Idle Thoughts

Put the dice away, edgelord (★☆☆☆☆)

Here at Idle Thoughts, it goes against our Code of Conduct to write about a game without finishing it. That being said, it turns out it takes more than a hundred excruciating hours to beat Library of Ruina.

Eh… maybe the Code of Conduct is more like a set of guidelines.

Library of Ruina is the sequel to Lobotomy Corporation, a game inspired by SCP Foundation, where you manage and contain various supernatural monstrosities that rampage gleefully through your hapless employees. But maybe that’s making the game sound too exciting. Lobotomy Corporation moves at a glacial pace. It’s the kind of game you should just watch a YouTuber play. They suffered for you so you don’t have to.

Lobotomy Corporation at least had an excellent setup. The setup in Library of Ruina makes absolutely no sense. Let’s see if I got this right. So, uhhh, the game is about a library. But you don’t actually lend any books, no. In fact, no one can enter your magic library without an invitation. You transform books into invitations to let people inside. Then you basically kill anyone the second they show up on your doorstep. You don’t kill your patrons in “battle” mind you, those are called “Receptions”. But then the game switches semantic field again and those Receptions have Scenes and Acts. I guess your library is also a theater or something. Anyway, the people you kill turn into books somehow and the cycle keeps going.

Has this game been made by aliens that have never seen a library? I can come up with a game concept too: you’re a helicopter salesman, yeah? But you only sell helicopters to the undead. So first, you have to resurrect your customers through the power of banjo. Then, to actually get a sale, you have to defeat them in three rounds of Scrabble, but we’ll call those “Laps” in a “Race”.

That’s the conceptual level on which the game operates.

The rest of the game’s universe is really something out of an edgelord’s darkest fantasies. In the first few hours, you’re introduced to : street urchins murdering pedestrians to harvest their organs, cannibal cooks that torture their victims “to bring out the taste” and poor people that sell away their humanity for machine bodies in order to save on food.

That’s the worldbuilding level on which the game operates.

But maybe the game itself is really good, so who cares about the setting, right?

Library of Ruina is a collectible card game. A really confusing one, to be honest. Every turn is a tangle of targeting, initiative dice rolls and damage dice rolls. Every unit can play multiple cards and every card can contain multiple attacks. We’re talking sometimes dozens of dice rolls in a single turn. Dice rolls are random by their very nature and thus not particularly interesting for a strategy game. They’re also a bit primitive. Isn’t the whole point of video games to do away with dice rolls? They’re not trivial events either: during a “clash” the winner of the dice roll gets all the benefits and the loser all the consequences.

Remember those people you turn into books? Those books are used up to start new fights AND unlock new cards. To be more precise, the books rewarded from battle are random and then you randomly unlock new cards from those (books are basically booster packs). It’s double the random! From what I’ve read, that means you’ll need to grind battles, just to get the chance to fight another battle that’ll give you a chance to get the card you want.

That’s the level of generosity to the player on which the game operates.

The cards themselves are on a power curve, so you constantly need to change them. Inscryption made a complete and really thematically consistent game with about a hundred cards. Ruina needs a hundred cards to get you through the first five or six fights. All those useless cards clog up the menus. Did I mention every unit or character is a deck and you eventually get dozens of characters? Have fun making all those decks with the slow and awkward user interface. It’s not like the cards have much personality either: a lot of them boil down to the difference between “2-5 blunt, 1-3 slash, 2-4 blunt” and “3-4 blunt, 2-4 blunt, 1-3 slash”.

Look, I’m told by the reviews that the battles eventually become really good, the kind where theme and mechanics become one. I’m also told the story gets good eventually, but who knows? Maybe it’s just the Stockholm syndrome talking. If the game is known for one thing, it’s the fact that it gets exponentially harder. Me, I’ve only dipped my toes into the game and I already hate it. And yet, based on the user reviews, it really seemed to be a hidden gem for true connoisseurs: very punishing but rewarding in equal measure. Connoisseur, you say? That’s me! I’ve got the patience, I’ll show the game who’s boss! Well… maybe not, as it turns out.

Speaking of reviews, considering how little time I’ve actually spent on the game, I’ll let the steam reviews speak for themselves. Consider them guest reviewers, if you will.

Steam user PUNISHED RAMSEY wrote:

You know how some games, let’s say, Dead Cells, have you do large amounts of progress each run, and that spans maybe a 35 minute run a day?

This game is the opposite of that. You will sit down to complete a single reception, get absolutely and thoroughly owned, you will realize it’s been 3 hours with no progress, and then you will shut down the game.

And by GOD you are going to like it.

Steam user snowy!!!! wrote :

they did it, they made a sequel more insufferable to play than lobotomy corporation. genuine torture to play this game and try to enjoy the story. no other artform can provide the level of misery that is playing this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ trainwreck. a one of a kind experience. glory to project moon.

