Angel’s egg maybe? I think that touches a lot of the same places.
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Not sure there is necessarily a specific origin point, but I think you can see influences of Blade Runner and Akira in Baroque. If we’re talking influential works I suppose it doesn’t get more influential than that. They fit the timeline too. In terms of other animated Japanese movies I think you’re probably right about Angel’s Egg, and I would probably add Memories from 1995 to that as well for good measure.
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I definitely see some Junji Ito there,
Gieger/Alien
Doomed Megalopolis
Serial Experiments Lain, also released in 98’
Edit: The Wikipedia article for the game says the characters are based on Tarot cards. It also cites Blade Runner and Memories, but most interesting is the concept of the tower as a uterus, and treating the enemies as microorganisms infecting the womb. cue the 92’ winter Olympics ceremony, which is bizarre. Even the sounds are quite similar to the game at points. It can be watched in full here (this moment is at 1:22)
and the early films of Jean Jeunet, of Amelie fame: The City of Lost Children and Delicatessen
-he also directed Alien:Resurrection in 97’ one year before the release of Baroque
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Oh yeah, totally some City of Lost Children vibes.
The cover itself almost feels like it could’ve been from a Baroque game, lol
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Baroque also fits perfectly in time with the post-Nine Inch Nails popularization of industrial music.
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I don’t like to say it but I’ll say it. Star Wars also popularized the more hunk-a-junk rusty sand ridden desolate post modern sci fi and baroque takes that concepts to it’s “baroquian” extremes. I think sci fi has been grappling with post sci fi since it’s inception though. in the Time Machine they shoot way past modernity to where humans have devolved, but the ruins of the past are still around them.
Mad Max is similar with Movies 1,2, and 3 getting progressively rusty dusty and weird
ironically Baroque has very little baroque about it in the classical sense
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apparently the title is meant to refer to these distorted and irregular kinds of pearl, not the baroque art style
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The colors and lighting are unquestionably baroque, though.
it ends up the pearls came first, but then the style obviously used the pearls and I would say superseded it as the base definition normally.
very different aesthetic than the game lol
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Perhaps a hint for the potential sequel: Rococo.
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Does this mean that Gothic was a prequel to Baroque?
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City of the Lost Children seems like a footnote now but you can feel its influence pollinating a number of works at the time. It was also cited as a visual influence on the original Fallout, and if you look at the imagery produced in that game you can see it, though that was gradually shed by the Bethesda sequels.
Cinematically, this kind of exaggerated and industrial world usually goes back to Lang, Murnau, etc., but every step of the way there is also influence from theater or painting or sculpture. Cinema presented the opportunity to create overwhelming, enveloping aesthetic experiences which could be distributed en masse to audiences. The world could be made elaborately strange for an instant in a single, still image, or a sculptural installation, or theater set. But staging so much artifice for the camera that there seems to be an alternate world which is solid and persistent, and which extends beyond even the lives of the fiction’s protagonists, was once a new idea, and one which novel technology could spread farther and faster than the inspirations that preceded it. “What if the qualities of this painting I like appeared to be everywhere, all at once, as the world itself is?”
Some games take a similar approach, and the endless replication of assets in a game engine can extend the boundaries of the Caligari’d or Metropolis’d world indefinitely. “What if everything you could see and move though was made from a Francis Bacon painting?”, with the response being a stretch in a Silent Hill game that feels like exactly that.
I think of Tarkovsky’s Stalker too, which takes a different approach in creating a new and engrossing world by recontextualizing what already exists and can be shot with an ordinary camera. And in a certain sense the Baroques and Silent Hills are doing something like this too, because 3D games require us to separately create an entire world and then a camera to observe it, and with this camera the player is directing, or documenting, or simply maneuvering through the experience in a way that resonates with but doesn’t map onto actions that exist outside of software.
And Stalker and Baroque and Silent Hill also all deal with images of postindustrial rot which are imbued with supernatural or divine significance, and I find them resonant because they confront the decrepit surfaces created by science and modernity and rediscover nature and gods and spirits there. In the failures of utopian projects our bodies of collective knowledge were meant to realize lies the suggestion that beyond mystery is science and beyond science is mystery again, repeating endlessly in an ouroboros that we as thinking organisms may be unable to escape. I think in Baroque’s case this comports with its narrative about the futility of dividing purity from corruption and the necessity of living and finding peace in spite of life’s apparently insurmountable contradictions.
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Booted up the Saturn version on the MiSTER, pretty interesting little game. Got wrecked my first few runs in the tower before I tried poking around a bit more (is Coffin Man’s dungeon supposed to be a tutorial?), but I’m really digging the atmospheric and noisy music and style of characters/monsters. It’s been fun to try and discover what the mechanics of the different items you find are, and I’ve liked getting glimpses of the story in the dungeons. Haven’t gotten much of an idea of what’s going on with the story but the tone of the opening cutscenes and the few characters that do talk is intriguing and makes me want to learn more about all the proper nouns they’re namedropping. Seeing my main character go through an operation(?) and other NPC’s telling me I have a big scar triggers some kinda body horror vibes for me, and I think that’s a cool thematic paring to bring with the roguelike structure, giving the dying and retrying loop a little bit more weight.
