The Spin-Off Shelf: Syndrome, Shooting, Typing
Sting treated Baroque less as a single game than as a world to be re-entered from odd angles. The first branch was literary. Novelist Mariko Shimizu wrote a prequel novella, Baroquism: Syndrome, serialized in Sega Saturn Magazine before the game shipped, written blind enough to avoid spoiling it, and followed by a second serial, Baroque Interludium, bridging the two stories.
Shimizu's prequel became a game itself: Baroque Syndrome, a visual novel for PlayStation released 27 July 2000, telling the world's last days before the tower from inside the delusions. It returned on iOS and Android on 11 January 2019, Sting's first Baroque revival of the mobile era.
The stranger branches are the PC ones. Baroque Shooting (Windows, 17 July 2000) is a top-down shooter: an Angel descends the Neuro Tower, stacking item pickups to reshape its fire pattern, speed, and power. Baroque Typing (Windows, downloadable 22 May 2000, packaged 20 March 2003) teaches typing inside the apocalypse. A full online Baroque was announced for 2005 to 2006 and never surfaced. The remake was then re-cut as Baroque FPS for iOS (26 December 2011), restoring the first-person view on phones, and in 2022 a free mobile action spin-off, BAROQUE: Become a Meta-Being, sent a reincarnated creature called Grue hopping through the tower. In December 2025, Shooting and Become a Meta-Being were both reissued for Steam and Switch in enhanced Reversed and Revive editions.
