Anachronox

I have a soft spot for RPGs that open with the hero at rock bottom, and Anachronox commits to that premise harder than almost anything I can name. Sylvester "Sly Boots" Bucelli starts the game owing money to a crime boss, living in a decrepit office on a dying alien planet, and accompanied only by a digitized secretary named Fatima who manifests as a floating arrow. That setup sounds like the opening of a Planescape fever dream, and honestly, the comparison is not far off. This is a Western-developed, PC-native love letter to late-nineties JRPGs, specifically the kind Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VII popularized, and it wears that influence openly while carving out its own weird identity. The party you eventually assemble is genuinely one of the most inventive rosters in RPG history. You get Stiletto Anyway, an assassin with high heels and a mean combo string. You get Grumpos, a cantankerous old collector whose world skill, Yammer, literally involves talking enemies and NPCs into submission. You get PAL-18, a robot companion whose emotional arc is played with surprising sincerity. And then there is Democratus, a whole planet shrunk to portable size and recruited as a party member, which is either the most inspired gimmick ever or a sign that designer Tom Hall had simply stopped taking meetings seriously. Each character carries four upgradeable combat skills plus a world skill used in exploration puzzles, and the MysTech crystal system layers a magic framework on top of that. The late-game Elementor subsystem, where you socket colored bugs into your MysTech to generate combined effects, is genuinely complex and rewards players who engage with it, though you can mostly ignore it on a first run. Combat uses an active-time bar model, close in spirit to Chrono Trigger, with up to three characters in your party at once. Enemies are visible on the field map and non-random, which is a courtesy every RPG should have adopted by now. The first few hours are nearly combat-free, which is either a relaxed, atmospheric slow burn or an interminable errand simulation depending on your tolerance for adventure-game-style puzzle pacing. The honest assessment is that combat stays on the easier side for most of the game, animations are slow, and certain dungeon sections, particularly the Verilent Hive, will test your patience more than your tactics. The Elementor system arrives late enough that build-crafters will feel starved for options through much of the mid-game. These are real criticisms, and anyone chasing the depth of a full CRPG combat system will be disappointed. What carries Anachronox past its mechanical limitations is the writing. It belongs in the same breath as Grim Fandango for comedic timing, and unlike games that mistake quirkiness for character, the humor here coexists with a story that genuinely escalates. The science fiction gets strange in ways that feel grounded, touching on themes of bureaucracy, democratic paralysis, and the indifference of deep time. The voice acting in cutscenes is strong, the dialogue rewards attention, and the sequel hook ending, left dangling because Ion Storm Dallas closed before a follow-up could be made, still stings. This is a complete story that ends mid-sentence, and knowing that context makes the final hour hit differently. If you are coming to Anachronox in the current era, go in with clear expectations: the Quake II engine underpinning is visibly aged, the first five hours demand patience, and combat will never challenge you the way a modern RPG might. But if you are the kind of player who finished Planescape: Torment and spent a week thinking about it, or someone who wants to see what a 2001 PC developer did when they genuinely loved JRPGs and had something to say, Anachronox is worth every slow-loading corridor.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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