It’s possibly becoming a bit of a hard sell these days, the old roguelike dungeon-crawling adventure, replete with retro/pixel visuals. We know it. However, as busy and as overstuffed with pale imitators to the greats as this genre is, it’s still well worth keeping an eye out for the odd gem.
And here we have an example of said gem. Into the Restless Ruins is a fantastic thing – put simply, a game that takes a whole bunch of mechanics you might think you’re tired of, and weaves them together into something entirely fresh and unique.
Edinburgh-based Ant Workshop Studios has melded deckbuilding, dungeon-crawling, dungeon-building, a fiendishly moreish memory game, and delightful, Vampire Survivors-esque, auto-combat to beguiling effect in its Switch debut. The delicately judged balance here, in how each of these mechanics is given an equal share of your time, ensures that, from the first dungeon drop to the very last battle of the campaign, you may find yourself immobilised, such is the addictiveness of the core gameplay loops running in tandem.
Kicking off in a dank catacomb, in a region known as Eorisdale, Into the Restless Ruins sees you take charge of a cloaked protagonist, a Celtic champion, who’s on the hunt for the Harvest Maiden. This figure from Scottish folklore, according to the game, can satisfy any heart’s greatest desires – in return for a little toil. And so off we pop down some dungeons as we’ve got a hot tip-off that’s where she goes to chill out.
This first dungeon gently introduces the flow of the gameplay. Starting a run, you’re procedurally-generated a single piece of dungeon, perhaps a crossroads, with a spawn point in the centre. You also have a deck with five cards. Each card has a little part of a dungeon displayed on it, alongside the number of BP (Build Points) you’ll need to play it, and a note of any other effects the card may have. An armoury will raise your attack stat, a camp lets you regenerate a little of your torch, whilst faded groves give you a little health regen, and so on through more complex fare.
You start off from your spawn point and use your cards, choosing a piece of dungeon to fit — in a lovely clicky way — to the piece you’re currently on. The aim now is to build and expand, using your given turns and BP, to reach several clouded areas spread around you, some of which contain seals. These seals must be found and broken to advance further to a final boss confrontation.
All good. Now, once you’ve done your planning and played your cards, you hold in ‘Y’ to drop right down into the dungeon (and it’s nice how the game just seamlessly zooms right in for this bit) where the auto-combat battling begins. The combat here will come as no surprise to anyone who’s survived vampires: it’s all about positioning and timing, avoiding explodey rats and mice, weaving through wizard’s spells, and knowing when to press or pull back.
Once this part starts, you’ll likely quickly realise that you’ve made some mistakes in the planning (especially if you are us). You see, as your dungeons expand, as you reach a seal and break it and are then faced down by a horde of angry beasties, the importance of dungeon design is fully revealed.
Campsites, first up, need to be placed along routes with some thought to ensure you can keep your torch lit, because they’ve only gone and put your light supply on a tightly-timed gauge. Tension has entered the chat! You also have a bar dictating your health, which doesn’t take much to empty either, so the positioning of those regenerating faded groves is now of critical import.
Once you complete a run you’ll be taken back to your deck and another gauge is deployed. This purple addition to the fun shows you how cursed you are, you see. It gets added to with each complete run, and so doing well, not dying, and playing clever will help you keep this bar filling up as slowly as possible. Dying and making a mess, on the other hand, will add some hefty chunks, putting you at risk of being overwhelmed before you manage to break all the seals and beat the boss. Phew!
The first dungeon’s leisurely pace and straightforward layout gives you a chance to get used to spinning and placing parts of your dungeon onto the map, as well as getting to grips with how you’ll need to time everything just so to push on to victory. The combat keeps itself varied by providing new weapons and collectibles, too, as well as giving you new options through a vast selection of upgradeable and changeable cards (116 base varieties, we believe).
There are further layers provided through build synergies — certain placement patterns provide surprise boons — and there’s also a whole bunch of Cantrips to unlock and use, allowing you to add both positive and negative effects to raise or lower the amount of XP you gain in a run, or “harvest” to use the correct lingo. So, lots of moving parts to consider.
You’ve also got a few characters to meet out in these ruins that you’ve built around yourself, strange NPCs who’ll upgrade your cards, duplicate particular faves, and more besides, whilst imparting some folklore upon you. Upgrading here, it has to be said, is also just really cool and satisfying because, besides the usual numbers-going-up, you get new entrances onto your card pieces.
So, for example, a long corridor with three doors that you couldn’t use because it wouldn’t fit, now gets an extra door for you to work with. It’s addictive, puzzley-time stuff that just gets better as it gets harder.
Of course, when a clouded area within any of your dungeons doesn’t contain a seal, you’ve wasted a lot of resources making your way towards it, and this aspect also brings enough tension to your planning time that the building is every bit as enjoyable as the combat. Wandering through dungeons brings the added danger of getting lost, too, as there’s no map, so the memory game starts to rear its head as you move onto the later catacombs, which mix things up by spreading the clouds you need to uncover in various directions. This means way more pre-planning is required to avoid coming a cropper to the tight time and health constraints placed on you.
Beyond this, you’ve also got cursed cards that’ll be played into your deck once you’ve been cursed, these add some rough negatives to proceedings if you let them sit in your hand, and so you need to consider when to play them (they cost a BP) in order to do the least amount of damage to your chances and get them out of your deck. These are offset by favour cards you’ll get from breaking seals and levelling up, so you could, as an example, play a cursed card that means you can’t heal up at groves, but then play a card that gives you +500% damage, so it nullifies the negative somewhat and removes it from your deck.
There are so many wrinkles here that it could have become very tedious and/or messy, so the best thing is how it’s all so effortless and easy to learn, even if you don’t really do cards as a regular thing. Every aspect is explained well (there’s a tutorial in the menus when you need it), and you can take your time in the planning phase. As the catacombs get harder, things progress along perfectly from relaxing and addictive, to tension-filled and even more bloody addictive. The lovely pixel art style, quick shots of Scottish folklore, and solid soundtrack all work to give you exactly the kind of ambience you need to settle in for the long haul.
In terms of negatives, well, the story aspects are light, really, so this one isn’t gonna be challenging any of the more narratively bombastic examples of the genre to a straight-up auto-fight in the school playground.
We guess, too, that the graphical style is one that’s been done quite a bit, but honestly, we’re picking for the sake of it now. This is some premium-grade roguelike, in the end – a uniquely fresh take that borrows inspirations from all over its chosen genre, and cobbles them together into a wonderful indie game that’s very much its own thing. Just be warned that the ‘one more run’ factor here is high.
