Barony Review

You wouldn’t think this kind of problem would pop up that often, but if you’re even remotely diligent about sweeping each floor for items - really, what kind of roguelike player isn’t? - you’ll find yourself quickly weighed down with enough magical loot to start your own travelling trinket shop. I know excessive inventory management is kind of par for the course among certain breeds of dungeon crawler - though why we haven’t collectively purged it as a society is something else altogether - but being loaded down with loot like this makes the game difficult in all the wrong places. Once you suss out all Barony’s cheap tricks it’s incredibly easy to build yourself up into an unstoppable adventurer with a bag full of equipment for any situation, but runs can still be arbitrarily shut down simply because the game doesn’t supply a scrap of food to you for four floors, or because a boulder trap - triggered by some random enemy on the far side of the level, potentially - blocks the only route to the exit. Random disasters have always been a cornerstone of good roguelikes, but the key there is that you have some agency to deal with them, some means of coping through your own skill; this is like if Bowser hired some decent contractors and just built a wall that’s too high to jump over right in front of his castle. You lose. No, there’s nothing you could have done differently. Turn the game off and reflect on this valuable life lesson.

It’s a shame, really, because in terms of actually modernising Ultima Underworld’s shakiest pillars - you know, the feature that I circled around for far too long on the way in to this article - Barony actually does a bang-up job. Alright, so the UI has more or less been lifted bodily from System Shock 2 and given a fresh coat of paint, but as long as you don’t have a morbid fear of mouse-driven interfaces it’s pretty much as painless as they get. The controls actually resemble a proper first-person game now, albeit one with a blindingly low FOV and really fiddly mouse tracking, and if you can find somebody else with interests as niche as you then you might even be able to take advantage of the primitive co-op. It still looks like a series of Hexen maps designed by a grid paper fetishist, true, but I think we got over that hurdle around the time Notch stuck six pink cereal boxes together and called it a pig.

Really though, all of this has been just delicate dancing around Barony’s big nasty issue, which is this: I’m sitting here, writing this, and have absolutely no desire to go dive back in for another run. Not because it did anything to put me in a huff, but because there’s simply no hook; no reason to return. Roguelikes subsist on novelty, drip-feeding you new challenges and experiences through the magic of the tiny D6 that rattles around in your CPU, and there are numerous ways to approach this: Spelunky has its endless arrangements of nuanced obstacles, NetHack has its blindfolded tasting menus, and The Binding of Isaac just throws game-breaking items into the fray before laughing maniacally at you. Without deep mechanics at its disposal, Barony is running on the pure thrill of discovery, which - surprise, surprise - only works once. You can procedurally-generate the level design all you want, but unless the gameplay is heavily dependent on the formation of the environments - like in, say, a platformer, or a shooter - all you’re doing is giving players a new maze in which to perform the same tired old tasks. That’s the world of Barony: different maze, same busywork. Before long you’ll have seen every spell, worn every ring, thoughtlessly chugged every potion, and all that’s left is the faint glimmer of hope that you’ll be fortunate enough to push through to the next area where new enemies await. Oh, there are a few special magical pieces of equipment floating around out there somewhere, but even if their effects are drastic enough to radically alter the experience - from what I’ve seen, most of them aren’t - is it really worth it if they’re harder to find than hen’s teeth?

Barony doesn’t feel like a bad game; barring the occasional unwinnable state, there’s nothing that makes you wish you’d spent your money on a deli sausage roll instead. More than anything else, it feels like a huge amount of potential that went unfulfilled. You have all these systems - character stats, character abilities, navigation, procedurally-generated items, appraisal, randomly-arranged levels, first-person combat and magic - that could, if they had just a bit more complexity and the decency to interact a bit more meaningfully, have produced an dizzyingly deep experience. Instead they’re largely one-dimensional affairs that just kind of independently do their own thing, and the game simply can’t supply the necessary landslide of variety to pull off that kind of wide-but-shallow structure. If you just want a first-person dungeon crawler that resembles Ultima Underworld to tide you over for a few hours, Barony puts on a strong enough first impression to satisfy, but look any closer and the cracks begin to show.