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Website: www.baronygame.com
Price: $19 USD at the time of writing.
Blurb: “Barony is the premier first-person roguelike with cooperative play! Adventure alone, or gather a party with iconic and unusual RPG classes to face off against the brutal dungeons. Test your resourcefulness, wits, and friendships, on your quest to lift the evil lich's curse!“
Barony is a game that has been in development for a long time (from around 2015). The Kickstarter campaign ended at the end of 2020. If you managed to pick it up in the humble bundle like me, you would have got it on the cheap. Honestly, I never gave this the time of day, due to the ugly low-quality graphics. However, I was talking to a friend, who jumped through hoops to play Daggerfall Unity with all the new mods, going on about how much fun it is. For those of you who don’t know, Daggerfall (Elder scrolls II) is free to play on Steam (the original). The problem is that it is Windows-only, and the new Unity version (1 January 2024) is finicky as all hell. I recall playing Daggerfall on my 486 PC and not really being impressed with it for the same reason.
Since we both had Barony, we decided to play it one Saturday evening. I expected it to be a snooze-fest, but since we caught up on life, the universe, and everything, during our gaming sessions, I did not mind (we live too far apart to go grab a drink). So, into the dungeon we ventured. The first thing I noticed was the version tag. It seems the developers keep working on it, and if it is a passion project, I should take more notice, and so should you. I looked into the updates and it is more active than a lot of games, see for yourself: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/371970?updates=true.
Barony is a real-time rogue-like rather than being turn-based, like a classic rogue-like should be, but if you’ll be playing with friends, it has to be. You can play with up to four friends at once. You can even play split-screen, where the display is divided up into quarters and you can see each the others’ point of view. If ever you were nostalgic for Mario Kart…
So in Barony, you are an adventurer who is going down into the catacombs below a Baron’s castle. The heinous Baron Herx enslaved Hamlet's people and now he's an awful undead lich. The whole town's been trapped in his massive dungeon for decades and now it's up to a single hero, or a group of adventurers, to confront him in his hellish lair and destroy him forever. Or that is what they claim. Only thing I know is, once in, you cannot just leave, sort of like the hotel California.
In the beginning of the game, you have to pick a race and a class. Standard fare, but in this game it very much matters what you decide on. Each race and class will play differently, and you need to devise a strategy and play accordingly. If you play a human, you need to eat and drink, for instance, so finding food will be a big part of your gameplay. However, if you play as a skeleton, you do not need to worry about food or drink. If you play as an automaton, you need to find magic scrolls and gems to fuel your reactor, so you never get to use any magic. Now, to make matters worse, or better, depending on your point of view, each of these races has a ton of classes. This means that the game has a lot of replayability on top of the already mentioned rogue-like.
Because the game is rogue-like, each run can be very long or very short, depending on the roll of the dice. The game has an even longer list of items than there are races and classes, making the game quite interesting. Leaning back into what I said earlier about choosing your class carefully, if you choose a dumb brute, they will not be able to identify items you find. You will literally need to start at the bottom, by identifying a rock first, to start levelling up your appraising skills, working up to apples, etcetera, before you even have a chance of identifying any weapons or armour. It sounds simple, but it can take you several dungeon levels to even find those items, so be careful what you pick. This auto-identify mechanic is something I really like about this rogue-like. Hunting for scrolls of identity was never fun for me. This explains another thing I like about the game, you level up a skill by doing. The more you cast your fireball, the better you get at casting fireballs.
The main game loop per level is simply to find the hatch going down, and then going down said hatch. Sounds simple? The level is actually a maze, filled with monsters and occasional events. I say occasional, as it is RNG-based. These events can have quite an influence on how you play that level. Unlike some other 3D dungeon crawlers, you do have a mini-map that fills out as you traverse the level.
Because the game is voxel-based and probably in a 320×200 resolution, scaled up, it is as smooth as butter, at the cost of visual fidelity. Since the requirements are so low, playing multi-player games on even a moderate to low-spec machine is not a strain on the computer or network. I feel that if the elements within the game were not made of voxels, you would have Minecraft.
The music in the game is by Chris Kukla, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lymDwAP44g4), and if you listen to his Bandcamp album, you will know why he was chosen. (https://chriskukla.bandcamp.com/album/dungeon-jams). The game just uses this Dungeon jams album as the soundtrack, but as you can hear, it is not a bad thing!
Issues & tissues with Ubuntu higher than 18.04: When starting the game, it displays a critical error message and does not start; the console complains “Failed loading libpng12.so.0”.
Solution:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linuxuprising/libpng12
sudo apt update
sudo apt install libpng12-0
Comments or questions: misc@fullcirclemagazine.org