Anachronox is a 2001 role-playing video game produced by Tom Hall and the Dallas Ion Storm games studio. The game is centered on Sylvester "Sly Boots" Bucelli, a down-and-out private investigator who looks for work in the slums of Anachronox, a once-abandoned planet near the galaxy's jumpgate hub. He travels to other planets, amasses an unlikely group of friends, and unravels a mystery that threatens the fate of the universe. The game's science fiction story was influenced by cyberpunk, film noir, and unconventional humor. The story features a theme of working through the troubles of one's past.
Gameplay in Anachronox is a mix of real-time exploration and turn-based combat; the player controls a party of up to three characters as they explore a 3D environment of futuristic cities, space vessels, and outdoor areas. Inspirations for the game include older role-playing video games such as Chrono Trigger and the Final Fantasy series, animator Chuck Jones and the novel Ender's Game. The game was built with a heavily modified version of id Software's Quake II engine, rewritten chiefly to allow a wider color palette, emotive animations and facial expressions, better lighting, particle effects, and camera effects.
The development of Anachronox was long and difficult. Originally planned for a third-quarter 1998 release, it was released worldwide in June 2001 for Microsoft Windows. Tom Hall planned to create a sequel with the copious content removed during production. Critics enjoyed the game and awarded it high marks for its design and story. Ion Storm's Dallas offices were closed mere days after the game's release. In 2002, Anachronox cinematic director Jake Hughes spliced together gameplay footage and cutscenes to create a feature-length, award-winning machinima film.
Gameplay Anachronox is a role-playing game similar in nature to many Japanese role-playing video games like Final Fantasy. The player controls a party of up to three characters as they explore a 3D environment (colloquially known as a "field map") of futuristic cities, space vessels, and outdoor areas. Players can swap for new party members, talk to non-player characters, and collect and shop for equipment and items. When players near an interactive character or item, a floating arrow-shaped electronic device called the LifeCursor appears, which lets the player click on the person or item. After a certain point in the story, players can travel by shuttle to other planets, triggering cutscenes of the shuttle trips. Each playable character has a unique skill, such as lockpicking, which may be used to solve puzzles. Some sequences involve minigames, such as an unnamed mission in which the player pilots a fighter spaceship to destroy enemies with lasers. Certain field maps also feature simple two-dimensional minigames, including the original games Ox and Bugaboo. The protagonist Boots also possesses a camera, which the player can use to take screenshots for their own enjoyment or as part of quest objectives.
Enemy encounters trigger a combat mode. As in Chrono Trigger, enemies are openly visible on field maps or lie in wait to ambush the party and thus are not random. Similar to Final Fantasys Active Time Battle, each character has a meter that gradually fills with time. When the meter is full, characters can physically attack enemies, use MysTech magic, unleash BattleSkill attacks, use items, move to a different position, or use a nearby object to attack, if present. For playable characters and computer-controlled enemies, each attack has their number of hit points (a numerically based life bar) get reduced, which can be restored through healing items or MysTech slags. Use of MysTech and equippable shield cells require Neutron-Radiated Glodents (NRG), a separate energy reserve displayed beneath a character's life bar. NRG is replenished through certain items. Use of BattleSkills require Bouge, a third bar beneath NRG that automatically fills with time; players can use different BattleSkills depending on how full the Bouge bar is. Some characters must undergo certain plot developments to unlock their BattleSkills. When a playable character loses all hit points, he or she faints. If all the player's characters fall in battle, the game ends and must be restored from a previously saved game. Winning battles earns experience points and raises characters' levels, granting them improved statistics. These statistics can be viewed through the status screen, which displays important character information and current quests. Unlike many other RPGs, Anachronox displays a character's attributes with qualitative descriptors (such as Poor and Excellent) instead of integers.
MysTech The Mysterium Tech (or MysTech) system allows players to use in-game objects collectively known as MysTech, and create new MysTech by using a configuration screen accessed through Elementor Host items. MysTech cannot be used until they are awakened after a certain story event. Eight basic colors of MysTech exist, representing different elements; for example, green represents poison. Players can use MysTech to inflict damage upon enemies, plague them with certain status effects (such as freezing them in place), or heal party members. Casting status effect-MysTech on party members will cure them if afflicted by enemy status spells. MysTech slabs and Elementor Hosts can be found as treasure in the game world or bought from shops. To create MysTech, players place colored bugs (found on small hills in several game locations) in empty slots on an Elementor Host. The color of bugs placed in the function slot determines the color of MysTech, while other slots modify the power and/or range of the spell. Players can add special bugs known as Cobalt Crawlers to make a spell target all enemies instead of one; a Host filled with eight Crawlers unlocks a secret spell. The effect of bugs can be amplified by feeding them petals from Lifeflowers, which can be found scattered throughout the world of Anachronox. Special types of Hosts with two or three different functions allow players to pick which MysTech function to use in battle.
