‘Lone Ruin’ Review: The Most Arcade-ish Roguelike in a While
Lone Ruin downsizes the classical roguelike structure and mechanics to become a bite-sized twin-stick shooter with little variation and lots of tension.
Cuddle Monster Games’ Hannes Rahm made quite the impression in 2019 with his debut game Hell Is Other Demons, an “action-platform shooter” with roguelite elements, relentless arcade-like energy, and a striking audiovisual style. After five hours with Lone Ruin, I can affirm that same spirit has been imbued into his second game.
“Five hours you say, is that enough to fully grasp a roguelike game?” Well, it’s more than enough to understand and suck dry this one. Lone Ruin really commits to the “arcade experience” bit (leaderboards included), and that translates into a lean and mean experience that is perfect for short runs rather than marathons.
The first thing that will catch your attention in Lone Ruin is its signature, vibrant art style, built around different shades of blue, purple, and black. From the brief beginning cutscene to the very end of a run, this is a game with a consistent visual identity. So much so that, despite its roguelike promises, most areas end up feeling the same, and that extends to the layouts of the rooms. The overly simplistic and repetitive nature of the levels is perhaps the most underwhelming element of Lone Ruin, a game which bets most of its chips on the raw and accessible moment-to-moment action.
And yes, good action it does deliver. By limiting the controls to four spells/actions at a time and embracing twin-stick snappiness, Lone Ruin is easy to pick up and play for a few minutes in between chores without overthinking character builds or getting lost in maze-like areas. While Rahm was smart enough to borrow a handful of mechanics and elements from now-classics such as Hades, Lone Ruin never seems to bite off more than it can chew. Though that comes at a price: this roguelike lacks any kind of meta progression and doesn’t have nearly enough variation to have you coming back for more. Spell and passive upgrades don’t shake things up notably; the roster of enemy demons isn’t terribly diverse; and there are only three sub-worlds and bosses, which you can blast through in less than 30 minutes.
Surprisingly, though, a survival mode spices things up with a tighter pacing and offers a different enough playground to test different builds; this mode also seems to fully embrace the arcade-y core of the game in a more effective way. It’ll be interesting to keep an eye on the leaderboards in the coming weeks.
There isn’t much of a story either. The starring explorer ventures into an old, magical ruin to seek an ancient power, but we aren’t treated to lore nor dialogues that bring us into the world. It’s all style (banger soundtrack included) over substance… and clearly done on purpose. Whether you play this game on PC or Steam Deck (it looks and runs great on Valve’s portable machine) or Switch, one or two runs end up feeling like a good ol’ trip to the local arcade, and the final scoreboards after each victory or death feel like the cherry on top.
It might seem like I didn’t enjoy much my time with Lone Ruin, but it’s actually the opposite: the core experience is solid and electrifying enough to sell you on its smaller scale and bite-sized nature. Looks can be deceiving, but Cuddle Monster Games had a clear picture of what it wanted to achieve with this game. Nonetheless, I’ll say it’s a bit frustrating to come across such a polished little game that doesn’t want to spend much time with you. But maybe that’s just a problem of expectations after years and years of roguelike titles that devour our free time.
Lone Ruin launches today, January 12, on PC (Steam) and Nintendo Switch.
Thanks to Super Rare Originals (publisher) for the PC review code.
Francisco J. Ruiz is that guy who has watched Jurassic Park a thousand times and loves Star Wars. His hunger for movies is only matched by his love for video games. He graduated in English Studies from the University of Malaga, in Spain. As he keeps writing about what he enjoys (and doesn’t) for websites all over, he’s continuing his studies.
