Baroque

2026-05-10
The creak of my old Saturn controller answers the dull thudding of my mute character's heart as I shuffle through another rusted hallway. Somewhere up ahead a furnace groans. Somewhere below a grotesque gnaws on god knows what. Baroque is an Event-Horizon-ass dungeon, all blood and brushed metal and indistinct industrial dread. And for the first three floors I'm ready for the blood orgy crescendo. The lighting is doing something. The sound design is doing more. I'm ready to ride this thing wherever it's going.

Then I remember I have to fight.

Combat is real-time and rancid. Tank controls, no real skill or kiting like King's Field, just stand and deliver like Edward James Olmos. Vitality ticks down constantly, pushing you ever onward. Health is also a war of attrition, every fight whittling you down unless you're lucky enough to scavenge up some entrails to slurp up. I get pinned in a corridor on a late floor and three lightning cyborg angels, each capable of one-shotting me, take turns clapping my cheeks. And we're back to the start. Oh, did I mention this is a roguelike?

Immediately tired of the combat, I follow a guide. I'm stuck in a story loop the guide doesn't even mention. I run the entire dungeon top to bottom 3 times with no progression. On the next run I bump into Eliza on floor 12 and somehow the world remembers to advance.

Eliza tells me I've driven her life into chaos. "Was it just a game to you?" Sorry, Eliza. A large green woman with her tits out has just punched me and then literally farted herself off into the distance (I think she's my wife now). I have bigger tits--er, fish to fry.

The story when it finally arrives is wanky SMT-lite about psychos trying to usurp God by giving it a migraine or something, and you kill God, and then the game goes "again." Fine. The vibes hold. We have obscene monsters with such creative names as Neck Thing, Sack Thing, and who could forget Box Thing? Your inventory fills up with entrails, torturers, bones, and parasites. The Saturn version I played looks significantly better than the PS1 port--the lighting is the entire point of this game and apparently the ports butcher it.

My favorite part of playing Baroque was the time I spent on nervetower.neocities.org, a straight-out-of-1999 Neocities fansite full of low-poly screenshots and lovingly assembled lore. That early-internet glow, flashing gifs, repeating pixellated backgrounds, all hand-built detail and obsession. The site has all the charm and vibes of the game without thrusting a mediocre roguelike in your lap. And it certainly didn't take me 3 hours to figure out how to patch and run it on my Saturn. The site rules; the game is like being farted on by a corpulent nude olive green woman who then flees.