I recently sat down with Baroque, the cult classic dungeon crawler for the Sega Saturn. Very good, top 20 games for me now!

First off, play the Saturn version. You can liberally rebind the controls in an emulator to make them feel a lot more like a modern FPS (d-pad up & down to left analog up/down for forward and backward movement with L & R to left analog left/right for strafing while putting d-pad left & right on right analog left/right for turning. Also rebind attack to R1 or R2 and map to whichever you didn’t bind attack to). Use scanline shaders, something like crt-royale or just hyllian-fast. Under the hood this game is a fairly standard mystery dungeon style roguelike but it’s ALL about the vibes.

The story is opaque but advances simply by doing runs through the dungeon. Make sure to talk to all the NPCs and do what they tell you to/fulfill their requests and you’ll figure it out. The gameplay is simple but the player movement is fast and smooth enough as well as hits having decent enough feedback when connecting with an enemy that it avoids feeling too much like a clunky old game. The weird monsters, gnawing on bones, and using torture devices really sell the atmosphere. A+ soundtrack, IMHO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRXUEH0ijdk&list=PLfhw8A1mg64H1MVWcSPocp6qaaQoiOAJo

TIP: Throw stuff at stuff. Experiment by throwing all the things at all the things. Throwing is a big mechanic in this game, don’t sleep on it. Throw things at sense spheres to teleport them out of the dungeon so you can guarantee them for your next run. Here’s an adorable Neocities fanpage for if you really get stuck, https://nervetower.neocities.org/guide

I’d skip the PS2/Remake, the vibes are all wrong and again, this is just a good game to spend some time with and soak in the bleak world they created. The PS1 version is pretty similar to Saturn but I think honestly the Saturn just nails the atmosphere a bit better.