Plot
Setting The game takes place on Anachronox (a portmanteau of anachronism and noxious, meaning "poison from the past"), a small planet floating inside a huge artificial sphere known as Sender One. Husks of futuristic cities exist on artificial tectonic plates, which constantly shift to connect different parts of the planet. Inhabitants believe that diseased aliens were quarantined there eons ago, resulting in the name Anachronox. Northern Anachronox is clean and upscale, while southern Anachronox is crime-ridden and run-down. Humanity travels to different planets from Sender One, which had been the center of a transportation system for a race of non-humanoids enabling faster-than-light travel. Inbound and outbound traffic stops at Sender Station, an orbiting construct above Sender One with hotels and a red light district. Civilizations conduct business using currency like the one-dollar coin known as a "loonie", while several people collect MysTech—shards of rock with markings, believed to be dormant weapons or art pieces created by an extinct alien race. MysTech were first found 300 years ago, and are poorly understood, though avidly collected.
Other planets in Sender One include Sunder, Hephaestus, Democratus, and Limbus. The galaxy's scientific community is headquartered on the temperate planet of Sunder, and people are only permitted to go there if they are sufficiently intelligent. Hephaestus is an important religious center. A mostly volcanic planet, Hephaestus hosts a town and temple complex of monks who study MysTech. Democratus is climatically similar to Earth, with regions of desert, snow, forest, and prairie. Several populations of different sentient species exist on the surface, but the planet is ruled by a race of tall, thin humanoids with large craniums who dwell on a large mechanical ring constructed around the planet. This race is obsessed with the ideal of democracy, and though they possess incredible scientific and engineering knowledge, they are constantly bogged down by their own ineptitude and the frailties of the democratic process. Limbus is known as the "planet of death", as voyagers never return; its surface is arid and rocky, with sparse vegetation. A planet mentioned but not seen in the game is Krapton, home to superheroes and villains. Most of Krapton's human population has fled, tired of being constantly abducted and saved by warring superpeople.
Characters
The protagonist of Anachronox is Sylvester "Sly Boots" Bucelli, a human and former private detective on Anachronox. Twenty-nine years old and described as "bold, brash, and overconfident", Boots has gotten himself into trouble and now runs his agency out of rented storage space above a seedy bar. His only friends are PAL-18, his spirited, sarcastic robot assistant since childhood, and Fatima Doohan, his secretary. Fatima was fatally injured and digitized by Boots onto a PDA-analogue "LifeCursor", where she bitterly lives to render assistance. Several allies join Boots over the course of the game; first is 71-year-old Grumpos Matavastros, a "scholar, outdoorsman, eccentric recluse, and renaissance man"—and a very grumpy person. A former curator of the MysTech museum on Anachronox, Grumpos devotes his life to studying the artifacts. Dr. Rho Bowman joins the party on Sunder; she is a brilliant scientist who's been branded a heretic after publication of her book, MysTech Awake! The team then gains support from Democratus, an eccentric planet boasting a planetary ring and brilliant technology. Said technology includes having the planet shrink to human height to be part of the team. Two further allies are the femme fatale Stiletto Anyway—a 25-year-old former companion of Boots known for being stealthy and aloof—and Paco "El Puño" Estrella, a washed up superhero who's turned to alcoholism after his comic book series was canceled. Their foes include Detta, a heavyset crime boss/kingpin on planet Anachronox, and several other monsters and shady characters.
Story Sly Boots lives in a cheap apartment above Rowdy's, a bar in the seedy "Bricks" section of South Anachronox. Grumpos Matavastros commissions Boots to find a piece of MysTech, but a crime boss called Detta accosts them and steals it. Grumpos, Boots, and robot assistant PAL-18 then seek out Dr. Rho Bowman, an expert on MysTech, at an institute for troublesome scientists on Sunder. She undertakes an experiment to activate MysTech, apparently causing the destruction of Sunder. Rho and the others escape the planet on a shuttle, and drift in space for seventeen days until they are brought on board a habitat ring around the planet Democratus. Rho discovers that all MysTech is now active, and can grant powers and spells. Boots pilots a fighter ship to save Democratus from insectoid invaders known as the Verilent Hive. The heroes return to Sender Station's Lounge of Commerce; Democratus joins the party, the High Council having shrunken the planet to human height. While searching for equipment, Boots earns money as an erotic dancer and encounters Stiletto Anyway, an old flame who's become an assassin and plots revenge against Detta. Rho explains that the universe operates on the Big Bounce principle; a universe that forms with a Big Bang will eventually suffer a Big Crunch, giving rise to a new Big Bang. She explains that Sunder was destroyed by an injection of matter from the previous universe, which will hasten the current universe's Big Crunch. If enough matter is switched between universes, the previous one can escape a Big Crunch and the current one will cease to exist.