Now I remember why I never beat this game ten years ago. :/

It's a brilliant game, but to say it's unpolished as ever would be an understatement. Countless glitches have stood in the way of progress as I've been playing this, from freezing during every battle to becoming permanently stranded on Anachronox, and even starting a new game the first few times inexplicably had me in a black void with nothing but Boots and a floating Anachronox symbol without the intro playing until I reinstalled, but this is the first one I've had no luck in overcoming.

Shortly after you assume control of Paco, there's a part where you take an elevator downwards and a cutscene plays. After the folks from Democratus finish speaking to each other, the error in the enclosed screenshot appears, and after clicking it closed, I'm in control of Paco in complete darkness. I can still open the menus, hear sounds, and even see the world-skill in the corner when I press ctrl, but my character and the game world itself is completely black. I tried searching for "commbase not played from real game?" and the variables, but found nothing regarding my problem.

Is there an easy fix? Something I can do in debug or with a save editor before taking the elevator? Do I need to load a save from an earlier point, and if so, from how far back?

Oh, thank GOG. My nearly two week hiatus is finally over, I can get back to playing again. I would have been playing days ago if the command for variables was "var", "cvar", or any of the other possibilities I tried. I even resorted to "help", "please help", "i will kick you", "throw leaflet at grue", and "cvarlist", but it didn't help at all. Apparently, the addition of the word "game" was all I really needed this whole time.

I don't know why this happened, but I do know that they really need to document these things more. This and command line options. I was legitimately worried that literally nobody on the face of the earth would know or remember the command to manually set variables in this game. I'm curious as to how you managed to solve this, but more than that, I'm grateful. Thanks again.

Can either of you tell me what I did wrong on mine??? I was standing in the middle of space, no elevator that I could see.

What the hell was THAT?

(I'm talking about this is what happened when I loaded the savegame from the other thread.)

I've attempted to answer that in the other thread. I've achieved consistent results from several machines and operating systems, so it appears to have been a total fluke on your end. You seem to have already resolved it, I'm not sure how, but I imagine you haven't been able to repeat it again after it fixed itself. That sort of thing will happen with this game, yeah. :/

Rho will not walk after picking up first block in the 2nd puzzle at Temsil. I cannot move her to any empty spaces .