The Baroque Books: Guides, Guidance, and Report
For a game this hostile to its players, Baroque generated a surprising amount of official paper. The Saturn original received the Baroque Kanzen Guide Book in 1998, a complete guide to a game whose floors are randomly generated, which makes it less a walkthrough than a systems manual: how the tower builds itself, what the unidentified items can be, and how the Grotesques behave.
The PlayStation port received the fullest treatment: the Baroque: Distorted Delusions Official Guidebook, published by Koei in November 1999 (ISBN 9784877197551). It analyzes the tower floor by floor, documents the item data completely, and ships with a poster drawn by the character designer. Its long interview with Kazunari Yonemitsu remains one of the primary sources for how the game was made, including his account of the port's exclusive Hell dungeon.
The collector's prize, though, is Baroque World Guidance (1998), the 127-page sourcebook: art, setting documents, and long interviews with Yonemitsu, lead designer Eisaku Kito, and composer Masaharu Iwata, plus the record of influences like Bin Kimura's psychiatry that the game itself never explains. Sting reissued it in 2012 alongside the soundtrack re-release, a reprint that tells you the book never stopped being asked for. Around all three sits the Baroque Report line: a 1997 CD Data File of art and music given to pre-orders, and a series of Report books Sting published between 1998 and 2000, later gathered into the Switch port as bonus material.
