Preamble: The Summer Of Sting Explained

For those who know their RPG "inside baseball," Sting is/was a name that inevitably made your ears perk up. Initially banal, then glorious, then deplorable, but never mediocre, the Japanese game studio in question started like many preeminent names in the RPG circuit, such as Atlus, by making tie-in shovelware before eventually finding itself sitting on some cash and, with new, young leadership, deciding to shake things up and get experimental. After porting vertical shooters and pinball games to home consoles and finding brief success making sports games for the SNES, such as Extra Innings and TKO Super Championship Boxing, Sting reached an inflection point when it developed Treasure Hunter G for the Super Famicom. While the game was released only in Japan, it marked the point at which Sting became inextricably associated with RPGs, a connection that still exists. Unfortunately, the studio today is a shadow of its former glory; their modern game credits suggest they are stuck in Steam/Switch port hell after solidifying their current "special relationship" with Idea Factory. Nonetheless, while their glory days might be over, Sting's mark on the roleplaying game genre is indelible for those who have decided to lower their minds and bodies two or three fathoms below the intermediate levels of the RPG iceberg.

While a few games played things "straight," the vast majority of Sting's works, at least during the heyday of their partnership with Atlus, were unconventional experiments. Some of them, such as Knights in the Nightmare, play unlike anything else in the history of video games and are downright indecipherable. Did you ever want your turn-based strategy roleplaying game also to have bullet-hell mechanics woven into its DNA, all while the combat occasionally lurches into real time? If so, then maybe Knights in the Nightmare is your cup of tea! But that's why Sting was a name you looked forward to when you saw a work of theirs was coming up: you knew it would be quirky and mesmerizing. Their games were for absolute sickos outside of the aforementioned Treasure Hunter G and maybe Riviera: The Promised Land if we are trying to be generous, but even those games have some odd Sting embellishments that set them apart. For example, Riviera has TWO modes for you to manage while you're in the field or in explorable environments (i.e., Look Mode and Move Mode), and each has its own point economy with little overlap. Does that sound overwhelming? Well, it is, and I haven't even begun to talk about its combat!

But what is this particular feature, "Summer of Sting," all about? Well, Sting made some gangster shit, and I want to talk about some of the works that best speak to their highly experimental era. As already hinted, some of these works fundamentally turn whole genres on their head and do things we have not seen since. Other works of theirs have developed the textbook definition of "cult followings," and I have always been a fan of putting games with internet fervor under a microscope to see how their reputations stack up against how they play. And before you ask, in this house we use the Northern Hemisphere's astronomical last day of summer as the benchmark for when this feature is officially out of place: Tuesday, September 22. Starting this in late August is slightly dubious on my part, but technically not incorrect. So, without further ado, let's talk about the game that I think really kicked off the wild and wacky golden era of Sting: Baroque.

What Is Baroque?

Baroque is, at least originally, a roguelike RPG where you take control of an amnesiac protagonist who lives in a post-apocalyptic world. The god of this world grew vindictive toward humanity and unleashed an event that transformed the surviving humans into manifestations of their guilt and sins. Most of these people are found in a hub world at the base of a massive tower called the Neuro Tower that you are tasked to summit, but there are others, including ones that you need to find and meet to progress the story, that live inside the tower. At the start of the game, you encounter the god of creation, Absolute God, and after this encounter, you are eventually given a gun to kill them by a figure named Archangel. As they quickly explain, even when you die in the tower, doing so is necessary to break the world from its miserable Purgatory. As you explore the tower, you'll learn more about why Absolute God turned on humanity as you also encounter other figures like Alice, Eliza, and even the protagonist's conjoined twin, who each have a plan and motive for how and why they want to defeat god.

The most noticeable part of Baroque is its stark aesthetics. The Neuro Tower is bleak, and so is the rest of the world, with you navigating one sparse or grimy industrial corridor or room after another, all while encountering horrible, twisted aberrations. To complement the game's bleak, depressing tone, Baroque features an aggressively grating, repetitive, and often discordant soundtrack that's unflinchingly brutalistic and makes playing Baroque a disquieting, sometimes uncomfortable effort. Now, all of that might make it seem like I dislike Baroque's artistic choices; let me be clear: I don't, and I love how unflinching the game is in its dedication. Take, for example, the works of Atlus or FromSoftware. In each of their cases, even when they decide to ramp up their spooky vibes or their respective game's difficulty, they hit you with gorgeous visuals and musical bops you can't help but bob your head to. Baroque tells you it takes place in the post-Apocalypse and that everyone on the planet wants to die, and dares to depict a world that drives home that, yeah, there's no coming back from this, and everyone is better off dead rather than rebuilding. It's genuinely incredible, and while it isn't "pleasant" to play or look at, the game slowly but surely becomes a "vibe piece" where you blend into its world as you continually get lopped into vicious, repeating cycles of death and rebirth.

