I didn't expect to like this one as much as I did. While it unfortunately suffers from an inverted difficulty curve (where a lack of options and power at the beginning of the game makes the first few hours far more difficult than all that follow, even in repeat playthroughs), once it opens up, it feels empowering to find a new weapon or spell or accessory that suddenly makes some other set of tools viable.
It does feel like some of the systems of the game go underutilized. There's a whole system where liquids like oil, poison, or water can spill on the ground and react with fire or electricity, but aside from certain traps, this whole system doesn't come into play too often. It might be possible to work this to your own advantage if you set up your equipment right.
Altogether, a pleasant surprise. Worth pursuing if it looks like your thing, genre-wise.
A word of warning: a quest given fairly early can be easily failed in the very next room, and several other points throughout. Completing it is actually required in order to get the "good ending".

I’m a big fan of metroidvanias, and this was one I hadn’t heard of, but a friend of mine is a big fan of. They happened to have a spare key for it lying around, and they very graciously gave it to me so I could play through it! Other than the bits of praise I heard from that friend, this was honestly a game I’d just never heard of. Judging from all the friends who jumped in call with me to watch me play it and how much they talked about loving it, it seems it’s certainly a popular one, and now that I’ve finished it myself, I can certainly see why! I played through the game three times. Once on normal mode and getting the good ending, which took about five hours. After that, I did a “Boss Mode” (this game’s version of the old Castlevania’s Julias Mode) playthrough that took about 2.5 hours, and then I finished it off with a hard mode playthrough to get the true good ending (which can only be gotten on hard mode after you’ve beaten the game once), and that was another 3.5 hours.

Lost Ruins is the story of an unnamed Heroine (who is simply called such throughout the game), who is summoned suddenly into some, well, mysterious and unfamiliar ruins. She has no memories of her life before being summoned, but judging from her clothes, she assumes she used to be some kind of school girl. A helpful witch quickly informs her that she is only the most recent to be summoned here, and that the evil Dark Lady is summoning all sorts of souls from other worlds to serve as sacrifices for a dark, ultimate ritual. With not a ton of help from her witch friend, our heroine sets off to take down the Dark Lady’s subjects and perhaps even get home in the end. The writing is nothing special, but it’s fine silly fun for what it is. The character writing is funny and weird in ways that make its small yet colorful cast charming in their own absurd ways, and that’s especially evident in the Boss Mode. It’s a lot less horny than you’d think a metroidvania about school girls would be, which was nice, though that’s not to say it’s not horny at all, of course XD. It’s at a perfectly tolerable level of it for me, and I found the writing fun for what it was and a good motivator for the adventure~ (clearly good enough to get me to go through it three times, at least XD).

The gameplay of Lost Ruins is a 2D action/adventure metroidvania, so there’s going to be a lot of familiar elements for anyone even remotely familiar with the genre. However, there are a few interesting things that this game does that makes it stand out among the crowd of other high quality metroidvanias. First of all, this game has no mobility upgrades. There’s some recursive exploration, sure, but beyond going back to tackle trials or puzzles you just couldn’t beat the first time, the game is honestly fairly linear if you choose to play it that way, as the only thing keeping you from progressing are the bosses blocking your way and not the upgrades you might’ve otherwise gained from them.

On that note, the game is actually very sparse on the upgrades full stop, really. You start with 20 HP and 20 MP, and by the end of the game your base stats will, at most, be 35 HP and 30 MP. The weapons, magic, and armor you find as well don’t really scale in power too much (though there certainly is some scaling to them), and you really end up playing through the whole game at a very similar durability to how you started it out as. You’ll find better weapons with different sorts of passives, you’ll find armor and trinkets that give different sorts of passives both defensive and offensive, and you’ll even get the ability to wear more pieces of armor/trinkets at once, but you don’t really play the game that differently at the end than you did at the start.

This particular aspect of the game makes it particularly fun to replay, I think, as it’s both not terribly long and you’re not really getting much of a downgrade in your arsenal when you restart. As my hard mode playthrough that took 1.5 hours less than my original normal mode playthrough indicates, the skills and strategies you pick up from one playthrough carry over very easily to other playthroughs, and the different modes and little modifiers they give you make for some very fun challenge runs if you’re up to tackle them (such as Witch Mode, where you can’t use anything but magic spells the entire game).

The aesthetics of the game are very pretty, and the pixel art is done very well. Both in the VN-style portraits for when the girls are talking as well as the animations on attacks, you can really tell a lot of time and effort went into bringing Lost Ruins’s cast to life. Several friends unfamiliar with the game actually thought I was playing a Momodora game, which is high praise in and of itself so far as I’m concerned. The music is also very fun and fits the mood of the game very well, and it all makes for a really good and fun time~.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. As far as more action-focused metroidvanias go, this is a pretty damn good one! The story is fun, and the action and exploration is even better. Heck, the fact that I played through it so many times is in and of itself a testament to just how fun the game is to play. If you’re a fan of the genre, then Lost Ruins is definitely one you don’t wanna miss out on.

started and finished in same day.
very momodora-esque, but it flops at a lot of parts. i dont really mind the difficulty, it rarely felt cheap, but a lot of my issues stem from other areas.
the map is ass. no two ways about it. there are a ton of gaps in it, and there are so many areas that you just cant get back through when backtracking, because theyre just drops or require you to jump higher than you possibly can.
the save system kinda sucks, but the reason i got the bad ending is on me. i got the holy sword and then started going back to the chests because it was ok to get them at that point. i died, but i guess i realized i forgot to save because i opened a few without it registering that i got the holy sword, and ended up getting the bad end. pissed me off, but its my fault. however the autosaves dont let you go back through them unless you use a portal, meaning that you can lose a ton of progress backtracking because theres no save points and the statues were all checked.
game length is ok, not a huge complaint, about the size i expected
the story sucked, plain and simple, but thats rarely the point of interest in these.
the combat i have a few issues with. saving doesnt restore hp or mp, meaning that youre pretty much forced to use the item that decreases your max hp unless you feel like using a bunch of items you cant afford. money does not come easy, and the prices youre paying are pretty exorbitant. your dodge doesnt go very far and leaves you vulnerable for too long afterwards. bosses are just trial and error, the only one i had any real trouble with being the bug archer lady.
overall though, i still think i had fun. it was a nice game to spend my skip day on, but i kind of wish i had spent it doing something more productive, haha.
6.25/10

