I found Anachronox a while ago on a list of forgotten, obscure, and underrated RPGs. I did a little research before playing it, and its history is actually rather interesting.
In summary, it was the game that was meant to save Ion Storm from the Daikatana fiasco. It didn't.
The game was critically acclaimed, but simply didn't sell. Of course, spending $50,000 on marketing after dropping millions into development may have had something to do with that. I was eyeballs deep into the genre at the time (early 2001), and never heard of it until recently.
Regrettably, it hasn't aged well. It's obscure enough that it doesn't seem to have a sufficient fan community to create more than cursory patches. It really doesn't like modern hardware. Screenshots were a complete bust. Print screens came out black, and my demo version of fraps kept the game from even loading. On to the game itself:
It make sense given the sci-fi noir/cyperbunk setting, but everybody in this game is damned grumpy. We start the game with the protagonist "Sly Boots" getting beaten up and thrown out a window. He's a down-on-his-luck PI with an attitude problem. Not even the barkeep is especially sympathetic, but we are treated with a well-timed "clear the rats out of my cellar" joke.
Our next grumpy person is Fatima, who is an absolutely brilliant piece of game design. She's Boot's secretary, except she's dead. He had her personality digitized, and now she inhabits his "Flying Personal Assistant," otherwise known as the in-game cursor (She's also bitter and disgruntled). This is an absolutely wonderful mechanism for reinforcing the fourth wall and integrating the UI into the game world. Good job on that front, Ion Storm.
It took me about an hour of gameplay (not including thirty minutes or so figuring out how to work around a CTD) in order to make any real progress in game. A series of contacts leads me to my first job: I need to to get in touch with a guy named Grumpos and help him extract molten pieces of ancient alien technology from the tunnels riddling the city. After breaking into his house, I finally meet the 'man.'
Grumpos is 'not' a dwarf. Apparently, he's a human being. I think. Maybe there's some backstory, but he sure looks like a dwarf. He comes up about to Boot's elbow, he's got a beard down to his knees and hair down to his ankles, and he's so pissed off at everything that his name is Grumpos. Not sure what the narrative motivation here is, but he seems to be a dwarf.
In any case, he sends me off to obtain a size-five guard's helmet. Seems pretty dumb, until he fiddles with it and hands me the universal translator. Great, I can talk to aliens now! Also, he joins my party.
Which is pretty awesome, because combat changes from "I'm gonna die!" to "Oh, I can live long enough to figure out these combat mechanics."
Not that this does me much good. After nosing around for a while, I come to a chase sequence where I have to follow someone through a number of scene changes. There's a known bug here on modern machines, with the affects ranging from losing your quarry to party death. I experienced all of the above, and have not been able to get any of the fixes to work.
So we're done here. Anachronox is disqualified by a game-ending glitch. I'm kind of disappointed, as the game is fairly pretty for its era, is well written, and was just starting to pick up. Maybe one day I'll salvage on single core P4 machine and get this to work, but for now I'm moving on.
To Arcanum!
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