Personally, I like to think about time-travel paradoxes. The potentially cosmic screw-ups that could be caused by temporal technology make my brain tickle. A society that develops such capabilities would certainly need to create a police force devoted strictly to monitoring the time lines. The story of one such agency's formation was told in the now-classic computer adventure, The Journeyman Project (which has recently been re-released in a Turbo form by Sanctuary Woods). Now the sequel, Buried In Time, is on the shelves, and it's an amazing piece of work. Sanctuary Woods and Presto Studios have outdone themselves on this one.
The player is once again Temporal Security Agent #5, Gage Blackwood, and the story picks up almost immediately after the events of the first game. Gage is just starting to relax after saving the fabric of space-time when his future self from ten years down the road materializes in front of him. Apparently, he's been framed for mucking about with history when he was supposed to just take notes. Or rather, he will be framed. The future Gage passes on his Temporal Jumpsuit, and immediately gets picked up by another TSA Timecop.
Gage's mission is clear. His future self is accused of leaving time ripples in four locations. While he had in fact visited those places (or would visit them later), he was certainly too careful to be responsible for these distortions. Someone else must have done the dirty work, hiding under the cover of Future Gage's travel. Gage must now visit these four sites to track down evidence of the mischief, and hopefully discover the identity of the miscreant. The travel locations are the Mayan catacombs at Chichen Itza in 1050 AD, Richard the Lionheart's castle in 1204 France, Leonardo Da Vinci studio in 1488 Italy, and a 22nd century research station in space.
Buried in Time is almost entirely non-linear. You can explore the different locations in whatever order you like. Your suit's jump mechanism can be kicked in at any time during the game, as can a nifty cloaking device. But you can't do anything useful while you're invisible except stand there and wait for the crisis to pass.
If you thought the graphics in the original Journeyman Project were cool, Buried in Time will blow you out of the water. The environments are so realistic that you almost can't tell they were computer generated. At all. While the compositing of human actors still creates a mild halo effect on occasion, it's the best I've ever seen in a game. A lot of care was taken to set cameras and lighting at the correct angles to match the digital set, and it shows.
As with any adventure game, much of your success relies on whether or not you can find certain items within the environment. While these are usually quite visible and clear, you will probably have to look up or down to see them. The navigation interface incorporates five arrows: up, down, left, right and forward. The arrows are laid out in a very attractive, almost elegant design in the bottom right of the screen. While clicking the mouse on the arrows works well enough, the control is not always responsive, meaning lots of re-clicking. It's generally a better idea to navigate using the number pad on your keyboard, with "5" for forward motion. There are also keyboard commands for almost everything else in the game, but they're not as easy to remember.
The program takes up three CD-ROMs. When a game has multiple discs, I don't usually consider that an advantage. It always means an inflated price tag, not to mention the annoyance of disc swapping. Buried In Time did a surprisingly good job of getting past my prejudices on this point. The price is still a concern, but there's a lot of bang for your buck. The disc swaps are there, but they are set at the most rational point you could imagine: between locations. If that doesn't sound too surprising to you, you haven't played enough badly planned games yet.
Instead of providing a help-line, Presto has included a computer sidekick for Gage. His name is Arthur, and he's got a very strong personality, not to mention oodles of information about each of the historical locations. He is smart enough to give you whatever facts you need on how to proceed, but it will cost you points, at least on the full adventure mode. Of course, he's also eager to give you lots of free comments on your environment that give the game a decidedly educational tinge. And, when you ask for a comment, you may also get a completely gratuitous popular culture reference. (In a halfway decent Heston voice: "Soylent Gruel is made from people!")
In fact, the thing that surprised me the most about Buried In Time was the pervading sense of humor. Every bit of promotion I had seen had led me to expect a deadly serious game. Most of the time, the situation is rather tense and the music gloomy, but then something remarkably silly will happen. Arthur is frequently the source of this silliness, dropping smartass comments even when nobody asked for them. I found myself laughing out loud on several occasions.
Buried In Time is quite the epic. With five fully navigable locations (including your apartment), there's lots of varied gameplay, and the on-line help (in the form of Arthur) is both helpful and entertaining. You don't have to be an adventure addict to enjoy the heck out of this product. You don't even have to have played the original Journeyman Project. Buried In Time stands alone, not just in its story, but among its competitors.
