The Gameplay

Exploration

Exploration is the bulk of the game and involves sleuthing around many different locales, chatting with the community and solving puzzles, frequently of the search-and-recover type. Your party consists of three or fewer people at any given time. This part of the game is very similar to PC adventure games and needs no further discussion.

What a fool	Green lights were on sale
The game begins	The inventory menu

Like most console RPGs, there are plenty of mini-games. Usually these mini-games are similar in quality to Java-based web games - when you're escaping the planet, you take control of the ship itself and have to do your best to avoid flying debris. As mentioned earlier, each character has his or her own "World Skill." These skills are in mini-games in themselves. Grumpos's yammer involves pressing keys repeatedly a la the old Track and Field games on the NES. Sly's own World Skill, lockpicking, involves solving a simple visual puzzle in an allotted period of time. Unfortunately, none of these mini games are at the same level of Final Fantasy VII's Chocobo Racing, or Sam and Max's Car Bomb games.

View Full-Size in another window."> Strunk's Elements of Style says: "Grumpos's"

If only lock-picking was this easy in real-life

During the exploration mode, navigation is done via a WASD keyboard+mouse layout. The keyboard provides absolute direction movement while the mouse rotates the orientation of character. When you're running forward and using the mouse to navigate, it's just like an FPS. However, when you press left on the keyboard, you won't strafe left, or even rotate left like you do in Hitman; you actually start running west. When you're idle, a 3D cursor will appear for you to interact with various items or characters in the game.

A bit more on Side Quests

Previously, we mentioned that the side quests were fairly random and occurred to early in the game. Here are a few examples of what you might find:

1. "Dude, I hate this guy. I just don't know where he lives. If you know where he lives, I'll give you 50 gold"
2. "You owe me a favor. I'm looking for a body of a criminal..."
3. "I'm a collector of pictures of ___. Take 5 pics of ____ and you get ____"

As you're probably thinking, the quests might not be that bad, but they don't tie into the story and they come at the wrong time. Contrast this to the side quests in Squaresoft games, which usually reward you with at least a tiny bit of insight into a character's history or personality, the background of the world you're exploring, or even serve to further the storyline a bit.

Anachronox does deserve credit for a particularly well-done sidequest that involves helping a secret resistance group. It's continual and recurring (different elements of it pop up occasionally), and keeps the player interested and absorbed. Unfortunately, it's only one of more than a dozen.