Anachronox
Ion Storm - 2001 - Available from gog.com
Humour in video games can be a hard thing to get right, with many more failures than successes. One of the more interesting successes is
Anachronox, a 2001 roleplaying game set in the distant future. Humanity has colonised (alongside various alien races) Anachronox, a floating city made up of rotating sections inside a huge sphere of alien origin. The sphere enables FTL transit across many worlds. Your character, down-on-his-luck private investigator Sly Boots, is drawn into a mystery that starts off small in scale but eventually becomes huge in scope, taking in the fate of the galaxy, alternate realities and a mind-bending number of plot twists.
The humour is absurdly brilliant, taking in everything from satire on detective and SF cliches to riffing off superhero stories and governmental philosophies. It also has some of the craziest ideas to appear in an SF video game, taking in a miniaturised planet that joins your team as a party-member (to the disquiet of everyone you later meet - "Is that a planet floating behind you?") and a fantastically-developed sequence which pays tribute to silent movies by not involving any dialogue at all.
The game has not aged well graphically, but if you can look beyond the surface, one of the richest and most imaginative games in the roleplaying pantheon awaits.
See also:
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and the
Mass Effect trilogy draw more than a little inspiration from this game, but are much more po-faced; Gearbox's
Borderlands series also employs a nice line in humour (but not as good as this).
Play if you like: Douglas Adams, Harry Harrison, Terry Pratchett.
