Baroque: What has Wii done to deserve this?

Baroque seems like an interesting idea at first: it's an RPG for the Wii, a console starved of the roleplaying format. The game's central conceit is that having your character die and restart the game is vital to revealing the plot. On top of that, it's what's known as a 'Roguelike', a game in which the locations are randomly generated each time you play and are never the same twice.

Sadly, these interesting ideas don't work at all well once you actually start playing. The randomly generated mazes may be different shapes, but they still all look the same and lack character. The fact that you can't even make an educated guess as to what progress you've made also robs each level of any sense of achievement, and as for continually restarting from scratch with little or none of the equipment you'd previously gathered? Thats exactly as infuriating as you'd expect.

On the plus side, the character designs have sprung from a lively and inventive mind and the plot is intriguing enough to keep you going back for 'just one more go'. Frankly, you'll get many hours of play out of Baroque, you just won't enjoy them all that much. You can watch our in-game footage and see a full review at The Leisure Lab.