Finished: 10.15.23
Score: 9.4

"Playing this series is easily the most painful thing I've ever done to experience Mili's music thus far."

To preface, this will be aimed at those looking for why they should pick up Library or Ruina more so than those than those that have already completed it... Okay, this is gonna be a long one. Easily the longest I've written thus far, and likely the longest I will have written for a while. After nearly five months of playing this thing and letting it endlessly stew in my brain, where do I even begin? I have no other option - the beginning it is.

Ruina is a direct sequel to Lobotomy Corporation. Do you need to play it first? Yes, absolutely. Not only are the story and characters carried straight over, but several gameplay mechanics from LobCorp reemerge in Ruina (albeit in completely different ways). Though I do believe that Ruina stands very strongly on its own legs, without the context of the previous game you will be missing on a lot of "ooooooooh" moments. Refer to my review of LobCorp for the Geram Signature™ way to experience it.

Where LobCorp only hints at a deeper (and incredibly bleak) world beyond the corp's corridors, we finally get to peep the horrors of the City: an absolute hellhole where, though miracles are possible, the Powers That Be instead choose to allow for endless human suffering to perpetuate. Every turn of Ruina's story brings the player by the hand further down the rabbit hole of depravity where not a single soul is blameless. The world is not only an incredibly fresh depiction of a dystopia but an equally incredible commentary on the world we live in ourselves.

Meanwhile, every character you come across (and ultimately have to kill) is endearing in their own way, further breathing life into the world in the short time you get to know them. But where the characters really shine is in our main duo of Angela and Roland. I can't say much about either without spoiling much, but every conversation involving either one of them is an absolute delight.

If you've already played LobCorp, you might be surprised to find the sequel is a deck builder of all things, but damn does it perfect the formula. Rather than a single deck you pull from, you have multiple characters with their own strengths and weaknesses whom you build a mini-deck for and then create teams with them. Each team then gets its own unique set of powers as you progress, giving them their own sense of identity that is thematically appropriate to them. Along the way, combos will naturally emerge between attack cards and passives you stich together from your defeated foes without the game needing to explicitly tell you - some of which may be exceptionally powerful, rewarding the player for experimentation and planning ahead of time. And if there is a fight you just can't take, there is always another one you can go for instead to get stronger and expand your options.

When you actually do get into the fights themselves, there remains an element of randomness as both turn order (think initiative from your favorite tabletop game) and each attack are determined by the roll of the dice. Some attacks may be more swingy and with higher potential while others' strength is in their consistency. Either way, every move the player must make is uncertain. For a turn-based system this is a MASSIVE game-changer as it is up to you to either take a calculated risk or proceed as safely as possible. And yeah, sometimes the dice gods will decide they hate you today and a fight you just swept will kick your ass the second time around, but hey.

I've really only got a few complaints that kind of intertwine. The first being that because each team progresses at their own rate, there will be points where one team has reached their full potential while another has only just started. By the end of the game, I had never even used the final three floors in a normal fight just because they were so behind the others the whole time. If not for trying to retain the characters from LobCorp, I honestly think that they could have gotten away with only making 7 floors (though I would NEVER sacrifice floor of religion's realization). This kinda leads into the second complaint: the very last stretch of the game is exhausting. Like, really grit your teeth and bear it exhausting. I'd stuck it through everything else up to that point, but using all ten floors was just too much. The pacing has been perfect up to that point.

I'm going to put this part last just because I don't know where else to put it, but since I'm talking about music... There's songs by Mili in here. Don't know who that is? Go listen to them right now. Finding that their music was in Ruina is what ultimately sold me and truth be told, I'm not sure if it would be better to go in blind or spoil yourself on the album first just so you can later go "oh shit that's what that song is about".

Okay... I think that's it. It's past midnight on Monday and I've got work, but I just finished and needed to put this out while riding the high. If you made it this far, thanks for sticking with me.

Some idiot typed "Amnesia" into the title instead of "Penumbra". I hope they got fired for that blunder.

Exceptionally solid horror experience. Gives you pretty much the exact amount of resources you need - not overly generous, but not stingy either. The main monster is really well designed, being always near you, but unless it's dark or you make a lot of noise (which you may have to out of necessity) it won't be actively hunting you through the game.

Gripes: It was shockingly slow to load such a small area, and yet still had an extra second to switch between areas. Whenever this happened the monster seemed to teleport to a new location on the map. Lastly, the final encounter with the monster was outright awful - it just didn't mesh with the rest of the experience.

You. Yes you, the person reading this. Look into my eyes, because I'm speaking directly to you. If you've already beaten LC, congrats! You can skip this paragraph. If you haven't started, consider this a formal warning: don't try to beat this game. If you are anything like me, you will have read what other people have posted, and said "I bet I can handle it". That hubris will destroy you. By all means you should play this, as there really isn't another experience like it. But please take my advice if ever at any point you're starting to have doubts - cheat, watch a playthrough, anything. When the grind sets in, Lobotomy Corp is an agonizing, repetitive experience that I somehow still recommend.

Let's start with the basics - I'm going to split the (non-VN) game into three stages: experimentation, management, and combat. Only one of these stages, experimentation, is interesting. Probing the Anomalies for the best output while making them not slaughter an entire department is fun and rewarding as you can then work with them in safety once you have the knowledge you need.
This lead us to the management stage in which you send an employee to do the work you already know will turn out alright. And then you do it again, and again, ad nauseam until the end of the day. Unless you forget the specific trigger for a given Anomaly, the majority of your days are just going to be repeating the same steps over and over. If you do mess up, the results are usually catastrophic enough to justify restarting the entire day.
When things do get shaken up, we get the combat stage, which is also incredibly tedious. It functions like a 2D RTS, with you selecting individuals or dragging a box for multiple guys before sending them off to fight. There are no control groups, no ways to split your guys between melee and range, and often times health bars will cover each other up. Unless an enemy is weak enough to just throw guys at, the best course of action usually involves some sort of cheese. Combat comes out as a sloppy mess that is unfortunately mandatory to master for completing sidequests for the true ending.

Okay, so the game's not good, but how's the story? The part everyone says the whole is worth it for? Yeah, it's great. I'd even say it's pretty fantastic. Every character and story beat was on point, and it left me wanting more. The Lore, while not expansive, gives you the perfect amount of info that you know what's going on but are still curiously in the dark about the nitty gritty specifics. If Lobotomy Corp was just a visual novel I'd probably give it a 4/5, but I can't do that in good conscience - I'm rating the whole package here. And at the end of the day, I can't even say what the best way to experience Lobotomy Corp even is. I can only hope that, if you are reading this, you don't do what I did. Don't fly too close to the sun.