REVIEW: Baroque
(I’m returning to one blog post per review. I liked the idea of Half-dozen Games (mostly because bird puns), but a couple posts per year doesn’t really justify the price I pay for my site domain.)
Developer: Sting Entertainment
Publisher: ATLUS
Released: 2008 (USA)
Platforms: PS2 | Wii
Nostalgia may be doing a lot of heavy lifting for me and this game.
The Wii version of Baroque was the first Roguelike/lite that I was introduced to in my teens. A school friend wanted me to give it a try. It took an hour for me to rage quit.
Nowadays, roguelikes are one of my favorite genres, even though I’m terrible at playing them. Funnily enough, I consider Baroque a “casual” roguelike, because it’s relatively easy once you get to understand its obtuse design.
I mentioned nostalgia earlier, because I think it’s what kept me so engaged while playing this game. I became entranced to overcome the game that defeated me as a kid. But critically, I’d say it’s “average” at best.
Combat is extremely stiff and clunky. Enemies can quickly swarm and stun lock the player to death. Due to animation timing, I exclusively used lightweight swords to finish attacks as fast as possible and weave through crowds.
Thankfully, the player also gets a stun lock attack, which was my primary strategy early in my playthrough. However, the window to swing again before the enemy retaliates is narrow. Broadswords are too slow for this exploit, which makes them “objectively” the worst weapons in the game.
On a related note, it’s mandatory to use a Wii Classic controller. Normally, the special stun lock is bound to jerking the Wii remote. Timing is unreliable this way. Mashing the B button on the Classic is essential to a smooth experience.
For a roguelike, Baroque doesn’t offer much in the way of builds. Nothing is as wacky as Binding of Isaac or Enter the Gungeon; it mostly boils down to damage output, health bars, and immunities.
Your equipment slots can provide status immunities, augment damage or resistances to a whopping 3 elements (fire, ice, and electric), or simply boost raw Attack, Defense, or VT (the hunger meter). Health and VT caps can be broken by eating flesh and hearts.
There are only two general categories of swords: regular swords and broadswords… so only one type of sword. Aside from a secondary effect (e.g. draining life from enemies), they all handle the same.
Boxes, Bones, Disks, and Torturers (kind of like magic scrolls) can also assist or hinder delves through the Neuro Tower. Most of them fall under similar categories as discussed earlier, but they can at least add variety to how you deal damage.
The most flexible and layered customizations are the Parasites. You can fuse two of them and affix them to equipment or even the player character. For example, I like a Leth/Ache hybrid so that I’m immune to Lethargy and can eat rotten food without the side effects. I wish the game offered more options like these.
Even with Parasites, there’s really only one way to victory in Baroque: maxing out Attack and Defense to broken levels. Swords and Coats cap at +99, and an ATK/DEF Parasite adds another +99. At that point, no status condition or enemy attack matters. You can 1- to 3-shot everything, so the game switches gears from “Mash B Simulator” into a Speedrun through the Neuro Tower.
Admittedly, I found this straightforward progression to be comforting and mindless fun. It’s repetitive, but decent to unwind with after a busy day of work.
A few of Baroque’s essential mechanics are unexplained and confusing, to the point that I needed a guide to sort them out (not even the official instruction manual saved me). For instance, punching NPCs causes them to spit out throwaway dialogue, except when done to the Collector, which opens up an important menu.
Items are transferred from the Neuro Tower to the Collector by throwing them into “Consciousness Orbs.” However, the devs were extra sneaky by placing the first Orb in the Tower on the ceiling. You have to move the camera up to see it, a feature that’s entirely useless for the rest of the game.
To initiate dialogue with NPCs, you either throw items or run towards them. With the latter, it’s possible to walk away and interrupt specific voice lines forever (unless you listen back to them in the game’s database like an answering machine).
All these features technically make sense when given context, but their implementation is unusual for standard video game design. The lack of tooltips or tutorials in-game creates what I like to call “guidebook bait,” so that you’re forced to purchase additional merchandise that explains it (ignoring the fact that GameFAQs exists).
As if Baroque wasn’t clunky enough, it features an abysmally translated story. The game is heavy on metaphors and symbolism, but it's victim to a lousy job for its English text.
I think I’ve parsed out some of the mess, but I’m not a hundred percent confident. The themes I picked up are the weaponization of religion, and embracing the chaos of existence itself. There’s a bunch of smaller Christian and “witchcraft” references sprinkled in (e.g. some items and one enemy are named after Tarot).
There are hints that the entire game is a hallucination by the protagonist, which is a stupid cliché that I reject entirely. The “just a dream” scam twist isn’t mandatory for the symbolism to work. I like to pretend that all the cool monsters really exist in Baroque’s world.
I’m glad that I was reunited with Baroque, even if it’s incredibly flawed and bare bones in areas. It’s not a game worth scrambling to get a copy of, but if you need a casual roguelike, give it a consideration. Just have a guide at the ready.
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Check out some articles where I talk about the various Meta-Beings! Go to part 1 here.
