Lost Ruins a shorter Metroidvania | Review… kind of

In my last video about Vagrant Story I talked about the terms Metroidvania, Soulslikes and how I would group the bunch of them together to better describe what I am looking for in these games. The term Bossploration doesn’t exactly scream memorability, but it does accurately describe my infatuation with these types of games. Metroid, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Hollow Knight, Vagrant Story and that list continues of course, they all share some common elements, but for the most part each of these games can still be grouped up again. Metroid and Hollow Knight fall straight into the Metroidvania category, Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Sekiro into the Souls group and Vagrant Story into… miscellaneous I suppose. The two elements that all of these games share however, the ones that I am so enamoured by are seamless exploration and grand boss encounters. Last weekend I randomly came across Lost Ruins, a Metroidvania that looked like I’d be having fun with it.

Spoiler Warning

While I won’t spoil much about the plot of Lost Ruins, I will talk about areas, weapons, magics, bosses and other things that could be considered spoilers. So if you haven’t played Lost Ruins yet and would like to go in blind, which I always highly recommend for these types of games, close this video now and go play Lost Ruins instead. I’ll still be here by the time you’ve finished Lost Ruins, promise. 

Presentation

If you don’t like cutesy anime inspired artwork, the visual aesthetic of Lost Ruins might not really be up your alley. And while I am not opposed to that type of artstyle, I am not the biggest fan of school uniform, Japanese school swimsuit or maid outfit fetishes, which are the only three costumes available in the game. Nonetheless the pixelart style the game rocks with the anime aesthetic layered on top is rather pleasing to the eye in my opinion. Other than the three aforementioned costumes that come with corresponding equipment pieces, there are no further equipable items that will change the look of your heroine. Weapons on the other hand all sport a unique look. You even get a broom to go along with your maid outfit, which even gets buffed by the maid outfit itself. Point is that every weapon has its own design and they seemingly had some fun with it during the design process, which I like. Although I would have preferred more body pieces as well, just to give the character overall a more unique look.As for the environment, it all looks great honestly. There are a lot of details to be found in the backgrounds and while the game isn’t that big in scale, it’s still very much appreciated that each room can be recognised immediately, simply by looking at the room’s design. While you will use your map relatively often in the beginning, you’re likely going to rely less and less on it as you start to backtrack. The characters you interact with, the enemies you face and the bosses you fight, they all have a certain unique charm too them thanks to the game’s artstyle. It’s the same story as always I suppose, whenever I talk about these more niche games on my channel it always comes down to whether you either like the visuals or not. I for one really like what the game looks like.

References

I’d also like to give a special shoutout to the references Lost Ruins pulls in some cases, especially the fighting games related ones. Just… please! I absolutely love it.

Combat

While combat is not bad by any means, I’d say it is the weakest part of Lost Ruins. It is very deliberate and precise which is great, but it’s also quite limited. You can equip up to two weapons and two spells at a time. You can move left, right, crouch and jump. There are no special moves, if anything those would be your magic I suppose. Lost Ruins really wants you to strike a balance between magic and melee, but in the end and especially when you get the option to go invisible, available as both a spell and a consumable, which buffs the next melee attack you do by… way too much, you really aren’t incentivised all that much to rely on other types of magic. That’s not to say that magic is useless or anything, far from it, but it does require both trial and error, as well as resource management. Whereas going invisible and whacking the boss for huge damage doesn’t require a lot of brain power, so it is always the first choice.

Speaking of melee, the game categorises weapons in two ways plus whatever status effects the weapon can inflict. The first is if it’s either a two-handed and or a one-handed weapon, a classification that from what I can tell is only really used for the equipment you put on the heroine to synergise with. The other category is the speed of the weapon, which is something you are much more likely going to care about. The fastest weapons are very fast, while the slowest weapons require you to press the button a week ahead of time to hit whatever you were trying to attack. Speed is of course offset by damage and reach, so the slower a weapon is, the further it reaches and the higher the damage tends to be. There are outliers that come with different sets of attributes, like the cursed scythe for example, which is a far reaching weapon that you can make extremely fast and powerful at the same time, or the rocket launcher which is in a category in and of itself, but those are exceptions. For the most part, you will be focusing on the speed of a weapon and how it meshes with your playstyle.

