Cliffhanger implies that it takes place after Baroque that it exists in the same verse but also implies that Baroque’s a alternate universe version of Cliffhanger as implied with the Forking Path and one of the alt Challengers met if one goes for the Shangri-la route near the end of the game. The mentions of Succoth-Benoth, the Gardens of Forking paths, Ah Ken mentioning some stuff from Baroque, and the fake advert mention of Holofernes and the bloody rose makes it more confusing
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Hello there!
In the first place, the Baroque references in Cliffhanger are intended more as Easter Eggs for fans of both games rather than part of a really detailed worldbuilding scheme, if that makes sense. But for what it’s worth:
The question as to whether the two games take place in the same world came up while I was writing it: the answer is no, they’re not. Baroque is set in a completely imaginary fantasy world; Cliffhanger is set in an alternative history version of our own world’s 1930s. Of course, they both exist in the same multiverse, since Cliffhanger’s multiverse contains every possible reality. But The Mysteries of Baroque is not meant to be the past of the Cliffhanger universe.
As to your specific questions:
Succoth-Benoth exists in all realities, at least all realities that I have a hand in writing.
I think you’re referring to Ah Ken talking about the Dead Rabbits, a gang that also appear in Baroque? In fact, both of these instances are references to the real-life (?) Dead Rabbits gang, mentioned in Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York.
The trailer is supposed to suggest that The Mysteries of Baroque actually exists as a film in the world of Cliffhanger. How can it be both an alternative reality and a film? Well, I do suggest at one point in the game that dreams are actually your experience of being other versions of you in alternative reality. So maybe some screenwriter in the Cliffhanger universe had a really vivid dream about goings-on in a mysterious Gothic metropolis, which they turned into a film?
And thanks for the close reading! I’m very pleased that somebody picked up on all those Easter Eggs.
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Awesome, tysm for the clarification! Makes sense now 
. Hopefully this isn’t a big ask but there’s a few achievements I’m having trouble getting in both games. For Cliffhanger, it’s Sweet dreams are made of this, Crime!, Ninotchka, and Constitutional. For Baroque, it’s Black mass, Me and my shadow, the portrait of Sebastian Melmoth, A Full bottle in front of me, and No greater love. Do you have any advice for any of them?
Cliffhanger
Sweet Dreams are Made of This, Ninotchka and Constitutional
Try failing the check in Ch. 5 when you’re flying over the Illyrian border and planes intercept. See what happens as a result of that, explore and try different options. All the above achievements are locked away behind that path.
Crime!
Have you achieved the Going like Gangbusters achievement? You have to basically follow the same steps to achieve Crime!, including opting for the Colossus ending, but instead of choosing to destroy the Syndicate at the end, you have to choose to take it over or replace it with your own organisation.
Mysteries of Baroque
Black Mass
You have to fail the check to infilitrate the Carpathian Rite cultists’ meeting on the necropolis route in Chapter 5. Bon appetit!
Me and My Shadow
You have to fail the check to fight off the Kanzler on the palace route in Chapter 5.
Portrait of Sebastian Melmoth
You need to try to flag down a carriage to get into the party in Chapter 7, and fail. You can’t have Carmilla, the vampire as an ally, and you also can’t have met Olympia (by spending time with Mona in Chapter 6). Then you need to get through the party without drawing any further attention to yourself.
OK, that one’s kind of convoluted.
Full Bottle in Front of Me
You have to fail the check to contain Succoth-Benoth in Chapter 8, then opt to lobotomize yourself (makes perfect sense in context, I assure you).
No Greater Love
There’s a couple of ways to get this one but the simplest is to find Holofernes in Chapter 8 and ask for her help, without being in a romance with her or even having a very good relationship with her. She’ll have a very Holofernes solution for you.
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Tysm! I have achieved the going like gangbusters achievement (dealing with Rothstein, HPB, Hassan, and golden bat. I sometimes change it up with La spectre, but Liou Hann’s my favorite so I get him everytime), yet when I do the same thing with a criminal challenger, I don’t get the achievement, even after choosing the options to establish my own criminal organization and going for colossus
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Thanks for sharing solution in details. I appriciated.
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That’s odd! You should get the Crime! achievement if you do all that (you don’t get it right away, but after reaching the epilogue). It seems like a bug, but I’ve just glanced at the code and it seems like it should work. I’m a bit busy with my Hunter: The Reckoning game at the moment but when I have the time, I’ll take a closer look and see if I can figure out the problem.
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Cool! If you don’t mind me asking a few questions; for Baroque: what’s the inspiration for the Crimson Death? And also its 3 abilities you can choose one of after De winter survives it. Aside from granting buffs to different skills, do the different outfits Mr. Merritt presents change up certain dialogue/text or anything like that? For Cliffhanger: who’s your favorite recruitable character for the Hellraisers? Is Ah Ken actually one of the masters of Shangri-la? It’s implied, but I’m curious about your input. What’s the inspiration for the Syndicate? Either in general or each one. A general question, but are there certain characters/concepts in either games that you wanted to put more focus on?
The Crimson Death
I think a few different ideas came together. I think I was thinking about the “old friends” hypothesis - about independent microorganisms that help coordinate the human body’s response to infection, and about things like coral colonies that exist in a kind of group life. I also wanted to do some plague horror stuff. All of this combined in the idea of a sentient disease.
I wanted the Crimson Death abilities to be cool and helpful to the player but also to feel a bit weird and to have an element of body horror, with the implication that the PC is becoming something other than human. My favourite is Communion - I like the scene where you can channel all of Julian’s lost friends and neighbours for him.
