Played a good bit last night. Finished and failed my first run through the tower which supposedly doesn’t matter? I was hoping to make it to the bottom first try but by floor 7 I was doing very little damage.
My first real run though has started off great. No sword found until floor 3. I’m using the quick guide from the nerve tower site to keep some of the mystery while still making progress.
I’m going to be the odd duck here.
I played for about an hour and I…kind of hate it?
At first, I didn’t like the 1-stick controls (my emulator initially had movement mapped only to d-pad, and that was even worse. Remapping to the analog stick helps a lot). I got used to them pretty quickly though.
But there’s something about the flow of this game that unsettles me. It’s the absence of music. It’s the constant need to go in and out of the inventory menu. It’s the lack of sound effects. Many things that “should” have a sound effect seemingly don’t (hitting enemies, item pickups). It all adds up to just a fairly unpleasant package overall, at least to me.
Another game could get away with not explaining things, expecting me to piece it together, but it would have to play well.
It feels a bit like I am playing an unearthed prototype version of a good game. There’s unpolished and then there’s unfinished.
This seems like a really nice thing to have in lieu of a manual. There’s a primer on the mechanics here as well
Played the Saturn version for a little while. I like the graphics, atmosphere and general weirdness of this one, but the game play is really lacking. Way too much heartbeat sound effects going on as well.
I’ll probably play at least a bit more, but I was curious if someone who has played a good amount of Baroque can answer this: Does the basic game play get more interesting than pointing the camera in the general direction of an enemy and hitting the attack button?
In gameplay it’s like a mix of King’s Field and Mystery Dungeon, with the Mystery Dungeon-ness coming from the general roguelike setup but also the specific way that internalizing things about items and their uses (and sometimes alternate uses) is a big part of how you progress. If you’ve played entries in Chunsoft’s series then some things are immediately familiar: throwing items, limited ways to smuggle items between runs, the division between ‘corridor’ and ‘room’ and spell-like effects that specifically target entities inside the ‘room’ where they’re used.
I don’t think I knew you could strafe before reading that…
I guess L and R on my controller weren’t bound so I guess I’ll have to fix that next time I play.
Maybe you should try the PS2/Wii version too? Those have added a lot of sound effects and music. Although, it’s arguable if you’ll think it’s “good” for that, haha. It also has a third person mode, which is a nice addition.
I’m up for it! I’ve had it sitting in my emulator for a long time so it’s great to have a reason to get to it. I’ll be playing the spanish translation of the PSX version because why not. I’ll give it a go tonight and report back!!
I switched over to the PS1 version of Baroque now, after having played a few hours of the Wii version. Playing the remake certainly helped me get a hang of the original much more. It felt like I was right at home, which was nice. Finished the first run of the Nerve Tower on my first go.
It’s interesting to see the differences between the two so clearly. The Playstation original definitely has a thicker more sinister atmosphere to it. The mechanical clangs and industrial noise of the Nerve Tower is much more emphasised here, compared to the Wii versions rock music. It’s deliciously gritty and makes me feel uneasy at every step. This absolutely slaps, my dudes.
I also looked up the Saturn version on Youtube, and it seems like the PS1 version has more music and sounds?
Here is the comparison between the Saturn original and the PS1 version that conrrrrrrr posted above
good lord, that is one creepy game!! the unsettling and atmospheric sounds coupled with the fumbly controls deliver a real tense vibe. it feels tough but fair so far, I managed to get to the second weapon. the spanish translation is horrible, and the text doesn’t fit the screen half the time so they just end words short with a dot, making the item menu basically unreadable. oh well lol, adds to the hard-to-parse atmosphere.
I don’t know if I personally agree with the way they heavily editorialized (if that’s the right word) their presentation of the differences. Feels like it might be leading the reader to a particular opinion more than I’d like. If it were me collecting all of this information I would probably have been keen about simply presenting it more plainly, without my personal opinions on the matter, for the reader to make up their own minds. But I don’t know what their goal with the website was either, this is just my silly thoughts of this kind of thing.
