This is a rogue-like, such as Diablo. Also like Diablo, it appears to include a small community outside of an apparently unique ladder of progress- leading either up or down. This game also has a first-person perspective, which I don’t think I’ve encountered in an RPG outside of Shin Megami Tensei and Persona.
Subtitles indicate offscreen voices in the opening cutscene. These voices are talking about sedatives and simulations and whether or not someone is conscious. We are left with the impression that the span of time we keep groundhogging over and over again is what they mean by “simulation.”
About that last part-
Baroque has recognizable RPG mechanics. Level-and-EXP-based progression with stat-building, equipment collections, implied “role-play” what with the first-person POV (nineties versions) and our self-named protagonist.
Little of which has any bearing on the player progress data recorded by the game, other than the “suspend” function. Without “suspend” (quicksave) there is no way to maintain progress in the Nerve Tower between sittings. Which places all of the onus on a complete trip without a single death.
There is a separate category of save data called “arise”, which starts you at the beginning of your most recent pass through the loop.
That’s our rogue-ladder, by the way. Diablo has the pit below the cathedral, Azure Dreams has the Tower of Monsters and Baroque has the Nerve Tower.
One of your first acquaintances on the “ground floor” urges you to hurry to the Nerve Tower before saying anything else. A moments’ distraction or idleness is paid with by either HP or VT, so you might decide to hurry up on your own out of a vague sense that doing expected things has positive results.
No one ever says so, in so many words. But it’s an intuitive assumption.
With some effort, it bears out this time. Setting foot in the Nerve Tower, alone, does nothing. Relief is eventually offered by monsters called “grotesques.” Upon death, they turn into little white spheres, along with any other item drops. The spheres are what keep things somewhat comfortable, as killing grotesques for spheres regularly is the only way to keep VT topped off.
To start with the familiar-
HP is, of course, hit points. You want them as far above zero as possible and taking hits make the number go down.
So long as you don’t get poisoned, HP counts slowly toward its upward limit, based on leveling. This slow recovery happens as long as VT is above zero and VT ticks away, roughly, with the seconds. Running out of VT will cause your HP to drain rather than heal. Without a quick infusion of VT, this drain can kill you.
So the solution is killing grotesques whenever possible. While you’re grabbing the VT orbs and trying not to take hits, it also pays to make prompt use of any restoratives you come across. If either HP or VT is full, they usually bump up your upward limit.
Conservation is best saved for after you’ve KO’d a few times. By then, you should be a little more acclimated to how long-term play works.
Speaking of- levels and stats do not carry over between KOs. Neither does your personal inventory but items can be secured in a kind of dead-drop.
A bit of a grind, really. But people who play through the second quest of LoZ Outlands for their blogs don’t get to complain about difficulty.
With care and repetition, it becomes apparent that the tower is only so long. Or…I guess…its successive basements so deep, since that seems to be the direction we’re heading. If you have a few hours and are willing to roll with some trial-and-error, you could, conceivably, clear the whole basement in one sitting.
One must not count their chickens before they hatch. It pays to see through sticky situations. A recent favorite of mine is running low on both VT and HP surrounded by grotesques I couldn’t possibly kill in the time in takes to survive contact. Like many rogue-likes, Baroque has randomly generated floors. Strategizing must therefore happen in somewhat broad strokes.
It is possible to survive those situations but it is also possible to die because of HP/VT. The random level-generation accounts for a lot of stuff like item drops. A little bit of patience can be surprisingly rewarding.
So things get punishing. What’s actually going on, though?
Rather soon, you realize that you begin the same time loop over and over again, with each death. In some loops, there are unpredictable cues and statements about how the particular loop you’re in right now relates to the other loops. Clustering, usually, into A. it’s different this time or B. it’s never different.
My first death occurred in the Coffin Man’s “training ground”. This triggered a cut scene of a coffin-like suspension chamber. With the context of an earlier cut scene, it makes sense to assume that the player character is inside it.
If you managed to talk to the Archangel before that point, he says that, at “this time”, he exists where he stands and, simultaneously, somewhere else. He says that this “is because this is not the real world”. He goes on to say that, eventually, the player character will awaken to a reality where such “illusions do not exist”.
After dying during the training of the Coffin Man, the Archangel treats you as if there is nothing to say or explain. He appears surprised as he notes that you are, apparently, struggling to speak, and have lost your memory.
A background observation slips through before your muteness and memory loss are apparent. The Archangel says that, if that’s the only problem you have than you’ve been lucky. He realizes it is not the only problem when he observes your (somehow) apparent memory loss.
If, at that point, we are truly free of the simulation and have entered the real world for which the sim was a model…it would make sense if things happened suddenly that were not expected to those who appear to be in charge. Accidents happen in real life. It may or may not be relevant to note that this is the first time I’ve encountered one of his most well-known lines: “(t)here is significance in you using it”, as he hands off the Angelic Rifle.
