Anachronox

In June 2001, Ion Storm’s Dallas office shipped a comedic science-fiction RPG built on the bones of the Quake II engine. Days later, the studio was gone. That’s not trivia; it’s the single most important fact about Anachronox, because the game you can buy on Steam today is structurally the first half of a two-part story whose second half was never funded, never built, and never will be.

Ion Storm Dallas was the office everyone remembers for the wrong reasons — John Romero’s Daikatana and the “suck it down” ad campaign torched the studio’s credibility before Anachronox ever surfaced. Tom Hall, id Software co-founder and the mind behind Commander Keen, spent years down the hall building something almost nobody expected from that address: a Japanese-RPG structure — party of seven, turn-based battles, elemental magic system, planet-hopping plot — running on Western adventure-game bones, with dialogue trees, inventory puzzles, and a hard-boiled detective at the center.

You play Sylvester “Sly” Boots, a private investigator so broke he’s been evicted from his own office and is living in the hallway outside it. Anachronox itself is a dead alien world that humanity found, squatted in, and wired into the galactic jumpgate network — a grimy transit hub where a routine skip-trace opens into something considerably larger across six planets.

On Steam, this is a back-catalogue listing under the Square Enix banner, priced at $6.99 and sitting at a 77 on Metacritic. That number is honest. Anachronox is not a lost masterpiece that the world failed to appreciate; it’s an uneven game containing hours of the best comic writing the medium has produced. Both halves of that sentence are load-bearing. The cult around it isn’t nostalgia inflation — it’s people who accepted a specific trade and found it worth making.

• A noir-parody script with actual range: The comedy is verbal, character-driven, and relentless — a large cast of NPCs with individually written barks, aliens built around linguistic jokes rather than rubber-forehead design, and a protagonist whose self-loathing lands as often as his one-liners.
• Turn-based combat staged in live 3D arenas: Battles resolve on a turn order, but the camera prowls the space cinematically, and most attacks gate extra damage behind timed button presses. Elemental abilities run on “MysTech,” a loot-and-slot system that quietly encourages hoarding.
• A party that includes a planet: Seven companions — bodyguard Stiletto Anyway, disgraced scientist Dr. Rho Bowman, professional malcontent Grumpos, a beaten-up robot, and Democratus, an entire world shrunk to pocket size that deploys as a battlefield weapon. It’s the single best sight gag in any RPG party screen.
• In-engine cinematics at unheard-of volume: Hall’s team built a full cutscene toolset into a shooter engine and then used it constantly. The cinematics were later cut into a machinima film that circulated on the festival circuit — the game is, in a real sense, an origin point of machinima as a serious form.
• Densely authored cities: Anachronox’s Bricks district, Sender Station, Hephaestus, Democratus — these are hand-built spaces with vertical geography and interrogatable populations, not procedural filler.

The Gameplay Loop

Anachronox runs on two engines that never fully mesh. One is an adventure game: you walk a city, talk to everyone, collect an object, and realize the object belongs in a slot three districts back. The other is a JRPG: you walk a corridor, get ambushed, and sit through a fight you were never in danger of losing.

The adventure half is superb. Conversations are the primary mechanic and the primary reward — Hall’s team wrote NPCs who remember you, contradict each other, and deliver exposition sideways through complaint. Questioning a witness in the Bricks plays like detective work because the information is genuinely distributed across people rather than dispensed by a quest marker.

The RPG half is where the argument starts. Combat is not bad by 2001 standards; it’s slow by any standard. There’s no speed toggle, no skip, no auto-resolve. The timed button-press system that amplifies attacks is a smart idea — it keeps hands engaged in a turn-based frame, years before Paper Mario made the pattern famous — but it’s welded to animations that play at full length every single time. The same timed window repeats on the same trash encounters, and the joke wears thin long before the credits. This is the complaint that dominates negative Steam reviews, and it’s fair.

