What Is Baroque?

A roguelike where death is not the failure state. Death is the plot.

Baroque is a role-playing game by Sting Entertainment, released for the Sega Saturn in Japan on 21 May 1998. The world has ended once already, in a cataclysm called the Blaze. What is left is a wasteland, one town of damaged survivors, and the Neuro Tower, a vast structure grown around the place where humanity tried to study its god.

You play a boy with no name, no voice, and no memory, carrying nothing but guilt for a sin he cannot recall. A being called the Archangel hands him a rifle and a road to redemption: descend to the bottom of the tower and purify the Absolute God, who waits there insane. The tower reshuffles itself on every visit, and when the boy dies, and he will die, he wakes in town with the story one scene further along.

A PlayStation port followed in 1999, a full remake for PlayStation 2 and Wii in 2007 and 2008, and an enhanced port of the Saturn original for Nintendo Switch in 2020. The original never left Japan in its own era; the West met Baroque through the remake, ten years late.

Baroque North American PlayStation 2 box — **THE WESTERN DOOR**The North American PlayStation 2 box: the version through which the West finally met Baroque, in 2008.

THE SHAPE OF IT

What you actually do

Descend

Randomly generated floors of the Neuro Tower, fought in real time. Find the portal, go down, and try to reach the god at the bottom before the tower kills you.

Eat to live

Two gauges rule the run: hit points and vitality. Vitality drains constantly, and when it empties your health follows. Flesh and hearts restore both, and eating at full gauge raises the maximum.

Die forward

Death sends you back to town stripped of items and levels, but scenes unlock, dialogue changes, and the tower itself grows new floors. Progress is measured in knowledge, not in saves.

Trust nothing in your bag

Items arrive unidentified. A meal may be rotten, a box may explode, and anything can be thrown: at enemies, for damage, or at townsfolk, who sometimes throw something better back.

WHY IT MATTERS

The short case

1998, first person, 3D

A real-time, first-person, fully 3D roguelike on home console hardware, years before the genre had a Western name for what it was doing.

Story through failure

Its narrative delivery, fragmented, contradictory, unlocked by dying, read as a flaw in 2008 reviews and reads as ahead of its time now.

One man's obsession

Conceived, directed, and written by Kazunari Yonemitsu, who built it out of European film, tarot, and psychiatry after a career of lighter games.

The Baroque Gallery The History of Baroque

What Is Baroque?

THE SHAPE OF IT

WHY IT MATTERS

THE FIRST WORD