(The Angelic Rifle will level any grotesque you encounter but it only has five shots and I have not seen any ammunition item drops)
At this point, I have a few questions. One of them is how many of these events happened because of something I did, immediately prior? Did I get the second suspension chamber cut scene because I died in the lair of the Coffin Man? That had also been my first death. Could the second suspension chamber cut scene simply be triggered by your first death?
Neck Thing, one of the NPCs clustered outside of the Nerve Tower, says that the Coffin Man makes him sick by profitting off of the catacombs. This tempts me to attribute the recent change of circumstances to dying under the roof of the Coffin Man. During the second suspension chamber cut scene, one of the off-screen voices asks if “he” just died. Two contrary opinions follow: “this one is garbage to” and “it’s off the charts!”, as if two people saw the same thing and had opposite reactions.
Less defensible but I can’t help but wonder: the suspension chamber cut scenes imply that the simulation is created in concert with your unconscious mind. If the oneiric projections are the basis for representations in the simulation, then consider this: there is a figure for whom you feel instinctive discomfort. You have no idea whether he is a human being or not or what his life and thoughts consist of. Regardless of his humanity or lack thereof, he is one of those whom the Archangel calls “distorted ones”.
Their lives and thoughts must consist of something, though: however incomprehensibly “distrorted” they may be, they are obviously sentient.
Yet for no reason that you are aware of, you give this person a wide berth. He carries a coffin on his back. He is both dangerous and duplicitous and appears to enjoy a kind of power. This I think is implicit in his ability to somehow profit from what happens in the catacombs.
One thing your subconscious might be wrestling with is what just happened, immediately before going under. Perhaps you were compelled to step into the suspension chamber yourself. Maybe you volunteered for it. It entailed a degree of risk, which your subconscious would also necessarily be aware of.
The whole notion of what just happened could make a menacing impression on an unconscious and suggestable mind. You may have thought, before losing consciousness, that this suspension chamber could well be your coffin. Something like the Coffin Man would make sense as a projection of your unconscious mind. If that happened, then such a projection might be something that the simulation drapes one of its NPCs in. Especially if this NPC has some sort of direct link to the life-support or a background program for the narcotic sleep control. Something not so different from the renegade programs portrayed in The Matrix: Reloaded and Revolutions.
An association between the second suspension chamber cut scene and the Coffin Man seems likely. A simulation-based one writes itself.
This is not the only possibility but it is easy to dwell on. At this point, you are aware that dying in the Nerve Tower and repeating the loop all over again is the most basic game play experience. Whatever else happens, whatever may be true about the context of your plight, that much has proved reliable. Being locked in a simulation would accomodate this.
As eternal as the time loop may be, though, the locals do not appear unanimous on it.
Repeated passes through the loop will also eventually draw your attention to a number in the lower right corner of the inventory screen, when hovering over the (so far) changeless presence of an item called “myself”. When you start off, the number next to your “self” is 0. With each death in the Nerve Tower or complete passes through it, the number goes up. The opening cutscene features a montage of images including a black screen with ‘-1’ in the lower right corner.
On the subject of whether every pass is unique or every pass is the same, this stands out. It is the only thing that is visibly changed with every pass through the loop. The dialogue of the distorted ones change as well but with each fresh loop it’s almost as if the prior loop might not have happened. Each floor below the Nerve Tower is randomly generated. The growing number of “selves” is the only clear evidence of consistent, long term progress on the “arise” memory card data (other than wherever the NPCs are in their dialogue trees).
There are other ways that long term progress can manifest, if one is bold, observant and persistant. With the ability to make multiple passes through the Nerve Tower with no relief but the “suspend” quicksave, you encounter things called Sense Spheres. On the original Sega Saturn version of Baroque, items tossed into Sense Spheres would appear around the last one on the sixteenth basement floor. I am, however, doing this on the PS1.
The PS1 features its own unqiue distorted one: Thing Thing. Thing Thing normally tells us about how he collects things that get spat out of a Sense Sphere just outside the Nerve Tower. Yes, it was always there- but nothing draws your attention to it early on, except its relative closeness to the Archangel (or his projection or bilocated presence). Anyway, deck Thing Thing in the face and he will offer to return up to five articles you previously threw into the lower Sense Spheres.
With a lot of care and maybe some luck, Thing Thing enables a way to add some cumulative progress to successive passes through the Nerve Tower. With adroit judgement of the things you send to the surface, you can leave yourself equipment to start your journey with or power-ups that buff said equipment or even level you up before setting foot in the Nerve Tower.
This, however, is juat a first impressions post. More to follow
AilixChaerea 