Lone Ruin Review: Let the Spells Do the Talking

Usually, the New Year starts off with a quiet introduction to new games. Gamers typically enjoy their holiday gifts from the previous year and cozy up to some new hardware all while sipping some delicious hot chocolate. 2023 is a bit different though. Super Rare Originals and Cuddle Monster Games are hitting the ground running with their captivating, thrilling, and fun roguelike title, Lone Ruin.

Purple and Blue and Pink All Over

Lone Ruin opens up with a brief animation, beautifully showcasing its neon pinks and blues through a pixelated lens. The ominous audio effects paired with the pixelated creatures and 3D environments really provided a fantastic ambiance. As the protagonist, you’re challenged to delve into an old and magical ruin. Through each level, you’re faced against strange creatures, have the option to find mysterious abilities that will enhance your own magical powers, or gain strange artifacts that can alter the gameplay during the run. Though the story within Lone Ruin is extremely minimalist, it served more accurately as a catalyst for the gameplay - creating a scenario as to why your nameless character is exploring these lone ruins.

Arm Your Fingers

With the very light story, Lone Ruin really delves wonderfully into the gameplay mechanics. As a roguelike, Lone Ruin has players replay the game several times - gradually building their wealth of knowledge and improving incrementally throughout the runs. You start off each run on the ground-level. A mysterious creature offers you a choice of eight spells. Each spell offers a unique experience, ranging from a boomerang-like-spell, to a close-combat-like-spell, and even a bullet-hell-like-spell. At first, I was a bit thrown off by the volume of options, but to encourage variety and experimentation, Lone Ruin randomly chooses three spells to already have one upgrade attached to them. This way, I was able to try a new spell and already have extra firepower or a shorter cooldown. I eventually found my favorite spell and upgrade combo through this feature - which only emphasizes the fun of replaying the game.

The game itself provides very little information on how to play the game, what you can and cannot do, and how you can spec out your character. Instead, it very purposefully forces you to almost guess what certain items are and what other abilities may be until you’re within arms reach of them. Eventually, you get mini descriptions of what each of these items or spells will do, but every time I saw something that wasn’t familiar, I decided to complete the room and see what I reaped.

In order to complete an occupied room, you must first defeat several hordes of enemies. Some enemies may be flying one-eyed bats throwing projectiles, while other creatures could be giant golem-like beasts that hover in the air then come crashing down. These rounds felt unique each time, despite the somewhat low level of enemy variety. Dashing and attacking the creatures feels immensely satisfying, and with the catchy music behind you, I felt like an absolute fantasy rockstar. (Your character even points their index finger imitating a *pew pew* notion, which I thought was a wonderful detail as well.) 

Balancing the Challenge with the Shopping

In addition to the occupied rooms, there are also shops and challenge rooms. The shops allow players to trade in all the coins you find in the rooms for additional spells, ability to recover some health, or gain some valuable items. Prices were fixed, so after a few rounds, you’d know whether or not you have enough money before going into the room. Though I didn’t focus on shopping as much as I could have during my runs, I found it satisfying to see what was available, read the descriptions, and gain a bit more knowledge about all the mechanics and items in the game to help me in a future run. With all that, the challenge rooms certainly did not offer any reprieve. These rooms would offer triple the rewards but usually have nearly double the amount of horde waves and enemies seemed more aggressive. I seldom would venture into these rooms because the risk vs reward ratio didn’t seem appealing to me. For the sake of trying them, I did jump in a few times and survived by the skin of my teeth. For players who are a glutton for punishment, these rooms are perfect.

My biggest disappointment with the game however were the bosses. Though each one felt unique enough, I didn’t find them to be particularly challenging or methodical. As someone who plays very cautiously, I was able to beat each level after 2 or 3 tries. However, I did encounter hard crashes when I made it to the final level twice, which was extremely frustrating. Since there are no saves on a run, all progress was lost. I’m hopeful that those were isolated incidents on my end and that they don’t occur to any other players in the future. [Update: The issue has been resolved with a day one patch]

Can You Survive?

In addition to the main campaign of the game, Lone Ruin has a separate Survival mode. This time- and wave-based game mode keeps throwing hordes and hordes of enemies towards you. The goal, as the mode states, is to survive and rake up as many points as you can. I really loved this mode because I was able to experiment with spells and items much quicker than the standard mode and see the large myriad of upgrades for all the features in the game. Eventually, I was dashing and destroying creatures at an exceptional rate and finding better and better combinations to clear through all the dangers.

Breakdown

Game: Lone Ruin

Developer: Cuddle Monster Games

Availability: Nintendo Switch, PC

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch

Pros:

+ Incredible color scheme are art style

+ Captivating gameplay loop

+ Variety of weapons, spells, and items to experiment and optimize combinations

Cons:

- Boss battles aren’t too exciting

- Experienced crashes at the end of the game, losing all progress [Update: The issue has been resolved with a day one patch]

Final Thoughts

Lone Ruin is a great kickoff to 2023. Between its stunning visuals, action-packed gameplay, and killer build variety, Cuddle Monster Games’ engaging roguelike is certainly worth your time.

Reviewed By Harry Loizides