These rooms and rewards are all randomly generated, as a roguelike demands, so no two play-throughs will be quite the same, and you’ll need to roll with the punches and sometimes try and figure out how a less-than-ideal loadout can be worked with. Rewards range from power boosts to additional spells to add to the arsenal, and upgrades to those spells. After doing so you’ll earn that reward, as well as two more gates to choose between. On passing through the gate, you’ll need to fend off a few waves of enemies. From that point, you will have a choice of two gates, each promising a different reward. You only get to pick one, so you’re going to want to make the right decision there.

These range from melee attacks to big AOE spells and rapid-fire magic missiles. It starts with the introduction, where you’re given an array of weapons and magical attacks to choose between. What Lone Ruin nails is the quality of action. There’s nothing wrong with that, but personally, I prefer games that leave me with something to muse over. Something that very few people are going to hear about.

As it stands, this one is purely for people who like submitting scores to online leaderboards and showing off how great they are at something obscure. There are clearly talented artists and designers working at this developer, and just a bit of context would have gone a long way to giving Lone Ruin an identity, hook and a reason to play it. With no context of an actual narrative to explain why the world is oh-so-dark I just assumed that the developers did this because they thought dark aesthetics were “cool”. The aesthetics are appealing and the monsters and characters are well-animated, but it’s never elevated beyond being grim for grim’s sake. There’s no narrative (I don’t even know if the protagonist has a name), and there’s no break from the relentless cycle of hordes of enemies and then the occasional boss. There’s no meaningful context given to the action. In fact, the game is so stock-standard that I’m struggling to think of a way to approach writing about it. Unfortunately, it’s a roguelike twin-stick shooter and… well, let’s be done with this genre for a while, yes? In a world post Hades and the rest, we just don’t need more of these at the moment. The game itself is an excellent example of taut, intense mechanics, a well-designed (and challenging) difficulty curve, and moody aesthetics. If it had been released a decade ago, it would have been celebrated. If Lone Ruin had been released three years ago, it would have been noteworthy.

Lone ruin review