The Outfits
No, no dialogue changes or anything like that. I flag the costume the player picks, so maybe I meant to do that at some point.
Cliffhanger
My Favourite Hellraiser
Le Chat Noir
Is Ah Ken actually one of the masters of Shangri-La?
Yes
The Syndicate
The general idea of a world-spanning crime organisation is all over the pulps, so it seemed like a fairly obvious choice for Cliffhanger. Individual Syndicate leaders:
Arnold Rothstein is Arnold Rothstein
Hassan-i Sabbah is Hassan-i Sabbah.
Jane Arkaris is a gender-flipped version of Gregory Arkadin, the titular character from the Orson Welles film noir Mr Arkadin.
HPB is Helena Blavatsky.
Le Spectre is a version of the fictional French supervillain Fantômas.
The Golden Bat isn’t directly inspired by any one source as such, although I had the comic strip Terry and the Pirates and (obviously) the Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon in mind.
Sky pirate Nana Djoussou never appears “on-screen” but she was inspired by various fictional sky pirates, such as Jules Verne’s Robur the Conqueror and Edward Fawcett’s Hartmann the Anarchist (an older, richer, and less radical version of Hartmann himself appears in Barcelona in the game).
Fun fact: There were originally supposed to be eight leaders of the Syndicate (like the arms of an octopus). Trouble is, I couldn’t figure out a way to fit an eighth Syndicate leader into the action. I toyed with the idea of having Challenger surprise the player by revealing themselves to be the mysterious eighth leader, having infiltrated the Syndicate. It seemed like an appropriately outlandish twist but I regretfully concluded I couldn’t really pull it off. I decided to just make it seven leaders instead, making all the octopus imagery I’d written about the Syndicate a little pointless.
More characters and concepts?
I think probably if anything I stuffed both games with a few too many ideas and characters. But for what it’s worth, I’ve always had a yen to do a little bit more with the story of Apollyon from Baroque. Apollyon is Baroque’s Napoleon analogy and also a literal Antichrist figure who was defeated by a coalition of the other Great Powers about fifty years before The Mysteries of Baroque starts. He’s barely mentioned in the game itself but I’ve had a few different ideas for ways to use that backstory and that figure.
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If I were involved in a global crime organization with seven heads, I would embrace octopus imagery on purpose. The “murky danger with tremendous reach” image still works, and anyone who tries to mess with us will always be wondering if there’s an actual eighth head out there somewhere.
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This is now the canonical explanation for why the Syndicate only has seven leaders.
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Even though Nana Djoussou doesn’t fully appear on-screen and moreso in one of the selectable endings, is there anything to know about her?
She’s the child of a marriage alliance between two rival sky pirate clans. She was born on the airship Lucifer in Starlight and she’s never set foot on ground in her life: her lungs and her bones are adapted to life at high altitude and she wouldn’t be able to survive descending on to Earth (I’ve mentioned elsewhere that each Syndicate leader is in one way or another a prisoner: Nana is a prisoner of the air.)
My original plan for the Colossus route in Chapter 7 involved Challenger stowing away on the Lucifer in Starlight, which would have been the Syndicate leaders’ secret meeting place. This would have been when Challenger revealed themselves as the mysterious eighth head of the Syndicate, if I’d gone with that twist. The rest of the route would have been set in Japan, and the PC would have rampaged across Tokyo in the Colossus mech a la Godzilla, fighting the Nemesis’ forces.
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What inspired the theme of each Syndicate leader being prisoners in some form?
As I recall, when I was coming up with the Syndicate leaders, I noticed that the first two I came up (Rothstein and HPB, maybe?) were trapped in different ways. I decided to embrace that and make it a motif for all of them.
In the first place, it was a way of giving a little bit of uniformity to all of them. They were all meant to be very different from each other in most respects, so it felt like a good idea to have something that tied them all together.
In the second place, it felt like the implication of that theme was a good fit for the moralising, rather sanctimonious tone of '30s gangster moves like Little Caesar, Angels with Dirty Faces, and Public Enemy that I was going for with most of the Syndicate plot thread. I could picture the narrator or a stern police captain character solemnly announcing: “So, you see, folks, it doesn’t matter how long they evade jail. Every outlaw is a prisoner from the day they choose the path of crime.”
Finally, I think the theme of imprisonment was just appealing to me because of the paradox of grand global criminal schemes and ambitions colliding with restriction and stasis. I liked the melancholy and loneliness of it, the sense that these characters were simultaneously all-powerful demonic tricksters dancing on top of the world like James Cagney at the end of White Heat but also far less free and in control of their destinies than the average shmuck in the street.
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So if the twist of Challenger being the 8th Syndicate leader was kept in, what would’ve been their form of imprisonment?
No idea! The idea never got that far.
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I see 
. Random question, but lore-wise, do the other Syndicate leaders know Le Spectre’s dead?
No. The Syndicate is more of a power-sharing arrangement than anything else; the leaders agree to stay out of each other’s territory/areas of interest. They have the same impression of Le Spectre as everyone else: they’re a mysterious master of disguise who seems to appear and disappear with spooky ease across the world.
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Interesting! What were the inspirations for each of the implants Holofernes offers to apply on De Winter? Cause some of them sound really unique, like the lens, magnet, and drug pump (My personal favorites to pick). What was the inspirations for coming up with De Winter and Challenger’s surnames? (Sorry if these questions are annoying, I just really like both games )