As one of the people who have played this game before the official release, I have seen it from the start to the end, alongside all the changes it has gone through and minor fixes it has needed. From these experiences, I can confidently say that Library of Ruina pushes enthralling opponents, wonderful OST’s, interesting and progressively evolving mechanics. Not to even mention the dark tale that wonderfully presents Ruina’s connection to the previous game in its universe, Lobotomy Corporation.
Library of Ruina can most easily be described as a deckbuilding RPG, although it has a few additional…well, additions than most of the same genre. Where you control Librarian’s and Patron Librarian’s in order face the library’s guests. By face, I mostly mean fight, in a turn-based battle that includes both Cards and Dice. You control up to 5 librarians at a time of course, the amount depending how far you have progressed in the game itself.
Combat starts every scene by rolling your speed die, it basically determines what action from what Librarian or Guest will occur first in combat, and whether you can redirect a page from one librarian, towards a faster librarian instead. Then come the pages-This is the deckbuilding aspect. Every librarian has a deck of nine pages used for combat, appropriately called combat pages.
Furthermore, you have Key pages, in other words a Kep Page determines the core aspects of a Librarian and if it has any, their passives. Both Combat and Key pages are obtained by defeating guests, taking on their likeness with outfits from their Key Pages and unlocking their Combat Pages by burning the books these guests have become after you beat them. While this is quite simple in practice, it gets progressively more intriguing as you progress and obtain the ability to put Key Page’s inside Key Pages to tailor a completely unique build!
This is how Ruina challenges players to keep progressing, by feeding you new books and their pages to use with every encounter. Maybe you want to bleed your opponents out as they try to attack you by stacking mass amount of bleed on opposing guests-Get the early advantage with oppressive Ranged attacks that always attack first or build up to something big by storing up charge for a massive finish. Many different setups are possible if you win enough receptions.
Defeating guests and the occasional (and technically unofficial) boss enemy are not the only things you have to deal with. In addition, we have the mechanics introduced by Abnormality Receptions, who work more like puzzles disguised as fights than anything else, forcing you to use your head if you want a change in beating them. But upon ending the reception with an abnormality by winning their thought-provoking battle, a new mechanic is introduced-Emotion levels and Abnormality pages.
These work by increasing your ‘emotion level’ throughout the reception of each of your Librarian’s individually, granting access to a multitude of unique and powerful affects to give your librarians for the battle. Some are entirely positive, while others have a risk-reward factor with devastating consequences for either side if used either wrong, or correctly. There are more specifics to be talked about, but they are best to discover by playing the game itself.
This is only enhanced by the dark story itself, and how well written it is from start to finish-Tragedy and despair, and many opportunities to show you that you are neither the good, nor bad guys in the story. Fleshing out entire groups of characters thoroughly over the course of a single interaction, or in one case, four encounters. The only criticism I have heard from it is a rather slow start due to the game not being the best at explaining its mechanics right away, although I had no such issues of understanding myself so take that with a grain of salt.
All in all, I highly recommend anybody to check out the game itself and give it a chance. With many opportunities to learn about the mysterious setting, experiment with many different setups, and if you find yourself in want of new content, the Steam version of the game has Steam Workshop access, so you are free to install a large variety of mods to spice up your gameplay or add more receptions to battle through!
