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| Talk to everyone or the shuttle won't land. |
We're there to meet a scientist named Rho Bowman, because Grumpos thinks she knows a lot about Mystech. It turns out Rho has been branded a heretic because of her science and rather than being burned at the stake she and her thoughts have been quarantined at a place called the "Rainbow Sanctuary" which looks a lot like you'd imagine a mental institute. To get to the Rainbow Sanctuary, which of course is out of limits to just anyone, I have to deactivate some lasers. It's a pretty easy and straightforward quest, especially since the guard by the lasers tells me exactly what I need to do to deactivate them. Why make things difficult, after all? I was going to find out some way or other anyway. I find Rho in the middle of a very interesting Mystech experiment. It's so interesting in fact, it's going to be the cause of all of Sunder being blown apart. But I am getting ahead of myself a bit.
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| Turns out it wasn't just a side-quest. |
So far Anachronox is a very straightforward game. Interestingly enough it reminds me a lot of the so called "walking-simulators" that we've got nowadays, though I guess if anything this game would be called a "talking-simulator" because you do a lot of that. A lot. You basically need to talk to every person you see, so it's a good thing they went through some trouble to make most people's dialogue quite fun. I have yet to find this gameplay system tedious or boring, I'm actually just enjoying a story that allows itself to unfold in front of me without me having to bend over backwards too much.
There are plenty of moments where someone will ask you for something and you will think "ah yeah, I remember seeing that somewhere" or "didn't that other guy mention something about this?". In some instances people will just straight up tell you what you need to do and know or Fatima will pop up out of nowhere and scare the bejeezus out of you, to tell you what you need to know. The only times I have been stuck so far is because I forget I have skills that can be used at certain points, not because the game hasn't given me enough information on what I need to do.
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| Do we look smart enough? |
That doesn't mean that there aren't things you need to keep track of. While the quest tracker is pretty good at telling you what you need to know, suddenly it will just not do that and if you're not on the ball you might need to reload.
A good example is when I get to the Rainbow Sanctuary and one of the personnel offers to guide me to Rho's lab. We pass four doors that require a color combination to unlock and I decide that I want to write these down just in case. Unless you're memory is superb there is no other way to get to these combinations once the frontdesk woman is done with you. And just as I had guessed, not long after you are on an actual time limit to run the heck out of Rho's lab to save your behind from being blown into space.
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| Oh oh, someone left their luggage unattended. |
The game is pretty obvious with the fact that you might need the combinations, but it doesn't outright tell you. I enjoy that though. It outright tells me so much else that the out of nowhere "where you paying attention now mug?" elements can either be taken as fun or frustrating. But I am ready for them, in fact I always thought there were going to be more of them. In my opinion the game keeps it at a good level.
Being an old game though you need to be prepared to redo things you've already done and consider exhausted after you trigger the start of a quest. It doesn't matter if you've talked to some person or tried to interact with a certain object. Some times they just won't do what you need them to until you've triggered the quest. For instance, I managed to get a ticket for Sunder on Sender Station Station before I got the quest to get tickets. The game couldn't read the fact that I already had a ticket in my inventory, and so kept telling me to get a ticket I already had. Fortunately this didn't prevent me from actually using the ticket when I needed to.
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| The laser quest is much easier than they make it sound. |
Rho's experiment with the Mystech triggers an event that tears Sunder apart, I guess the name should've been taken as some sort of foreshadowing. Everyone on the planet dies, which apparently is pretty much every scientist in the known universe, because that is where they hang out. But we make it out of course, after a little asteroid-dodging mini-game.
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| Some you need to dodge, some you don't. Better guess right! |
The blast knocks out the shuttle we're on though and the gang don't get rescued until they've been floating around aimlessly in space for 2,5 weeks. We get to see some scenes from these days, and they're pretty funny. Overall I quite enjoy the tone and writing of Anachronox, it's definitely my kind of humour.
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| Sunder goes kaboooom. |
By the end of the 17 days in space we get taken in by a place called Votowne on the planet Democritus. I've heard of these people before, some guy on Anachronox told me they vote on exactly everything which pretty much paralyzes their ability to get anything done. And of course, as I land there and need help to get the shuttle fixed, I first need to make sure to vote in the daily elections. In fact if I don't vote, they are going to kill me. And I can't just vote any which way, I have to vote the same way the High Council does or they won't want to help me. So I set out to... yes you guessed it... talk to people about how they are going to vote.
So far I've only been able to find out that they are going to vote NO to allowing marriages between locals and extraterrestrials, so I have a lot more prying and talking to do to find out about the other seven matters before we can leave this place.
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