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Veteran game designer Tom Hall is into Anachronox. Really, really into it. When we sat down with him at Ion Storm's impressive penthouse office suite in Dallas, he went to great lengths to make sure we got as intimate with the game as we could. This included his personal voice-overs for every single line of dialogue in the game, in character. So when Sly Boots' robot sidekick asked, "Do you want to see my batteries?" Hall visibly stiffened and intoned the line through his nose.

This preview article also appears in the April issue of Computer Gaming World.

At least he can rest assured that if the whole game-design thing doesn't work out, he'll have a career in voice-acting. Not that he needs to worry. Even at this early stage, Anachronox's unique blend of humor and story appear to transcend current state-of-the-art gaming - not necessarily technologically, but in a far more critical category: gameplay.

Anachronox, in fact, could be one of those rarities that cause everyone in the game industry to sit up and take notice.

The strangely named Anachronox is the ghost town of a city where the game begins. This bizarre, at times gravity-defying place actually rests inside a hollowed-out planet that functions as a sort of interplanetary hyperspace hub. The planet's surface is littered with huge spikes, each of which serves as a hyperspace accelerator into a different part of the galaxy.

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The game's initially strange setting serves two functions. First off, it's just plain cool - and it features the kind of hard-edged science fiction that rarely makes its way into the RPG genre. Second, it kick-starts the game with a bit of intrigue and mystery. From the moment you set foot into the game universe, you're going to want to know the answer to one very powerful question: Why?

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Sly Boots is the trench-coat-wearing, slightly frayed hero through whom you'll piece together all the answers by taking on different missions and quests and by traveling through those cool spiky hyperspace accelerators into even cooler locales.

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Although Sly will encounter plenty of different folks along his excellent adventure (you may have up to seven different people in your party, although you'll only have three or four at one time), one constant companion is Fatima, the game's 3D interface. Fatima was once Sly's real-life personal assistant. When she died, Sly had her digitized into immortality - against her will. The end result is a unique, if slightly bitchy, game interface. In addition to keeping track of goals and quests, Fatima also records key parts of your conversations and can make snapshots of important moments in the game.

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