Playing Baroque for the Wii is rather a lot like overhearing a couple having an argument at a cafe: You feel vaguely uncomfortable, but still curious to know what's going on. It's not just the twisted and disturbing creatures of Baroque that will unsettle players, either. Realizing that you must repeatedly die and be reborn, stripped of all your possessions, is sure to give more than one RPG fan a case of the screaming heebie-jeebies.


You begin Baroque in a barren wasteland with no idea of who or where you are. There are a few other people nearby, but each is more twisted and confusing than the next. There's a girl with horns, a guy with a coffin strapped to his back (shades of Gungrave, there), a man whose neck has been stretched to alarming lengths, and a girl in a sack hanging from a rope. Their comments are strange and seem nonsensical. Is this a dream? More like a nightmare. An angel -- well, he's got wings, anyway -- hands you a rifle and tells you that you must descend to the bottom of the Neuro Tower and atone for your sins. It's hard to imagine what you might've done to deserve this kind of bizarre fate, but you're left with little choice. Off to the Neuro Tower you go.


Baroque belongs a sub-genre of role-playing games frequently referred to as "roguelikes," the point of which is usually little more than getting from Point A in a dungeon to Point B. In Baroque's case, your objective is to make it from the top of the Neuro Tower down through all of the randomly-generated floors to the bottom. Crawling through dungeons and slaying monsters is a familiar staple of RPGs, but roguelikes keep you from becoming too obsessed with that other RPG staple, treasure, by completely turning out your pockets if you die. When you die in Baroque, you find yourself right back where you started, without so much as a rusty knife to show for your efforts.


Even if you could make it to the bottom of the Neuro Tower without dying -- which I very much doubt -- you probably wouldn't want to, because death is the only way to advance Baroque's story. Each time you revisit your starting point, you learn a tiny bit more about what's happened from the twisted souls that are trapped in that hazy, red land with you. A catastrophe called The Blaze decimated the world and distorted reality. The creatures you encounter are what's left of humanity; those that clung tightly to fantasies called "baroques" have retained some semblance of sanity, while those who couldn't hack it devolved into fearsome monsters called meta-beings.


You'll face plenty of creepy meta-beings as you make your way down the Tower, "purifying" them with the swords and traps you find lying around. They're no pushovers and are more than happy to chase you from room to room, leaving you little opportunity for calm reflection. Somewhere on each level is a portal to the next floor down, but Baroque gives you plenty of reason to think twice about whether or not you should use it as soon as you find it. You have two health meters: one measures Vitality, and the other keeps track of your Hit Points. Your Vitality is always dropping, no matter what you do. When it reaches zero, your Hit Points begin to decrease. Once they reach zero, back to the top of the tower you go.


Purifying meta-beings rewards you with a small amount of Vitality, and consuming items like Hearts and Bones (told you this game was gruesome) will raise it even more. As long as you have Vitality points, your Hit Points will slowly recover, frequently leaving you wondering if it's in your best interests to use that portal to the next level down, which brings you closer to your goal but is populated by even tougher meta-beings, or to use up some precious Vitality to search your current level for power-ups and items.


Whatever you decide, you will die many, many times on your journey to the bottom of the Neuro Tower, but you can cheat a bit when it comes to keeping some of your hard-earned swag. Giant orbs called Collection Spheres dot the grim landscape of the Tower, and each one will hold a single item for you, which you can then retrieve the next time you're dumped topside.


That may not be enough to persuade players used to hoarding sets of armor and keeping three different kinds of shields just in case, though. Making death part of the storytelling process is certainly an intriguing and different approach to spinning a tale, but it doesn't make retracing your steps any less frustrating or repetitive. The Neuro Tower's burnt-out factory aesthetic and the otherworldly shapes of the meta-beings create an atmosphere quite unlike the typical sword-and-sorcery fare that most RPGs favor, but players may find themselves craving more substance and less style in the characters they encounter.


Playing Baroque feels alien and different, but that very weirdness is what makes it intriguing. We've played RPGs before, we know how things are supposed to work, so to encounter something that is clearly an RPG and yet so clearly not is frustrating and fascinating at the same time. If you enjoy role-playing games, you should at least give Baroque a try. You may ultimately decide that it's not for you, but I guarantee you won't find it ordinary.


If you have the choice, though, pick up Baroque for the PlayStation 2 instead of the Wii. The controls feel like they were awkwardly shoehorned into the Wii remote and Nunchuk. Using the classic controller works somewhat better, but performing simple actions like sorting your items or controlling the camera is still far more difficult than it should be. The controls aren't bad enough to keep you from playing the game, but enough of an annoyance that if you can play the PS2 version instead, you probably should.


This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.