With the amount of sensational Roguelikes that release every single year, it’d be fair to think that there aren’t a whole lot of unique ideas left in the space. Despite this it feels like every single month I play a new Roguelike that does something special, which I suddenly want to dedicate my life to playing over and over again. Last month it was a tactical combat of Star Vaders, this month it’s Into the Restless Ruins – which blends dungeon construction, deck building and Vampire Survivors style combat to create a delightful package.
Your goal in Into the Restless Ruins is to harvest the Warden (essentially the boss) of each ruin. There’s a lovely bit of Scottish flavour to everything, with features of folklore like the Harvest Maiden and the Hen Wife. Other than these Celtic influences there’s not really much of a story to worry about though, it’s all about the beautiful blend of gameplay.
Each dungeon tasks you with defeating a boss, but the issue is there’s no dungeon when you start. Each turn begins with you drawing a selection of cards from your deck of rooms, and by using your BP you can place these so their doors connect. The rooms come in all sorts of shapes so they won’t always fit where you want them to, and they almost all have various effects to take advantage of too. With a bit of luck and a lot of redraws you’ll make a path to foggy unexplored rooms, which contain characters to help you upgrade your deck, various important items, and seals that you can break to destroy barriers blocking the boss.
Once you’ve spent all your BP on a turn then you’ll switch to exploring the dungeon you’ve created, and without a map to check hopefully you’ve been paying attention to your layout. Your ruin is typically full of monsters, which you can only deal with by using auto firing weapons that will feel immediately familiar to fans of survivors games. Killing these enemies is important, but the main goal when dungeon crawling is to make your way to the new unexplored rooms you’ve added to see what treats await you – and it’s not just the enemies who will make this difficult.
To explore the ruins you’ll need the light of a torch to guide you, but this doesn’t have enough fuel to last forever. With a constantly draining meter you’ll need to rush to make your way in and out of the dungeon you’ve created, because if it empties not only will you struggle to see but you’ll take constant damage. There are some ways to counteract this though, and it all comes back to the building.
While some cards in your deck are just blank rooms to wander through, others have powerful effects that will help you survive deeper in the ruins. Early on, placing campfires to add a chunk of fuel to your torch and healing shrines is important, but more complex rooms like teleporters and power boosting armouries will also make it easier to make it to the boss. Ensuring you play the most helpful rooms that also allow you to make your way towards the boss is the key to victory, but that’s easier said than done.
Your basic deck has a few tricks up its sleeve, but for the more exciting and beneficial cards you’ll need to level up in the ruins. Killing enemies will grant you blue orbs that level you up, and when this happens you’ll be able to choose a new room from a selection of three to add to your deck. With ways to upgrade rooms and even remove them from your deck, Into the Restless Ruins has all the deck building elements you know and love.
Although Into the Restless Ruins is a Roguelike, there’s a lot it does differently from its peers. For example instead of having to beat the game in a single run the game is split into six individual stages, which for the most part take about an hour to beat (or fail to beat). There’s also no permadeath in the ruins, and if you die to the monsters or a lack of light you’ll instead just add to a curse meter. This goes up every time you go into the dungeon, but will raise a whole lot more if you die. There are various punishments you’ll receive for filling this up, and if it fills entirely the run will end and you’ll need to try again. This constant pressure means you always need to balance exploration and safety, but it does at least mean that a run doesn’t ever just end in an instant.
There’s so much to Into the Restless Ruins, and honestly it feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface. Various new weapons can be found that work in different helpful ways, there are seriously tough boss fights that’ll take all your skill to take down, and perhaps most notable are the items called Cantrips you’ll unlock that add modifiers to runs for maximum replayability. Replaying earlier dungeons with tougher enemies or more curses will grant you more points than usual, which will help you permanently unlock more cards and Cantrips to mix things up. I so rarely get tempted to replay games on harder difficulties, but this clever system allows you to customise the difficulty however you want (with a selection of Cantrips that make the game easier) and this ensured I enjoyed every repeat run.
There’s so much to praise Into the Restless Ruins, and also very little to complain about. It can be frustrating when a run grinds to a halt because you just draw the wrong shaped rooms, and with only one redraw a turn (by default) this happens a little too often. The combat is always pretty simple too, which although not necessarily bad does make the early parts of runs a little less exciting.
Into the Restless Ruins blends dungeon creation and dungeon crawling to create an intensely compelling game. It also manages to avoid the frustration Roguelikes often bring with its clever curse system, and by breaking the game into manageable chunks. Very few games keep me so invested that I replay with added difficulty, but I refused to put Into the Restless Ruins down and it’s likely you’ll have the same wonderful issue.