Simplesmente Dark Souls em 2D, controles responsivos e rápidos, pixel art e estilo gráfico lindo pra porra, história final sendo até bem interessante e bom plot twist, recomendo pra caralho, só acho que faltou um pouco de trilha sonora, a e bosses muito bons e bem variados.

9/10

trilha sonora quase não existente.

I can see a lot of value here, but too much of it is lost in annoying design decisions. At first, I was really enjoying how this game is perhaps the best attempt I've ever seen at capturing the tension of Dark Souls in 2D, but I was pretty permanently over this game's shit within just a couple of hours.

The game is very (very) pretty with some of my favorite lighting and particle effects I've seen in quite some time, I love how the game is loaded with loot and things to find in nearly every room (plus generous enemy drops) and I was even enjoying the slow, deliberate and very punishing combat, and the fact that you progress very slowly and enemies stay dead for as long as you stay alive, but the game had forced me to replay story sections or rewatch cutscenes upwards of ten times, including different cutscenes and sections, within like the first hour and that's when I knew I could never love this game. It's like the developers were actively attempting to place checkpoints right before cutscenes when they could just as well have been right after instead. I can't stress enough what a huge problem this was for me and that I'm not talking about one poorly placed checkpoint and one cutscene, but how it kept happening over and over in new situations.

I really don't understand why we're only allowed to activate checkpoints once even though the areas have us running in loops past the same checkpoint statue, since that only results in having to re-do any sections you didn't magically know the correct order for and I think I would've been able to like this game so much more if checkpoints just triggered when you walk past them like in every other game ever. What happens here, instead, is that you'll run past the checkpoint, since you have no choice due to it being in your way, in a T section room where the right path leads to a dead end and the bottom leads to the boss. You will now have to re-check the rooms to the right before heading down every single time, because the checkpoint was placed at the entrance to this T section room and not the exit leading to the boss. That type of thing happened literally constantly in the 2-3 hours I managed to play before I felt fed up with how this game handles progress and saving.

On top of all that time-wasting nonsense, it takes a lot for me to get into low pace and slow combat and I was just on the edge of almost loving this game when a tougher boss made me skip the same dialogue for like the seventh time and I just instantly lost all desire to continue. Very attractive and pretty cool game that someone who might love, but that someone isn't going to be me. It's a shame, because there is something unique and special here. I just wish the developers had been a little more aware of the player's time.

A pretty solid Metroidvania with anime girls in it. I particularly liked the way elements interacted with stuff in the environment in ways that both help and kill you. The story is pretty predictable unfortunately, so that's nothing to write home about, but the gameplay is pretty good! The game is pretty weak on backtracking though, which may be a positive or negative depending on what you're wanting out of a game. This isn't the best game from the genre I've played, but it's not bad by any means.

I thought this was terrible, no other word for it. I got as far as the first boss before giving up, and even that was a painful and deeply unpleasant experience, and I simply do not want to subject myself to any more.

So before getting into the breakdown of what I didn't like here, I'll take a moment to say I like the visual design of the environments. The pixel art is pretty good and, for the most part, this game looks the part. Also, I can't say if this carries on throughout of course, but the early game enemy diversity at least is pretty decent too.

But apart from that.... no. Nothing about this feels good to play. The combat and platforming both feel incredibly clunky; movement is floaty and slow, and even the weapons with 'fastest' strike speed kinda waft across their strike arc with the speed, weight and grace of a fly swatter. I can feel the Dark Souls influence in the enemy design here but it just... doesn't work at all. Most enemies provide no threat at all, and you can either trivially stunlock them to death or just walk on by. But others are just... unfair. Despite how little of the game I got through, I had already run into multiple enemies where so much as grazing one of their attacks would result in a certain stunlock until you died.

And the UI looks terrible it's literally just textboxes in some default-looking font and looks so odd with all the pixel graphics. And the writing is next-level dreadful; the story and textlogs you can find read like they were written by a ten year old. And for some reason you can't save whenever you want, and have to rely on built-in savepoints. But who cares about any of that right? Because as far as I can tell, this game is just an excuse to put endless scantily-clad underage anime girls on the screen. As far as I can tell, literally every character (most of the enemies included) is an underage anime girl. And the game is super thirsty... it's really, really uncomfortable. All the characters gyrate around constantly in their idle animation like someone gave Shantae a line of cocaine. Every time you or one of the anime enemies takes damage they scream and grunt in that classic anime young girl voice, and every attack is some kind of thrust or suggestive lunge. Like, I'm not here to kink-shame if this is what you want out of a game, but it made me feel physically sick. The final straw for me was the second phase of the first boss, when the mandatory slime girl emerged from the arena floor, breasts flapping so violently they took up about a quarter of the screen. No. I'm not doing this to myself. I want no part in this.

So yeah. I think I actually hate this game. It gets a full star rather than 0.5 for actually having a somewhat playable game in it and, like I said, for having some pretty decent pixel art in the backgrounds and environments. But I will now be uninstalling this game, uninstalling steam, turning off my PC and throwing it in the nearest river.