What a game.

ProjectMoon is a peculiar developer. Ruina is not the impenetrable wall that Lobotomy is, but it does share a lot of the same flavors. Such as an incredibly awkward and clumsy UX and terrible tutorial, made worse in Ruina by just many more mechanics there are in Ruina, as opposed to the simple but nuanced gameplay loop of Lobotomy. You just have to accept it as the ProjectMoon flavor at this point.

However, ProjectMoon has strengths, from their incredibly fascinating and fantastical urban hellscape in the city, their inspired SCP-likes in abnormalities, and gameplay ideas. While other popular cardgames try to replicate a draft format via roguelike elements, Ruina is more like replicating a constructing format.

Except this time, there's no bad developers ignoring terrible metas for months on end.

Ruina tests your deckbuilding skills, both in how to make a swiss army knife pile of extremely strong cards, and more nuanced singular counters to specific mechanics in their abnormalities. As the library gains more notoriety, the more powerful and influential figures of The City will show up and seek what it can offer. And you'll take their cards and pages, too.

A notable flaw in this system, however, is the fact that you lose your books upon loss. This can be circumvented with an Alt+f4 before you actually lose, mind, but still it's an unnecessary addition to an already very long game to force backtracking, when there's already plenty of incentive to go back. It's a pretty severe problem the game didn't need.

Nevertheless, the game succeeds in replicating a constructed format vs many different figures and people. Some monsters, some humans pretending to be monsters, and all they command.

One of the things I really enjoyed was how, narratively, despite the plot ostensibly taking place in one area, you get to see just how much the library effects the world at large. You cause so much change in the city, whether good or bad nobody can say. And while the characters initially shrug their shoulders at how the library lures people into its maw to turn them into books, the player themselves may not. You'll hope for characters to not come to the library knowing you'll be forced to cut them down. It's an interesting method of storytelling you won't see much similar to.

Ruina is not a game for everyone. The UX will definitely be too infuriating for some, and the necessity to understand its mechanics with how badly tutorialized they are likewise. Not even counting the barrier of the deckbuilding/cardgame aspect of it. But if you can get into it, odds are you'll be VERY into it.

A weird ass game with SOUL.

Terraria-ish combat with a lot of build variety by equipping food items. Mostly linear with a little bit of side paths for extra recipes. The story is... much more than you expect from the game, and from the first few hours.

What starts as a truly bizarre game about celebrating cooking and eating things that were all alive, including plants, quickly becomes an existential dread simulator featuring body horror. To say the game undergoes a tone shift isn't quite accurate. It's more like a tone catapult.

The writing can sometimes be a bit too corny as characters will talk at length about >THEMES OF THE GAME<, but it's heartfelt and the characters have great chemistry with each other. The comedy has a lot of good usage of art assets, too. It's a fun, rather breezy ride.

I do think there's more design than what meets the eye in the bosses and platforming, but the player becomes so horrifyingly strong, and easily, that even on master chef it feels like the game falls over without too much issue, the bosses largely because of one food item that lets you delete projectiles via dashing, and the platforming because the obstacles simply aren't threatening enough.

Either way, a fun romp with fun characters and it has Simmer, so 10/10.