Baroque Review

Written by: Darren Cartledge Posted: 20th October 2008

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We try to get to the bottom of Baroque.

Baroque Details:

	RPG
	Nintendo Wii
	Atlus
	Rising Star Games

12+

Out Now

It’s important to me to have a clear understanding of what I’m doing and where I’m going and so on when playing videogames. So when I heard about how vague Baroque was suppose to be I didn’t really know what to expect.

The story of Baroque is vague to say the least, the game starts with no real intro and you find yourself standing in a strange world inhabited by weird people. The game is set in the wastelands of the world after a gigantic disaster only known as The Blaze. You play the role of an unnamed character that can’t speak, has no memories but has feelings of overwhelming guilt!

Within the first two minutes of playing Baroque I was confused, after two hours of playing the game I was still totally confused? When you start playing your character is in the outer world, a small town occupied by strange inhabitants that feed you little bits of information to advance the games story.

As you explore the outer world you encounter an angel like character known as the Archangel who instructs you to go to the bottom floor of the mysterious Nuero tower, he then gives you a huge gun and tells you there’s reason for you using it. That is basically the only instruction you are given throughout the game so off you go to the Nuero Tower.

The Nuero Tower itself is a strange place occupied by strange meta beings that will attack and kill you given the opportunity. It is also filled with various weapons and items that you can use to aid you in your decent to the bottom floor of the tower. However, expect to die regularly as reaching the bottom floor is no easy task and death is an integral part of the games story.

Every time you die in Baroque you return to the Outer world where, you can once again interact with its inhabitants who will often have some thing new to say to you before you once again return to the Neuro Tower and try to reach the bottom, which you would expect to get easier every time you try but that’s not the case. The levels of the Nuero Tower change with every visit meaning that you will have to search for the port down to the next floor every time which is good for the games replay value offering constant variety. However it can be frustrating when you simply want the games story to progress and reveal some of it secrets.

In the early levels of the tower the games challenge is pretty good and fair, however as you progress further down you come up against hordes and hordes of quite formidable enemies and you start to get the feeling that maybe your not suppose to reach the bottom, this really adds to the frustration especially after dying a number of times.

The vagueness of the game really works against it at times as you have no clue why you’re suppose to be trying to reach the bottom of the tower, it can also be very frustrating when you die and return to the Outer world as the characters there will often feed you the same lines over and over and any weapons or items you collected during your last visit are lost.

To get the most out of it, the game requires you to invest a lot of time and patience, however the slow progression and vagueness of the games story rapidly become annoying as does the frequency that death occurs. It truly is a game for the hardcore dungeon crawler fan as most would simply find it truly annoying.

Visually the game looks dated, character models and environments lack detail and the game has a strange fuzzy look to it. Levels of the tower all look pretty much the same with only a few different themes for the game engine to randomly generate them from.

Baroque sadly features one of the worst camera systems I have ever encountered. It’s completely manually controlled but positioned at a too close angel to the character which make it difficult to see enemies and important items littered around the levels. It’s also fairly easy to miss the exit to the next floor if it’s placed in a corner.

The game features a pretty good upbeat techno soundtrack for the decent of the tower, however this changes to instrumental music when a cut-scene is triggered. The music all fits in perfectly with on screen action. Sound effects like the graphics sound pretty dated whilst voice acting is a bit hit and miss.

Barque is a strange game and whilst I understand what the developers were trying to achieve with the vagueness of the story line it doesn’t really pull it off right mainly due to the very slow progression which isn’t helped by the difficulty of the title. This is truly a game for hardcore dungeon explorer fans as most other gamers would simply give up to early on.