The game is played from the third perspective, using WASD to move and the cursor to interact with the environment. Consistent to its JRPG roots, Anachronox is a mostly linear game - it's hardly small, but there's very little freedom left for the player, short of not choosing to do a side quest. Speaking of side quests, there's a lot of them, and a lot of interesting encounters to be had too - despite its linearity, Anachronox still places a lot of emphasis on exploration. Unfortunately, this is somewhat of a double-edged sword, because the game is surprisingly stingy with giving out equipment (there's only a handful of weapons for each of the characters), and missing a piece could make the next leg of the journey much more difficult.

The side quests are usually interesting, though they as a rule involve a lot of running around; in addition, since Sly, as all good PIs, carries a camera with him, you'll often be tasked with photographing various objects or aliens. Unlike some more recent games, in Anachronox the "quest giver" is almost never obvious, so you'll be spending a lot of time talking to virtually everyone. Thankfully, most of the characters have something interesting to say and some are outright funny. This humor permeates the whole game, giving it its own unique charm and is probably the game's greatest strength. When you're not talking or wandering around, you'll be using one of your characters "world skills", which are implemented as easy minigames, to gather information or complete a task. Boots can pick locks and other characters will bring their own expertise into the mix (the most interesting, by far, will be the Yammer skill - Grumpos will incessantly talk to the "victim" about all sorts of unrelated things, which is often hilariously funny).

Character development is very streamlined, which is a bit disappointing. While there are a number of different stats, you can't choose which to improve [...]​