The gameplay is notable in a few regards as well. The Neuro Tower's floors are generated via RNG, with no playthrough bound to be the same as a previous one, though certain NPCs are guaranteed to populate specific floors. To give you the sense that you are descending into Hell, your character is actually navigating down the tower rather than up it, and like many roguelike RPGs, death can come swiftly, and when it does, you restart your runs with no items or experience points besides what the Archangel provides at the start. To further drive home the Biblical references, dying is actually necessary to progress the story. And to make the theme of death and dying completely unrelenting in the game, Baroque has an interesting way in which it handles health. You have two gauges that connect to your character's health. One relates to your actual hit points, and when they reach zero, you get a "game over," and the other bar is vitality, which acts as an overshield of sorts but is constantly dwindling. If your vitality reaches zero, even if you aren't in combat, your health starts to decline progressively. No matter what's happening, you're taking damage, and one of your early unofficial objectives is to craft and find items that allow you to increase your pool of vitality and health, though that's easier said than done. The most common way to do so is to use a vitality or health restoring item when your gauge is at its maximum; when you do, rather than restoring either meter, they add a fixed amount to that bar. This adds a press-your-luck element to the game, as the RNG will very often drop multiple food items or restorative objects on you all at once. When that happens, you need to do some basic math or assess if you would rather use them to increase your stats or hold onto them in fear there might be something really nasty right around the corner.

The other gameplay mechanic, which also relates to Baroque's uncompromising, oppressive nature, is its exceptionally tight item management, as you have an incredibly limited inventory. Eventually, the game will start dropping items, armor, and weapons all around you, and with you only having so many places to put things, you need to make snap decisions on what to keep fairly regularly. On a few keystone floors, you'll encounter "consciousness orbs" which allow you to place an item from your present playthrough into it so it carries over into the next one, and you should always use these when you find or encounter them. Still, these have an inherent risk, as anything you put in the orb is locked away from being used in your present run. The combat itself depends on which version of the game you're playing. The Saturn and PS1 versions are played from a first-person perspective and clearly draw a lot of inspiration from Torneko's Great Adventure and King's Field. The PS2 and Wii versions are played from a third-person perspective and are more of an action RPG. We will get into the details later, but I greatly preferred the former more than the latter. Nonetheless, regardless of which version you play, battles are highly dependent on the items you pick up and your mitigation of negative status effects. Also, throwing items at enemies is usually a good idea, as it casts powerful spells or moves that impact all of the enemies in a room or even a floor. Nevertheless, knowing what any item can do is a mystery unless you burn scrolls on them to figure out what they do or, as I discovered, have your character gain a passive ability to know what items do by default. Otherwise, sometimes you'll throw something while a swarm of enemies is around you and discover it actually dropped your stats by a not insignificant margin, and now you're boned.

The Many Faces Of Baroque

Something that is bound to come up throughout this series is the fact that Sting has a weird relationship with its back catalog of games. Some games have been kept updated and playable on everything imaginable, including your Samsung smart refrigerators, while others have been left in the dust entirely. Baroque, however, is in a category of its own, as Sting has gone to great lengths to keep it in the cult RPG zeitgeist, but largely only in Japan. To start, the game first came out on the Sega Saturn and, in many ways, speaks to the art-house launch-era aspirations of the Saturn. It's high concept, unlike anything that could be found on competing consoles, at least until it was ported to the PlayStation, and a bit off-kilter; just like the Saturn. And just like many of the Saturn's best titles, this game was regretfully only released in Japan. Compared to the PS1 version, the original Saturn version actually looks better, has a better drawn distance thanks to how the Saturn processes backgrounds, and generally runs better, with the PS1's load times being absolutely killer in comparison. I would also say the original Saturn version has more evidence of the game starting as a PC-9800 work. It's odd to say, but seeing some of that old PC game DNA was fun, even if this version of the game really enjoys kicking your teeth in. The floor RNG is significantly tougher, there are fewer vendors in the town, and the Saturn version is just downright more difficult, which made it a bit harder to vibe with, if you ask me. The Sega Saturn version got a lightly "enhanced" port on the Nintendo Switch, but it only came out in Japan. Rather frustratingly, this version included elements of Baroque Report, a pre-order bonus for the Saturn release. It also featured cinematics from the PS1 port and PS2 remake and quality-of-life features that would have easily made it the version to recommend if it ever got an English localization!

