Lost Ruins (PC)
In Lost Ruins, you find yourself as a schoolgirl with no memories in a hostile fantasy realm. Despite seeming to be kind-hearted and a bit oblivious, the heroine proves herself to be quite adept with a blade and magic, but the bigger surprise is that hardly makes her unique. Other schoolgirls who have been called to this deadly realm have been warped into skilled, lethal creatures despite having once been regular girls, the fight to survive complicated just as much by peers as the natural monsters that you encounter on your journey of survival.
Despite the name Lost Ruins, this exploration focused platformer doesn’t seem to put much emphasis on its setting’s ancient history. The story is generally pretty lean, you’re told by the magician Beatrice of the powerful Dark Lady sealed in the ruins that others are trying to awaken, the heroine needing to defeat them to get closer to the truth about herself. However, the greater sense of history in the setting comes from those who were pulled into it away from their regular lives. A fairly frequent find around the dungeons, snowy wastes, and sewers you find yourself in are the bones of young girls who arrived before you, abandoned smartphones often containing their mournful diaries as they found an insurmountable obstacle or learned how dangerous the local creatures are the hard way. However, it’s the ones who have adapted to the new location you have to concern yourself most with, much of the bosses and even some of the regular enemies being girls who were twisted into monsters as the darker sides of their personalities were rewarded or exploited.
Lost Ruins has some very impressive pixel art to render its world, many smooth animations for things as simple as a boar sniffing around or the protagonist waving back and forth as she idles joined by the impressive giant bosses, but you can still see the bits of humanity even in the eye-catching monstrous twists on these women. The large slime girl will begin to blush as you strike her chest one too many times while another moves from being a brutal cannibal to becoming an immature crying child when you wear down her more monstrous form. Every now and then you get the reminder the characters you are up against, no matter how far gone they are now, were still once regular girls, something that can make the build up to facing a boss more interesting even if it doesn’t feel like that theme ties too much to the core plot about stopping the Dark Lady’s rise.
Exploring in Lost Ruins is appropriately focused on survival considering how hostile the game aims to make the world you find yourself in. Even when facing a foe as simple as a goblin or bug, taking a hit not only deals decent damage but can leave you bleeding or poisoned to shave off even more of your limited life. All around the game’s map are traps to watch out for, but they can be even more devious when combined with the game’s combo elements. If you’re walking through water and an electrical attack goes off nearby, you’ll get zapped. Oil might coat the ground or even your character, allowing for flames to catch quickly and ignite you. However, beyond a few enemies like demonic girls being resistant to fire, all of these tricks can be used to your advantage against the opposition as well. The game will give you the tools to exploit these environmental dangers or even set them up yourself, the many items you find around the world coming to comprise a rather useful arsenal to counter how lethal even regular foes or situations can be. Healing food is somewhat common to the degree you can scarf it down if you need to counteract an unexpected injury, but also still limited in ways like it healing over time rather than instantly so you need to plan their use instead of it just being a free heal. You’ll find many weapons along the journey, including magic wands with limited uses or blades with special elemental affinities, allowing you to quickly pause the action and pull them out if you can gain an advantage in a fight with them. You can have two weapons set for immediate use as well as two spells, although it will take some time and indulging in some fairly straightforward side quests to become durable enough that encounters can be treated more casually.
In fact, the action almost feels like it pushes Lost Ruins towards a souls-like in terms of genre. Regular foes may only have an attack or two, but they are decent threats that must be approached as such. You have a dodge roll that gives brief invincibility, and against bosses there are attacks that will require proper dodge timing to overcome. Bosses similarly only have a few tricks but they are very powerful until you learn the patterns and strike appropriately, your own weapons often coming with downsides you need to account for. You can wield something powerful like the large zweihander, but its slow swings mean you have to pick your moment well each time you strike or you’ll be the one hit. Knives are quick but their range is so short that you have to play dangerously to land your hits, and projectile weapons like bows require you to pick up arrows to be able to gain that range advantage. Power for your spells is also rather conditional, magic recovery harder to come by while each time you cast the spell uses a fair bit of magic, the wands that are limited use instead actually good alternatives when you just want to exploit a specific situation rather than spend the magic power. Some artifacts and equipment gained for progressing will ease up things eventually, even giving you room to recover health or magic slowly, but Lost Ruins is a game aiming to have those difficult moments where you must carefully watch your foe and attack only when it is safe or you will suffer the consequences regardless of whether you’re up against an exploding mushroom or a snowman who curiously uses the same moves as Sub-Zero from Mortal Kombat.