Steam user Vitlöksbjörn wrote :

1. The fights get exponentially longer as you progress. The first reception can be easily completed in 5 minutes tops, but as you reach mid-game, you’ll find that some boss fights can take up to an hour. One reception can have two, three or even more acts, which are their own separate groups of bad guys to fight. After that, certain story fights have you fight a boss that has 5 separate phases with their own sets of mechanics… and of course, if you die in those, you have start right at the start. And then it gets even worse.

2. Power creep. Simply put, latter cards are flat-out better than earlier ones (in case you didn’t know, Ruina is a deckbulider). Around mid-game you’ll get some cards that will probably be viable until the very end, but for the most part you’ll be constantly replacing your decks. I’ve had multiple situations in which I steamrolled reception X, only to be defeated by the next one – and had to rebuild the decks based on cards I managed to get from the enemies I killed in that failed reception.

3. Rebuilding decks is unwieldy. Not only the UI is clunky, it also involves a lot of searching, equipping, unequipping. The card effect search, while it’s nice to have it, feels like it’s missing features. On top of that, there’s a lot of depth to this game and there are many, many, MANY effects. Too many, perhaps. And for each floor (which you’ll end up having 10, after the Sephirot) you’ll have 5 librarians – so that’s 50 decks in total – each made out of 9 cards + one key card (which also has sub-cards connected for passive abilities)… admittedly, you’ll be mostly rebuilding one floor at a time, but that’s still 5 decks. And they have to synergise and be adapted to the fight at hand. Out of my 90 hours played, it’s safe to say that at least 30 were spent building decks – but I didn’t use a guide or watch anyone play, as I fail to see the point of that.

4. Gacha, and the punishment for failure. No, there are no microtransactions. The only way to get new cards is to burn books which are left by killing enemies and winning receptions. You don’t know which cards you’ll get, and of course you’ll want the more rare ones, key cards in particular. So often you’ll end up burning all books you’ve gotten from a grueling, hour-long reception just to get that key card… only to find that you actually needed that book to progress in the story! So here we go again. And if you’ll lose a reception, you’ll also lose the book that you needed to start it… in other words, there is a very big chance you’ll have to redo fights which were already crazy long to begin with.

Steam user P51mus wrote :

But the entire last part of the game is awful. There’s like 20 more or less boss fight receptions in a row. There’s checkpoints between the fights, but if you’re short on any cards and want to get more of something you’ll have to start this entire 20 fight chain all over again from the beginning. And none of them are short. And they all have fight mechanics to build your decks around.

Steam user PurpleXVI wrote :

Library of Ruina is a fundamentally good game, which is certainly a lead-in for a negative review.

The problem is that the good game is buried under everything else about the game that doesn’t want you to play it. Even after 13 hours of play, there are still mechanics which interact in completely obtuse ways and surprise me, and even after seeing them trigger, I still don’t entirely understand what made them play out as they do. I refuse to believe there exists a human being who can look at a fight once you hit the stages where Ranged cards start being involved, and accurately assess exactly what’s going to happen once you press “resolve” for the relevant turn, or correctly predict which characters will regain how much Light(the game’s resource spent to play cards) at the start of a turn.

It doesn’t help that the UI aggressively doesn’t want you to understand the game. Is a card currently boosted or penalized by a status effect? Possibly, the game doesn’t provide you the final resulting dice being rolled anywhere, so it’s up to you to calculate the end result together(and a given mid-game turn may result in some twelve cards being tossed across the playing field on any given round, so have fun with that). You have some 6+ teams of characters, each with their own loadouts and piles of passives. Perhaps the game could tell you when a passive interacts with a card you’re equipping? Ha ha, no. And of course the lists of passives are long enough that you have to scroll them for each character.

Ah, you think, but I will just focus on one or two teams, to make sure I have a decent overview of what’s going on. Screw you, the game replies, certain battles can only be fought with certain teams, even if the teams are entirely interchangeable except for their limit breaks(abnormality cards).

Battles yield books, which work both as tickets to enter later battles and can be melted down for cards. You can do any battle any number of times(unless you lose, in which case the ticket is lost and needs to be regained), so you have technically infinite books, limited only by your patience. Yet when you gain cards from books, it’s random which ones you get, which means you may need to grind for them in an entirely *risk-free* way. It feels like the game is lacking some sort of additional resource or timer which would cause you to be cautious or sparing with your resources, but it doesn’t exist, so once again all a loss costs you is time.

Steam user 天下無狗 wrote :

You either die a quitter after 3 hours of lobotomy corp or you live long enough to see yourself become a ProjectMoon shill

As for that last quote, looks like I’m the former. I quit.