Baroque (Wii)

Death is not only inevitable, it's required.
4/18/2008 3:08 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 2

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.