Lost Ruins is a metroidvania, meaning exploring the map is part of the challenge as well, although your character’s movement abilities don’t really expand too much. Navigational aids are rare to come by, the map often defined more by having the right keys or unlocking shortcuts that let you access previously out of reach areas. Some switches are locked behind puzzles or might ask for smart use of a spell, and with many items being quite useful to have on hand, spending the time to search every nook and cranny is usually rewarding save for when it’s an overspecialized piece of equipment. Lost Ruins does have multiple endings, the “true” one easy enough to pursue if you take all the game’s side quests seriously, but the more interesting extras come from the unlockable modes. A few just limit how you approach the main adventure or make it more difficult, but Boss Mode is an interesting twist despite its name making it sound like it would just be a way to rematch the game’s quality boss fights. What Boss Mode truly comprises of is an adventure starring three of the monstrous girls from the main adventure, all forced to work together as they go through the same ruins you faced in the main adventure. You can swap between the three bosses as you please, each one fighting in a different manner like one focused on spell-casting while the other is a close-range swordswoman, but unlike the heroine they can’t swap their weapons or abilities and instead just get a little stronger the deeper in you get. The reduced focus on items and increased range of skills from the get-go does streamline the adventure, making it shorter while also not feeling like a full-on retread despite hitting mostly the same beats, Boss Mode an appreciated means of getting a bit more out of Lost Ruins since the main adventure, even in a 100% run, will probably only take around 6 hours to complete.
THE VERDICT: Dangerous encounters that lead to careful use of your weapons and the environment give Lost Ruins a satisfying action element even when facing regular monsters, and when the bosses ask for even more smart item use and well-timed dodging, you end up with fights that are tough at first but become true shows of your skill when you overcome them. Exploration in Lost Ruins is rewarding because of the value of even simple healing items, so even though the map can be a bit small and navigation often blocked more by keys than something contingent on your abilities, Lost Ruins creates a setting worth exploring for the well-realized pixel art as well as the challenging but layered combat design.
And so, I give Lost Ruins for PC…
A GOOD rating. I can easily see why Lost Ruins has a bit of a mixed reception, and it’s because it seems unsure of how to put its best foot forward. Its name isn’t really indicative of its main appeals, and rather than emphasizing its deliberate souls-like combat in marketing it emphasizes its Metroidvania map that expands less because of your own actions and more just because you eventually find the right paths to connect locations. The careful fighting style feels like its main gameplay draw, the smooth and appealing pixel art the visual draw but also a bit of a sweet face on a game that will play very rough with you. Early on it can be disheartening to see how regular enemies are rather unrelenting, the player needing to understand their dodge, make use of their entire inventory, and figure out how to best utilize their weapon speeds to hold their own. Seeing how slow a strong weapon is or how rough it can be to get a quick weapon to work in regular fights is another mental barrier that must be overcome, the player needing to plan an attack or seize a moment with there being no room for careless action. It’s not so oppressive that it feels like a large part of the experience to surmount, you can start taking out goblins with two well-timed swings with the big weapons and your magic spells and environmental combos can be used for quick and satisfying advantages if you get past a desire to hoard the things you find. The resources are placed to be used frequently so that bleeding or becoming poisoned can be accounted for but still treated as dangers to avoid, Lost Ruins wanting its action to have weight outside of the tentpole boss fights. It’s one reason the game can be only a few hours long but still feel like it has plenty of engaging encounters, Lost Ruins not just about working your way to the next showdown with a fellow fallen schoolgirl. Perhaps a cleaner way to telegraph this would help the game find the audience who would like it or at least train up people who thought they were getting into a different type of experience better, but if you’re willing to engage with its more unforgiving side you will get a battle system that can seem imposing at times but can be quite thrilling to overcome once you understand its ins and outs.
Lost Ruins could have benefited from focusing in more on its strengths, elements like the Metroidvania design not feeling as crucial to its appeal as the big bosses or how different weapons can confer different advantages based on the environment. However, its strengths do definitely come forward once you come to realize the true shape of this adventure, Lost Ruins maybe in need of a rebrand to help put players in the right mindset. Even if it can be a little rough at parts, the emphasis on consequential action as well as the design approach of having young women twisted into monsters that are stylishly realized does give the game elements that stand out and can make it worthy of giving a shot after you better know what you’re getting into.