Calling all adventurous
adventure players! Looking to try a game that’s out of the genre but
nevertheless “Adventure Game Player Friendly”? Look no further,
my friends. Listen to the sound of my voice, get out a post-it, write
this name down and stick it to your credit card:

A N A C H R O N O X.

You
want adventure? This game has it in spades. You want characters? This
game’s characters could support a raft of sequels. You want story?
Anachronox tells a story worthy of a rich, complex science
fiction novel. You want humor? This game has a galaxy of funny. You
want pretty pictures? Don’t even get me started.

It’s hard to know where
to begin to talk about this wonderful game.

Let me first tell you that
this game was supposed to be a disaster. It was developed by Ion Storm,
the Eidos-owned subsidiary of Eidos. And before you say, Hey! Didn’t
Ion Storm create the spectacular Deus Ex? Yes it did, but that
was that was the Austin-based, Warren Spector-led Ion Storm
group that is now basically doing the work that Lookinglass Studios
left off (they’re currently cooking up Thief III and Deus
Ex II. . . . at least they were until Ion Storm’s continued existence
came into jeopardy recently . . . but that’s a different article)
No, Anachronox was made by the Dallas-based Ion Storm
team. Yeah, the same guys who made the now-legendary-disaster Daikana,
the Heaven’s Gate of recent games.

Add
to this the buzz I kept hearing at E3 last year. I kept scouring the
huge Eidos area for signs of the game – nada. The scuttlebutt was
that the game was a train wreck and they weren’t going to let it stink
up the showroom floor.

It turned out the joke
was on the naysayers. This is one honey of a game.

What kind of game is it?
The designers attempted to adapt the structure of a Japanese anime-style
RPG (Final Fantasy being perhaps the most famous example) and
give it a decidedly American flair.

The game’s main protagonist
is that mainstay of B-movies everywhere, the down-on-his luck detective.
This particular detective is named Sly Boots, and he lives on the
very strange world of Anachronox, which is a hollow sphere constructed
by a long-vanished alien civilization. Some time before humans (and
others) discovered this and a whole network of abandoned worlds and
promptly moved into them.

As
the story begins, Sly owes the local political boss money, and this
gets the story rolling. I can’t even begin to describe the gigantic
plot that unfolds in this game, but it includes the reawakening of
a long-dormant amagical substance called “mystech,” and
how this development literally threatens the very existence of our
universe.

But don’t get the wrong
idea. Anachronox is a very good-spirited and light-hearted
game, and this is evident from the very beginning. The Japanese-style
RPG format may well be unfamiliar to many players, but this problem
is taken care of by the fact that the very game cursor itself is a
person, albeit a dead one. She’s Fatima, Sly’s deceased secretary,
who he had digitized after her death. She’s your guide in the game,
and she takes you by the hand and teaches you how to play the game.
The learning curve is gentle and very user-friendly.

The character-development
in the game is nothing like that of D&D-based RPGs. Through the
course of the game you develop a team of seven characters, though
only three can be active at any one time. These characters are already
set, and while you can develop them by gaining experience and better
equipment, you’re working along a pre-ordained track. The abilities
and skills each character can acquire are pretty much set in stone.

This
doesn’t matter a bit, though, as it’s a delightful septet. In addition
to Sly, there’s a grumpy old Grumpos, a mysterious sort of archaeologist;
Rho Bowman, a feisty and iconoclastic scientist who thinks she’s on
the verge of a major breakthrough regarding Mystech; PAL-18, a robot
valet; Stiletto Anyway, a buxom and very dangerous woman from Sly’s
past; and two very strange characters I’ll mention a little later.

There is a lot of combat
in the game, but nothing that should scare adventure game players.
The combat system is a bit strange – it’s not actually real-time and
it’s not actually turn-based. But as it does in all areas, the game
provides a seamless way for you to learn the techniques of fighting.
And the battles are so easy I probably only had to play two or three
of them more than once in the entire game (and that was on the Normal,
not the Easy, setting).

What distinguishes Anachronox
is the fact that the entire game feels utterly drenched with an infectious
sense of fun and good gameplay. Every corner of the game has fun things
to discover. Even the Options Menu, for example: When you pick the
“Easy” setting, you see a graphic of Sly facing down a fearsome
bunny rabbit. The game if full of hilarious dialog, frequently from
completely unimportant characters. Example: in a shuttle station there’s
a character sitting on the science-fiction equivalent of one of those
luggage dispensers at the airport. When you talk to him, he simply
says, gleefully, “I love the way this thing vibrates my butt.”

The
storyline is consistently innovative as well. In addition to the vast
underbelly of Anachronox itself, you get to visit several other planets,
space stations, and space ships. Every one of these environments is
teeming with with life, and the populations and environments are wildly
diverse.

In a game full of highly
imaginative twists, two truly stand out. First there’s the fact that
one of your party members is a . . . planet. Yep, you heard right.
A planet. Second, during one ill-fated jump through hyperspace, Sly
and his team gets pulled in by a huge Villain starship. This starship
is from a famous “superhero planet,” and for this sequence
the entire format of the game changes to that of a comic book. You
also end up with a party member who’s a superhero (albeit a washed-up
alcoholic superhero). It’s an inspired bit of silliness, and it’s
just an example of the various ways the game remains fresh through
the very end. There are dozens of minor examples, such as the fact
that you can gain experience points by properly voting in a local
election, and you can make money by dancing in a gay bar!

Graphically, the game is
just plain gorgeous. From the very first areas of the game, which
introduce Sly’s neighborhood in Anachronox in all its eye-boggling,
Escher-esque challenging glory. The colors are lush and the characters
themselves are truly convincing.

The characters are so vivid,
however, that the game has occasional moments that transcend what
a game should really be able to do. There’s an interesting non-player
character, a flying alien who’s a wry, amoral informer. The character
is so beautiful visually, and performed by the voice actor so convincingly,
that it gives his part of the story unusual weight. At one point Sly
asks him how he comes by so much sensitive information, and at which
point the alien answers by languidly flying out of site and saying,
“You’d be amazed, Detective, how seldom people look up.”
It’s a lovely, bittersweet scene, and it’s one of my all-time favorite
moments in a game.

In
short, this game has everything that adventure gamers are supposed
to like: A fantastic story, great characters, beautiful worlds to
explore, fascinating puzzles to solve, and lots of great humor.

After thinking real hard
I can only come up with one criticism of the game: Limited save slots.
This is a pet peeve of mine in any game. What’s so hard about giving
me unlimited save slots, damn it? Even that much hated feature so
common to console-type games – the limited ability to save – is a
feature that can be turned on or off in the Options menu. Yep, there’s
just not much to complain about.

Eidos, Ion’s Storm’s parent
company, did an even worse job of promoting Anachronox than UbiSoft’s
unforgivable fumble with Myst III: Exile. Despite the fact
that it’s been winning all sorts of awards (including Best Story –
from any genre – from GameSpot), it didn’t sell well at all. Which
means you can probably pick it up cheap, sports fans. So what are
you still reading this for? Get thee to a software store. Trust me,
you’ll thank me. Play this game. Right now.

Grade: A+

Play: Outcast
Read: Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl
See: Sorry, I can’t think of a single movie that reminds me
of this game.

System Requirements:
PII 266 or equivalent
64 MB RAM
4X CD-ROM
3D Accelerator
12MB VRAM
mouse
sound card
DirectX v7.0