Barony
When writing these reviews, I always keep in mind that the goal should not be to evaluate a game based on how well it entertains me , but rather, how well it does entertaining its intended audience. There are many, many games for which I am not the intended audience, but just because these are not the games for me does not mean they’re bad games. Rather, it’s just that the niche they’re filling isn’t one that exists in my world, and that’s okay. We all have our own tastes.
Barony is one of these games. I am not in Barony’s target audience. I definitely enjoy rogue-likes, and I can enjoy dungeon crawlers, but I’m also the person who got so tired of dungeon crawling in Oblivion that I took off all my armour and just sprinted through all of the final dungeons rather than slogging through them. Barony, by its nature as a dungeon crawling rogue-like, was never going to be my game. Once again, that’s okay. I’m interested in how well it does for someone for whom this is their game, and to understand that, I brought a friend along.
Meet Ashi. He also doesn’t understand the concept of levers.
In Barony, you play as a human (unless you have a DLC, which I do not) of one of several classes and races. The races, as far as I can tell, are aesthetic. The classes are not, and range in difficulty from beginner (healer, warrior) to extreme (jester). For the most part, these are your generic classes that you’ll find in most fantasy RPGs, though the addition of the joker is fantastic. The decision made here impacts the entire rest of the game, and indeed, the length of it.
I always use a random number generator to choose my class, just to keep things exciting. For this particular run, I rolled wanderer, and off I went with my friend on our gallivanting adventure in the spooky dungeon.
Barony sets up its gameplay in a long series of levels. Each level of the dungeon has a trapdoor that you must find to escape to the next level, and monsters to fight and traps to evade along the way. This means each level can take minutes or, more likely, twenty minutes. If you’re like me and like being a completionist, it is a long, long way from one trapdoor to the next.
We found the trapdoor, but what about the rest of the level?
This is the heart of Barony. It gives back what you put in, at least to a point. If you want it to be a mad sprint through the dungeon, it can be. If you want to be a completionist and explore every nook and cranny, you can do that too. There are elements that are arbitrary and unfair, but once you get used to them, even they can be avoided.
Pictured: Me (a puddle) learning from my mistakes while Ashi continues the level
I mentioned that your Barony experience is determined at the class selection screen, and that’s true in more ways than just the obvious style. In this playthrough, there came a point where Ashi and I steamrolled everything in a dungeon, then spent twenty minutes on inventory management. Even boulder traps and minotaurs stopped being issues, instead the main challenge being finding a merchant. Depending on the class you choose, the game vacillates between wildly difficult and ludicrously easy with very little middle ground, especially on multi-player. Even the rogue-like elements lose their bite when you know that your friend will eventually make it to the trapdoor, once he finishes clearing out his inventory.
I like the idea of Barony. I like the idea of a rogue-like dungeon crawler with many classes and fun ways to approach the same challenges. The difficulty is in that the challenges are the same - the same walls, the same tunnels, the same sounds, the same monster faces. It’s a small indie game, and I know there aren’t the resources to make an intricate, ever-changing world, but in the end, the only enemy I found I couldn’t beat was my own boredom.
Developer: Turning Wheel Llc
Genre: Rogue-Like, Adventure, Action
Year: 2015
Country: United States
Language: English
Play Time: 3-5 Hours/Run, But There Is A Lot Of Replayability