Anyway, I played some more, finished another run and fired the Angelic Rifle at the bottom of the Neuro Tower again. So I am at the same spot where I last stopped playing the Wii version. This game really rocks when you are in a tough situation, but get a lucky break with the help of some clever item management. Got some helpful Attack and Defense upgrades for the last few floors which barely brought me over the finish line.
The PS1 translation calls that thing the Archangel is impaled on the “Sense Sphere”, but I gotta say I much prefer the Wii/PS2 remake calling it the “Consciousness Orb”. That’s just such a delicious thing to call a giant, spiky land mine.
Yeah, I’ve had to deal with my consciousness orb many times in the past.
You gotta love a game that on the first five minutes of gameplay gives you “Seed, Hope, Glass” as inventory items while completely refusing to elaborate lol
I’m extremely into it though. It’s the perfect mix between thematic and narrative esotericism with a mostly comprehensible game loop. I also really like the game-feel in the Saturn version, in the sense that it feels like an arcade and faster paced take on the King’s Field formula of real-time first person RPG.
Those are some pretty good items!
On my latest run I’ve been manipulating an item called Convergence that pulls all the grotesques on the floor into the room you’re currently in. Them I’ve blasted them with items that hurt all enemies in the room. It helped that I was super lucky with special healing items this time too.
This game is really cool, and it’s fun to figure things out as you keep going. I realized that the big orbs on certain floors are Sense Spheres, and if you throw an item into one it will later appear in the outer world. There is guy with a funny head if you walk straight forward from spawn and then to your left, he holds up to five items for you.
I have proceeded further in the story, and I think I am on the right track to finishing the game.
I finished the game this afternoon with a splendid run where basically everything seemed to go my way. I had a Comet sword with me that I had been using in two other runs, so it was pretty decked out, and I got extremely lucky with powerful healing items that I somehow ended up not really needing thanks to some good ass brands and wings that gave me faster healing and 25% slower vitality depletion. By the end I was basically a freaking tank.
Knowing now that you can throw items into the sense spheres at the very end of a run would’ve probably made this game even easier if I were to do it again. It basically means that you can keep a lot of powerful items, and if you’re lucky every run will give those items more attack and defense. There are some chunky enemies at the end, but a lot of them can be dodged surprisingly easily.
Anyway, those last two runs where I scrounged together all of these plot necessary items and got some story sequences were pretty dang good. It’s a really neat game when you figure out the mechanics and everything you’re supposed to do to progress further. If I would give a tip it’s to keep an eye on the characters in the outer world and interact with them, because they are surprisingly more important than they first might seem.
I might go back to the Wii version too, because why the heck not. I’ve been Baroque pilled.
Alicia has just been sat in bed playing Baroque on her little emulation system the last few days or so. She stopped playing Zelda for it!
Don’t Baroque shame me.
Where does it come from? Baroque’s “desolate, surreal, most likely rusty industrial hell” aesthetic, I mean. Off the top of my head, I can only come up with three other instances of similar things – it seems to start and take off in Japan in the late ’90s, with the advent of early, uncanny 3D.
There’s Garage: Bad Dream Adventure (Windows, 1999).
There’s Nazo-Oh (PS1, 1996).
Then personally I associate it with a stageplay I once translated called Padalama Jugulama (2014) – the picture doesn’t quite convey it, but rest assured that it takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where all the food is chickens raised under terrifying conditions in a humongous central tower, shipped out by freight train to a starving wasteland.
Of course, Silent Hill (PS1, 1999) flirts with the same thing – just doesn’t go as surreal, or as desolate, or at all post-apocalyptic. Some of Amanita Design’s output (moments in the Samorost series; bits of Machinarium) comes somewhat close as well.
There was something in the water – but who put it there? Was there a particularly influential film, or a video game, that planted the seeds?
