A crafting sim that, to its credit, does try to differentiate from Stardew Valley by focusing on building. There is a bit of a learning curve (I didn't quite grok mining at first) and the game expects you to explore the workbook and menus and sort out an early building strategy, which is fine. Most of the NPCs seem fairly mundane and uninteresting, but I think what kills this one for me is the abundance of crafting timers. I feel like I'm always waiting around to craft the most basic ingredients, only to wait even more after to craft those into something else. If the crux of the game is crafting, early pacing should be determined by ingredient rarity or volume rather than timers.

Rise to Ruins is a fairly simple colony builder with some unique aspects. It obviously takes a page from Dwarf Fortress, but adds in some mechanics reminiscent of Populace and tower defense games (neither of which added a ton for me). I found a lot to like about it, but it doesn't quite bring what I want out of a game of this type.

The setting is pretty generic -- peasants building in the wilderness while fighting off a spreading corruption. It is enough to motivate and Rise to Ruins also zooms out to encourage you to take over one area, then move onto other areas in the same world with different challenges, which is pretty unique and cool. The setting also leads into the tower defense aspects of the game. Enemies come in waves over a long period of time, so defense of your settlement (most efficiently by building walled mazes with towers) is a large part of the game once you get your colony established. I don't find the repetitive nature of tower defense to be super compelling, but it works ok for what it is in the game.

I like the way Rise to Ruins looks. It is straightforward pixel art that is well done and appealing, though it doesn't quite get across as much of the personality of different characters as I would want to feel attached to any of them.
The building is probably the most interesting part of the game, in that you sort of designate areas for specific purposes and you can freely build roads and things over your buildings, which gives the village a very organic feel in the end.

Managing the colonists is sort of unique, but works pretty well. You assign numbers of colonists to a building, and the system figures out who to assign (basically like Frostpunk). This is good for a hands-off, easy way to handle this, but can feel bad when the system assigns non-optimal people to a job. Rise to Ruins sort of wants you to not care so much about the specifics here, which also removes some of your attachment to specific characters and the specific stats on the characters work against this.
Rise to Ruins does a great job of surfacing problems and letting you fix them, which is cool. It will tell you someone is dehydrated or a house doesn't have food, but leaves you to figure out how to solve that.

One interesting feature in the game is the use of spells, like in Populous. You generate magic power and can use this power to heal your colonists, call down fireballs, summon golems, and other things. This brings a unique facet to the game, but took away from the colony building aspects to me, since the spells feel like they override any need for preparation in some cases or feel pointless if you are actually prepared.

I had a fun time with Rise to Ruins, but am unlikely to do much more with it. It brings something unique to the genre with its heavy dependence on tower defense and spells, but it isn't really what I am looking for with this type of game.

Forwarning that I am posting this after unlocking all characters / weapons and am still playing, but did beat the first level of darkness so felt it was fair to give my review since the game is not much different on (from what i've been told). Now with that out of the way...
It's charming, I like it a lot. I've never been a huge fan of action-roguelikes or bullethells, but I do like what flanne has done here. The characters and weapons all seem solid in their own way, none feel significantly weaker, but some feel suspiciously strong. I think the design is nice and clean, very fun gameplay mechanics and overall just a great game to sit down and bang a run or two out in when I have an awkward amount of time... especially with "quick-play" being a feature I find very accessible. Solid fun, will keep on grinding through the end of the year.