Volume 15: Baroque
You wake up in a place as sinister as it is mysterious, a walled-off wasteland populated by human-shaped creatures. There’s a sad-looking man with an absurdly long neck, a brick wall of an armored soldier guarding a door, a short, impish guy in a pointy hat rambling about storage, a frail woman with horns on her head, to name a few. The sky is a deep, hazy red, and an endless, piercing howling in the distance refuses to allow any quiet. In the distance looms a massive tower, a grotesque instrument of metallic musculature and organs. It looks like a machine begging the heavens for organic life. Before you do anything or speak to anyone, you’re already hungry. Approaching the tower is the only option, aside from starving. A man with a distorted physical presence and broad, white wings appears in your path. He drops a rifle the size of a person at your feet. “Use it. There is significance in you using it,” he says.
This is Baroque.
STING’s cryptic, Sega Saturn dungeon-crawler is a bit of an odd duck for this column, in that if you boil it down to its raw parts it’s more of a Mystery Dungeon-inspired journey than a DRPG. But it is a first-person adventure, and one with real-time combat, something I won’t be messing around with much as I vastly prefer turn-based. Since Baroque is already a weird game in terms of its aesthetic trappings, I may as well let it occupy a slot on the ol’ blog while I have Mystery Dungeon on my mind. It’s topical, since Square Enix finally decided to localize Torneko’s Great Adventure, the very first of Spike Chunsoft’s roguelike series. Baroque isn’t part of that series of course, but it borrows heavily from its base mechanics to fuel all its strangeness.
Mystery Dungeon is a simple formula, as it originally appears as an effort to convert a Rogue-like experience to consoles, specifically Super Famicom at the time. You navigate dungeons made of rooms and hallways, have fateful encounters with strong enemies, stumble across random items that could help you or ruin your run, and deal with a stamina or hunger meter ticking down every few seconds. Those games are 2D, isometric, turn-based affairs, but Baroque makes it into a real time, first-person experience in which you have to move, fight, and explore more actively.
Obvious at a glance, the most fun you’ll have with Baroque is due to how grimy it is. That intro is nasty, the environments and enemies are nasty, and the things you’ll be ingesting on your desperate grasp for survival in the Nerve Tower are nasty. In games like Shiren the Wanderer you’ll be breaking open pots, eating peaches, and fighting animals. In Baroque, you’re gnawing on bones, chowing down on human(?) hearts, and fighting living nightmares. And you’ll be barely holding on for the most part, as this thing is as brutal as it can get. Especially in the Saturn version, as it’s frankly kind of janky. What good is strafing when you get hit anyways? Skill issues aside, you’ll be dying a lot. And much like the Shirens and Tornekos of the world, Baroque expects your failure, and incorporates it into its story.
How that story plays out takes a world of patience and determination, and plenty of critical thinking ability of your own outside the software. Baroque is extremely cryptic, and delivers its narrative in tiny chunks based on chance encounters with NPCs across multiple runs, and actions you might not ever think to take without a guide telling you what to do beforehand. If you do take the time to piece it all together there’s a lot of brain food to think about, with plenty of very 90s Japan-flavored nuggets of biological horror, spiritualism, and existential crises blended together in a rust-colored paste. The sheer authorship of it all, as I said recently on Axe of the Blood God (gotta get the plugs in, brother), is impressive.
Another interesting development in Baroque’s history is its remake. The only version ever localized in English officially, Baroque for the PlayStation 2 and Wii updates the visuals, expands the story (mostly with more cryptic dialogue, events, and characters), and shifts the action to third-person. But you can also toggle back to first-person, and not only does strafing work better thanks to more contemporary geometry and collision, you can also lock on to enemies. So it’s a bit easier by nature of technology, but still far from toothless. But unlike the original, Baroque’s remake has a permanent progression system. But unlike most “roguelites” that give you levels or simple stat upgrades, Baroque has to keep its street cred even when it’s ostensibly trying to be more approachable.
The remake’s progression is like an achievement system, in which you earn “Baroques” by completing non-disclosed objectives. These make your base stats higher, making further runs easier. In theory, anyway. In practice, these achievements are some of the most absurd, sicko-brained series of prerequisites you could possibly think of, minus a few obvious/easier ones. But even those won’t be triggering until you already die in the Nerve Tower at least a hundred times. So, yes, if you’re struggling you’ll eventually get some help, but you’ll still need the endless determination of a deer tick to get there. It’s hilarious, especially in comparison to how these kinds of systems work in the roguelikes of today. That’s the kind of brazen disrespect for “quality of life” I love to see.
If you’re in the mood for something weird, cryptic, and obnoxiously difficult, I really do recommend diving into Baroque head first. You’ll want to look at a guide eventually for your own mental wellbeing, but I think you ought to try a few runs without one first, especially if you’re playing the Saturn original (which is fan-translated). Oddly enough a few bizarre spin-offs are available in English on the Nintendo eShop, such as a game that’s essentially gutterpunk body horror Frogger, but the actual original game remains unlocalized. Perhaps that could change one day, but I doubt it. Luckily Saturn emulation isn’t the pain in the ass it used to be, and the translation is good quality.
Until next time, dungeon delvers.
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