One year after the Japanese Saturn release, Baroque came to the original PlayStation; however, unfortunately, once again only in Japan. Like the Saturn port, there's a fan translation that can help you out, and this is the version I enjoyed most. As hinted at earlier, Sting tweaked the floor RNG to be less fucked, with you needing to worry less about giant swarms of late-game enemies getting the jump on you and ruining runs just a few floors away from "victory." Likewise, that additional store vendor is a godsend. The PlayStation version also has additional cinematics and music, with a much-improved opening theme that significantly enhances what little in-game storytelling there is. Nonetheless, there's no going around the fact that the PS1 version looks slightly worse, has a noticeably worse draw distance, and a worse framerate. However, I believe those technical flaws and issues actually lead to a better experience. I don't know, but there's something about fifth-generation console fog effects that get me nostalgic, and the fact that you can't see everything as well as you can on the Saturn version makes the PS1 game a slightly spookier experience, which fits the game perfectly. Likewise, the game's lower framerate makes the gameplay a bit easier to process because everything runs slightly slower, including the movement and attacks of the enemies. So, you mix an easier experience with low-fidelity graphics, more musical variety, and snazzy, era-appropriate cinematics, and I think you get a game that exudes 90s vibes out the wazoo.

Now, this is the part of this write-up where I firmly plant my flag in the ground when it comes to Baroque. If any of the screenshots or descriptions of Baroque in this article inspire you to check the game out, I have one piece of advice: don't play the PS2 version. I get that the PS2 "remake" was a lot of people's introduction to the game and proved to be a segue into Sting's catalog of more obscure RPGs; I don't deny that. The PS2 and Wii releases are also the first legal releases of Baroque outside of Japan. Nonetheless, I think something was lost in translation when the game transitioned from first-person to third-person and swapped the 2D enemy and NPC sprites for fully rendered 3D ones. I'm not completely sick, and I'm going to tell you that the original game benefits from tank controls or grid-based movement compared to the PS2 version's third-person, action-based gameplay, but HOT DAMN do the PS2 and Wii games lack the grimy grit that makes Baroque a truly special experience. When playing from the third-person perspective, there are no surprises or environmental shocks, as your field of view is far greater and enemies rarely get the jump on you. It's weird to say, but much like the classic King's Field game, there's something "charming" about spelunking down an industrial corridor, getting jabbed in the back by an enemy when you least expect it, slowly turning to face it, and being shocked to see how much of an abomination they are. And again, I hate to sound like Grandpa Simpson yelling at clouds, but I think the 2D sprites look better and scarier than the 3D models in the PS2 and Wii remake.

If you insist on playing the remake, you're better off opting for the Wii version over the PS2 version. It's the same game as the PS2 remake, but with marginally better graphical fidelity, and if you don't have a Classic controller, you have to play it with a Wii remote, which is obviously less than optimal. But it's fine. Of the two, the PS2 version is probably the worst console option to play Baroque, with its only saving grace being that it's not impossible to find a used boxed copy on eBay, and PCSX2 runs its ISOs pretty well. At one point, this version of the game was available to play on Apple phones, but that version has since been pulled from the iOS marketplace, even though the Frogger-clone spin-off and visual novel prequel are still there. Not sure what happened there, but even if it were available, I can tell you the game played like dogshit because, like a lot of console-to-mobile ports, the digital analog sticks felt like hot garbage. And speaking of those spin-offs, BAROQUE SYNDROME and BAROQUE ~ Become a Meta-Being ~ Revive are available on Steam, but only Revive has an English localization. Syndrome, the far more interesting spin-off that actually fleshes out the story and world of Baroque, is only available in Japanese. But hey, Steam also has the weird Baroque top-down shooter that most people don't remember.

Look, Sting might have taken some wild swings during their heyday, but they had plenty of misses and really milked their IPs for all their worth to keep the lights on.