Just read up a little more on that Nerve Tower website and I’m excited to jump back in with a little more context on how to advance the plot later today. Reading through that mechanics page opened my eyes a lot too, I didn’t realize I should be throwing things at so many different NPC’s lol.
Glad I hopped in the forums and saw this thread/tried it out!
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yeah, coffin man’s as much of a tutorial as the game contains
I picked this up on PS2 near release after really getting into Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer (DS) a few months before. Both these and Izuna 2 (DS) made 2008 a bumper crop of Japanese roguelike releases over here. I was raring to explore rooms, hallways, then rooms, then tunnels, and so on! Following fresh off Shiren really fast tracked my Baroque learning curve (Not Scroll! Bone!), but at the same time made the movement/camera/combat feel more off putting. Shiren is clicky and optimized with nice colorful sprites and readable turn based combat. Baroque is sluggish to navigate, messy, with unclear real time combat. Combined with the storytelling and I bounced off it pretty quickly.
I dug out the PS2 disc and am having a much better time of it this go-around! I agree with everyone who mentioned King’s Field. Learning to love it more as a first person hack and slash hybrid makes it a lot more enjoyable. Skirting around single enemies, getting into a gaggle of fights, all fun! Was surprised to find first person and third person camera toggle on PS2/Wii has different character motion and rules. Third person has committal canned animations and you move forward slightly each attack. First person has stubbier hit boxes but you can attack while moving and without breaking motion. I guess that keeps it in line with the Saturn version.
Probably have a few more runs to go yet, but some initial impressions:
- VIT ticking down while in town and listening to dialogue is pretty intense! No free rides!
- Love the playfulness of their subtitles. Fading out when further from the speaker, Thummim’s (shoulder character) dialogue appearing vertically, mask enemy speaking in crosses. Less useful for their actual purpose and legibility, but still cool.
- I like the PS2 look for many of village NPCs. Approaching them from the distance feels like nice clear sprite poses even. There are many more misses when it comes to enemies, cutscenes, and environments though. I’ll give the Saturn version a look a little later.
- I could only imagine that being able to save and load from a memory card, for every floor and failure, would hinder people finding the fun with this kind of game. The baroque list for different ways to die helps a little, but there isn’t anything telling the player "Its ok you died, you made some progress in learning or elsewhere.
- Last run ended with: warped into room of monsters, ate unidentified invulnerability bone in desperation, cleared room, opened box from inventory, exploded and died.
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Living in a society,
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Apparently, Psygnosis (the British studio behind Lemmings) made a video game adaptation of The City of Lost Children in 1997 that was similarly hard to parse and received mixed reviews.
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I played through the first run and a half of the game with a friend over the weekend while coming down with a cold. I’m back at home and I started up a new game on my Saturn.
After clearing run -1, my friend hinted to me that you need not follow the archangel’s directions and blow the figure in the bottom layer away with the rifle but when I got there again I overthought it and must have done something wrong because when I went to walk toward the figure nothing happened. I think it may have been that I threw a punch or an item and that cut off the nonviolent exit? Anyway, I’ll be smarter next time, and I’m thinking I might take this game one run per night.
Also: I’m playing with my 3D control pad and the fully analogue movement (yes, even the triggers) is really nice. It’s not a total game changer but if you have one on hand I recommend plugging that shit in right away.
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I’ve had such an ordeal trying to play this game!
I have a Sega Saturn with an ODE, loaded up the English translation and played the first run. But I was getting a bunch of video artifacts and general issues, seems like the capacitors on this Saturn are on the way out or something. Cue me searching my house for Sega Saturns and finding 3 of them in drawers, cupboards and at the back of shelves: “Ah, here’s another!”.
One of them happens to be compatible with the ODE I already have, so I switch it over to that. Start playing some more runs, but the Saturn starts making a horrible noise and getting very hot after running for 30 mins or so.
At this point I try getting the game running on MiSTer… and it works but it just doesn’t feel right. Like really I’ve got a stack of 4 Saturns here and I’m gonna play this on the MiSTer? Unacceptable. So I buy a replacement PSU for the Saturn, but then shortly afterwards realise this is a known problem and can be fixed quite easily with a single capacitor mod to the stock PSU. I do that and the problem goes away (and I’ve got this replacement for no reason now!).
So I start doing more runs… and then I’m having this problem where randomly the Saturn acts as if I just pulled the disc out. Turns out now my SD card is having issues too!
This is a real bad game to be having this sort of problem on, as there isn’t really a way to save a run. If you save partway through and resume, you lose what you saved anyway. So I’ve lost like maybe 10 runs to stuff like this, some of them really deep and/or promising.
I replaced the SD card, and now the game seems to be running fine. I got a couple successful runs in, trying to figure out this cryptic stuff in the game but drawing a blank at this point. Did a little bit of reading and I have a vague idea what I need to do now. Started a run today and got to BF12 in pretty good shape, and then the game froze! Which apparently is a known bug.
I do like the game, though. Excellent atmosphere, very surreal and some awesome music as well. Gonna try to persevere and get to the end!
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I’m just popping into say I’m really bummed I’m just seeing this now. The PSX/Saturn version of this has been on my “to-play” list for quite a while. Excited to read through people’s thoughts!
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