Baroque

When they said “it’s an RPG, dungeon crawler type, fancy giving it a look?” I jumped at the chance. I LIKE RPG games, quite a lot! I like to explore my environments, to make sure I see everything which needs to be seen, to talk to everyone I need to talk to and to gather every little collectible and drop I can find. I like to build my character to suit my style of play but most of all I like to take my time.

So here is my first problem with Baroque. There is a character stat called VT (vitality) which basically counts down constantly as you move around the environment – yes you can top up this stat by consuming hearts (ick!) but there are not that many hearts around, or by absorbing the crystals dropped by some of the ‘wandering monster’ characters, known as Meta-Beings, when they die but this is just not enough to allow for my style of play.

But lets take a step back and take a look at Baroque as a Wii game, as that’s the remit here.
There are a few things which make the Wii, as a platform, different and exciting. The first is the Wii-mote and the motion controls, the second is the overt and deliberate use of lower resolutions and bright engaging colour-palettes. Baroque takes these premises and throws them out of the window. The controls are all button and stick based – OK I’ll give you the Wii-mote ‘special attack’ move – and the combinations available with the Wii-mote and nunchuk are only just what you’d want in controlling a 3rd person game. Even with this the locations of the buttons on the Wii-mote don’t lend themselves to a smooth execution of the attack / inventory / movement / interaction elements.

The graphics piece is the real kicker though. When I loaded up the game for the first time it was, and I kid you not, like going back 6-8 years. The graphics were fuzzy, lo-def and just lacking in overall… well anything really. I’ll admit that the majority of my serious gaming time is spent on the Xbox 360, a platform which delivers some truly stupendous HD graphical loveliness, so I may be a little spoilt here but it was really hard work to get over the graphics shortcomings whilst getting to grips with gameplay which left me in a state somewhere between confused and ambivalent!

The main character, known without a hint of humour as ‘The Protananist’, emerges without memory and is instructed by an entity known as ‘Archangel’ to enter the Neuro Tower and proceed to the bottom where everything will be revealed. There’s not much more exposition at this stage, well nothing which makes any particular sense at the start anyway. We are told that after a spectacular disaster known only as ‘The Blaze’ the world and reality itself became twisted and fractured and that humans became lost in their own fantasies or Baroques to such an extent that they themselves became their own nightmares.

I took the instruction literally and, coupled with the ticking VT clock, the game took on the form of a strange race to get down through the level of the tower to find the answers. This race however is not the key to finishing the game, as by motoring through levels in the search for the next portal (you can go down but never back) I missed out on the story pieces and as a result had to go back over and over and over again to put all of the pieces together. The pieces are so bizarre however that it’s really a major leap to make some of them actually work.. and did I mention that you have to die to get there?!

Here’s the thing though.. it’s compulsive. I sat through a few sessions with my bewilderment and frustration building, willing myself to the next save opportunity but then afterwards I found myself re-thinking my progress and wondering if I’d missed anything. I’m still not convinced though, sure there are aspects of the game which appeal but the majority of the experience isn’t one I can say I enjoyed.


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