Myth Of Baroque Versus The Reality Of Playing Baroque

Alright, I've been fairly positive about this game outside of dunking on the PS2 remake, but I feel Baroque's cult reputation is completely overrated or oversold in a handful of areas. Flat-out, Baroque's story is incomprehensible. The minute the game drops you into its hub world, you're basically on your own to parse out what forces are at play and what is even driving the plot. Sure, there is the introduction with the angel character at the start of every run, but anything beyond that requires you to consult supporting media to know what the deal is with named characters or what it is the game might be trying to tell you. Worse, there are entire characters and character interactions that are easily missable in any given run down the tower, and though it's genre/era appropriate, unlocking the "true ending" in Baroque is some straight-up Byzantine bullshit. Outside of consulting a guide, I have no idea how you would have been expected to figure that out on your own, as some of the triggers for unlocking it include finding secret walls that are unmarked on your minimap and talking to NPCs during highly specific windows or floors; otherwise, you've fucked your run. And even if you do all of that, the narrative doesn't exactly go beyond dealing in vagaries or weird interjections with faces projected onto your screen with very little context. Honest to goodness, it wasn't until I consulted nervetower.neocities.org, which is an incredible site you should check out, that I really understood who anyone was. This wasn't for lack of effort on my part. Trust me, I talked to everyone and exhausted damn near every line of dialogue there was to be had in the game, and I still felt completely lost as to what was happening.

And playing Baroque becomes less of a trial of horrors and abominations, and more of a routine. Once you accept that items are best thrown to kill enemies as quickly as possible, you can really burn through the first half-dozen levels, especially if the RNG-goddess is on your side. After a couple of runs, I got a really good weapon right from the rip, and that all but guaranteed I would make it to the end, and I continued to bank that weapon in holding orbs to make later runs laughably easy. I get that the game is a roguelike dungeon crawler, and that's just going to happen no matter what, but the fact that the story is predicated on you going through and performing specific actions on specific floors across multiple runs means the game gets tiresome quickly, even if it ultimately isn't that long of an experience. That said, completing the tower does drag just a tiny bit longer than I'd like, and with the game not unlocking any new environments unless you pick up on its esoteric tells about how to funnel your character down its "true ending," there's just not enough mechanical or environmental variety in Barqoue. And the game's health system, while an initial point of anxiety at the start, is very easily exploited and negated within just a few scant floors. When you stock up on hearts or other foodstuffs, you can boost both your vitality and health bars pretty quickly. So, what you end up with, more often than not, are long treks through industrial corridors while listening to grating but highly atmospheric sound and music as you wail away on the same ten or so eldritch horrors.

In my opinion, Baroque doesn't actually have enough mechanically going on to justify its multi-run roguelike format. That is part of the reason why I find how weirdly arcane and obtuse it is about what actions you need to perform to get its true ending off-putting. Yeah, I know a bunch of you are going to type away that true endings in RPGs from this era were always a chore or ordeal to get, but in the case of Baroque, it's not like the underlying game itself really has all that much to give you after two or three runs if you aren't looking up how to enact its underlying story. Especially when you start locking in high-quality weapons and armor in the consciousness orbs so they carry over between runs. Once you do, the first half dozen floors become girtless breezes. The Saturn and PS1 versions have a weirdly esoteric dodge system that I never got a handle on. Still, it didn't really matter, as I more often than not handled almost every enemy type by just wailing away at them until they were dead and popping an item if my health or vitality got low. If you forced me to say something nice about the PS2 and Wii versions, those versions are way more transparent about what you need to do, communicate more quickly whether you are prepared for any given floor, and have nice selectable difficulty settings.

None of that is to say you shouldn't play Baroque. You should. The game is the doyenne of high-concept and artistic JRPGs from the fifth generation. It speaks so empathically to that creative spirit that came to define Sting for better or worse during their glory days. Baroque is brutal and uncompromising and doesn't hold back its punches, which are aspects that Sting would hone in on and sharpen like a lethal dagger with some of their later works. Nonetheless, it is far from perfect, and some parts feel like you had to be in the development room to really understand why they function the way they do. And yet, nothing really plays or feels like Baroque. If you pinned me in a corner and asked me where I think people should start their journey through the world of Sting, it's still probably Riviera: The Promised Land, considering that game is narratively and mechanically coherent without being completely overwhelming. That said, Baroque is game number two on that list, as any self-discovery into Sting isn't complete without it. So, give it a shot! Completing at least one descent all the way is a worthwhile exercise alone for anyone who wants to appreciate games as an art form.

Also, if you want to see a VOD of my blind playthrough of the game, you can find it on my YouTube account.