Progression and Onboarding Friction

The bigger structural problem is legibility. Anachronox routinely expects you to know that a specific NPC in a specific alley now has a new line, or that a puzzle solution depends on an item description you skimmed hours ago. There’s no journal worth the name. A meaningful share of players report reaching for a walkthrough, and a meaningful share of positive reviews recommend keeping one open from the start.

We’d frame it less charitably than “old-school.” Adventure games of the same era — Grim Fandango, The Longest Journey — solved discoverability with better signposting of what you’re currently trying to do. Anachronox doesn’t. It hides forward progress inside optional-looking conversation, which is charming the first time and exhausting the fifth. The onboarding friction is real and it is front-loaded: the opening hours are the game at its most obtuse and its least funny, which is a brutal order of operations for a first-time player.

MysTech and Party Systems

MysTech is fine. Elemental slots, gear-driven, deep enough to reward attention and shallow enough to ignore on a standard run. The party mini-games and side diversions are more interesting as evidence of ambition than as things worth playing twice. Character progression exists mostly to keep the numbers moving; nobody finishes Anachronox talking about their build.

What the systems actually do — and this is the insight the game’s imitators missed — is give the writing more surface area. Every combat encounter is a chance for party banter. Every new companion reconfigures the conversational chemistry. Democratus joining the party is a mechanical event and a comedic one simultaneously, and that fusion is rarer than it should be.

The Ending Problem

There isn’t one. Anachronox stops. The plot escalates toward a resolution the studio never got to build, and the credits roll on a cliffhanger that was meant to be a mid-season break. Going in knowing this helps enormously; discovering it late in the run does not. Any honest assessment has to price this in as a permanent, unfixable defect — and it caps the score no matter how good the preceding hours are.

The Quake II engine was old when Anachronox shipped and it is ancient now. Low-poly characters, muddy textures, hard-edged lighting. What survives is art direction: the vertical slum architecture, the alien silhouettes, the willingness to make each of the six planets look like a different genre entirely. Democratus and Hephaestus still read as distinct places decades later, which is more than most contemporaries manage.

Bill Brown’s score does heavy lifting, giving the noir framing a musical seriousness the script keeps undercutting on purpose.

Technically, the Steam build is unrenovated. It’s 4:3 by default, with minimal graphics and audio options and no modern resolution handling. Widescreen requires community patches, which are well documented but are absolutely a prerequisite, not a nicety. Crashes are reported regularly, including recurring reports on Steam Deck. There are no Steam achievements. This is a straight port of a 2001 executable with a store page attached, and it should be judged as such.

Steam (Windows-only; also available on GOG) is the entire story here. No console, no iOS, no Android, no Switch — and there won’t be.

The practical checklist: install, then immediately install a community widescreen/resolution patch before starting, because retrofitting it mid-save is more annoying than doing it upfront. Mouse and keyboard is the native and correct input; the interface was built for a cursor and fights a gamepad.

Steam Deck is a coin flip. Some players report a clean, well-behaved handheld experience post-patch — and a slow turn-based RPG with a great script is ideal Deck material. Others report crashes serious enough to abandon the run. Given the pacing complaints, the Deck is the best place to play this game if it cooperates. Verify early, inside the refund window.

Anachronox is a broken game with stretches better than most working ones — but broken is the operative word, and most people should think twice. Its combat is a tax you pay to access the writing, its interface is a museum piece, and its story ends mid-sentence because a studio died on schedule. For a narrow audience, none of that stops it from being funnier, stranger, and more affectionate toward its own cast than nearly anything released since.

Tom Hall built a JRPG out of a first-person shooter engine and filled it with people worth talking to. That the industry never got the second half is a real loss — not a nostalgic one. Go in with a patch installed, a walkthrough bookmarked, and clear eyes about the ending. What’s left is one of the great what-ifs, and a cult classic whose reputation is earned rather than inherited — provided the friction doesn’t price you out first.