Lone Ruin

Lone Ruin will test your patience, but let’s all be grateful the arcade action comes without the arcade cost. The “just one more try” gameplay benefits greatly from the snappy load screens and menus, even on the Nintendo Switch version, making it easier to recommend this brutally difficult and magical indie hit from Super Rare Games.

Whilst it may be pleasing to the visual and audio senses, Lone Ruin balances out that pleasant feeling with fair challenge. A roguelike in the traditional sense, it offers that “one more run” gameplay for anyone that feels like they can do it better next time.

It’s unfortunate that Lone Ruin came about two years after the jokes about every indie doing a pixel roguelike became exhausting. It’s well-made and undeniably entertaining, but there’s so much competition in this space and the developers didn’t seem overly concerned with doing something that would actually differentiate their game. So yes. This is a mechanically very solid production that I can recommend to people that like difficult action roguelikes. Unfortunately, I’ll also likely forget about it by the time the next one of these comes along, and that’s probably sometime next week.

While Lone Ruin is currently sparse on content, there’s some solid gameplay foundations here that could be built upon in the future.

Lone Ruin is a spell-based roguelike twin-stick shooter with a focus on replayability, but it doesn't always deliver on its promises.

Lone Ruin is a solid roguelike twin-stick shooter, though this style and form has been done better elsewhere. There's a decent challenge and some replayability to be found as you repeatedly venture into the ruined city, but its brevity and lack of narrative drive fall short of the genre's greats.

While the ingredients for a compelling roguelite are here, Lone Ruin opts for a straightforward roguelike experience that shines a spotlight on its relative lack of content. Shame, because it is fun and if they’d given me a reason to keep playing it, I would have.

"Twinstick roguelikes aren’t usually my cup of tea, and Lone Ruin certainly doesn’t offer that much to make itself stand out from the games that inspired it. However, the beautiful visuals and tight controls are what kept me hooked. If you’re looking for a reasonably priced roguelike that offers quick paced fun, you could do far worse than Lone Ruin." ****/2023/01/16/lone-ruin/

The game itself is great, but the Switch version will crash in the main game mode 100% of the time. I'm at 5 consecutive crashes during the final minute of Survival. Do not buy this on Switch. You can't get a refund on a product you can't finish playing.