level 1. All of this would be frustrating enough, but on top of all of that, there's a ten-minute time limit, and every node guess eats a few seconds away. Failing to clear the puzzle in time means Agent 5 dies of radiation poisoning. The Pegasus Prime remake alleviated the difficulty somewhat by making selecting nodes take less time, but it's still an exercise in frustration, and a pure guessing game. And in Pegasus Prime if you exhaust all of your 5 allotted guesses you are given per each of the 3 levels and still not manage to get it right, the bomb explodes vaporizing you.