saturn imo, although most of the partisan opinions i’ve seen are a little exaggerated (i kinda like the remake in its own way, even if i wouldn’t recommend it now)
While strongly influenced in gameplay by the popular early Mystery Dungeon console roguelikes, Yonemitsu is open about the sources Baroque drew on beyond its own medium. Among the most intriguing of these include the cult, playfully avant-garde 90s fashion label 20471120 (a personal favorite), and Shusuke Kaneko’s ethereal boys’ love melodrama Summer Vacation 1999, a film whose loop-like structure, subtle sci-fi mechanical design, and themes of guilt, longing, intimacy and doppelgänger-like cyclical rebirth clearly informed the the tone of the game. Yonemitsu was also interested in poetry, evidenced not only by overt in-game references to poet Sakutarō Hagiwara but also by his own Baroque-relateddynamic modular poem experiments following the release of the game. This is no surprise; Baroque is, like the medium itself, in its own way one of many heirs to the strategies of nonlinear textual spatialization and open reading developed in the past 125 years of modern poetry since Mallarmé.
very very late, but i started playing this the other day on Saturn and i can see now what the hype is about. it’s really held up and the way exploration works feels really organic and mysterious.
my save was lost recently due to the Saroo betraying me with its latest update, but i plan to get back into it, soon.
like honestly, when the Wii version came out, i was afraid it looked a little jank, but playing the Saturn version, it really feels excellent. not sure i’ve played much else that’s like it
this is a very good game. the enemy designs are creepy, the world is very creepy, the characters all feel pretty interesting. It’s creepy finding items and then trying them out, I like that you have to gnaw bones to figure out what they do. At one point I had a flamethrower ability that activated sometimes after I killed enemies.
we’re having fun but how far we make it feels mostly down to luck at this stage. wouldn’t be surprised if we’re missing something the game wants us to do, like maybe enemies are secretly jukable in combat or there are npc item interactions we’re missing–but then again the tuning of VT is so brutal on its face that maybe this is how it’s supposed to be
i just chug them for small vt/hp restoration when i have a bunch built up because they don’t damage you when you eat them but otherwise no, i think they make enemies follow you more but i never really noticed