Magic on the other hand is a little bit more involved and as mentioned earlier requires resource management. While there are several ways in the game to replenish MP, I found it rather cumbersome to rely on spells, especially as the majority of the spells didn’t seem to do enough damage to warrant setting up the heroine around it. Offensive spells are divided into elements. Fire, Ice, Lighting, Poison, Magic and even Physical. You have spells that act as projectiles, shields that damage enemies on contact and even trap type spells that activate as enemies walk over them. Then you have other types of spells like invisibility or HP absorption which I used much more frequently than the more offensive oriented ones.Magic will absolutely have its place as in Witch Mode, which is one of the game’s difficulties, or modes, magic attacks are the only attacks that can be used. Either way though, while combat in itself is rather simplistic in Lost Ruins, you hit, you dodge, you repeat, there are also more peculiar ways to deal with enemies.

Bosses

Once again we’ve reached my favourite subject— video game bosses! The last boss is admittedly not as much of an insane ride as I would have expected it to be, the other bosses are all really fun encounters though. Unfortunately there are only seven bosses in total, but what the game lacks in quantity it makes up for it in quality. I should also mention at this point that I played the game on Veteran, so depending on the difficulty you chose some things might be a little different, but I would think that it should all be rather comparable.Pretty much every boss has more than one phase and some have even more than that.

The first boss you fight is Lima. This being the first boss it’s still very early on in the game. In my case I pretty much arrived there at bang on 1 hour of playtime. In the first phase you fight a green and a red slime, which both have very different speeds and attacks. As this was on veteran and my very first time playing the game, this first phase alone, as simple as it is, got me killed more often than I’d care to admit to. The second phase went a lot smoother, but the third phase, which the first time around really took me by surprise, took me a while to get accustomed to. All in all, it took me roughly half an hour, dying over and over, to beat the first boss of the game.

The next bosses, Rosie and Yuri, were a lot easier to deal with, even though the summoning of normal skeleton enemies during Yuri’s boss encounter can really screw you if you are not prepared for it. It probably felt easier as I was much more comfortable with the controls and pace of Lost Ruins at this point. The boss after that though, Jun, I honestly still don’t know how to fight her. While trying out strategies and weapon types as I got my ass handed to me over and over, I also wanted to try out one of the shields I picked up, as I hadn’t used them at all up to this point and… well, she defeated herself without much input from my end.

There are two bosses that I believe are optional, I would have to go through the game again first to find out if that’s really the case or not, as I just killed everything that I came across. Both of them are the screen filling kind of bosses and rather straightforward as well. Just memorise the patterns and poke away one attack at a time until they go down. Kana is a more challenging fight as spacing plays a much more vital role here and while the same could have been said for Jun, Kana doesn’t cheese herself just because you were using a shield. Her first phase I kept dying to over and over and over, whereas I only made it to her second phase two or three times before I took her down for good.

That’s it though, after this you get one more sequence of rooms to traverse through with a few enemies littered about the place and then you get to fight the final boss. This one is also on the bigger, screen filling, side of things and yeah, not really all that challenging. If you did a particular side quest, one that you’re unlikely to actually do on your first playthrough, there’s technically another encounter after this one, but that is not an actual boss fight, it’s more to make a point rather than be an actual fight.Those are all the bosses in the main game. There are a few modes that open up after you’ve beaten the game. There’s the aforementioned witch mode and also assassin mode, which are both just the normal game again but with restrictions on what types of attacks you can use. Then there’s also boss mode, which I initially mistook for a boss rush mode, but that’s not the case at all, you actually play as the bosses of the game instead. You’d think that some new bosses would be hidden in here, but that is unfortunately not the case.

Exploration

As much as l like me some exploration there really isn’t much to do here. While the game is set up like a metroidvania, encourages backtracking and collecting keys to open previous closed off areas; the truth is that the game is rather short and very much hands you everything on a platter your first time through. With the exception of one side quest which requires you to not touch any golden chests, I’ve done literally everything in the game. My map completion percentage sat at 98% by the time I finished off the last boss. With these types of games I usually end up at about 70~80% tops though, as I tend to miss entire areas my first time through. I’ve played on the highest available difficulty, I am not counting Hardcore as I see permadeath as more of a separate category entirely, did everything there was to do and finished the entire game in about 6 hours in a single day. Don’t judge me, it was a very productive Sunday. That doesn’t mean that it’s not worth the money, that is absolutely not what I am trying to say here. Even with the limited exploration Lost Ruins has to offer I still enjoyed my time with it and I still have the other modes to sink my teeth into, so it’s not like I’m completely done with the game yet. If exploration is the most important criteria to you though for this type of game, then yes, you might be a little disappointed here.

Closing Words

For the 16 something Euros I paid I got more than my money’s worth I think. I really enjoyed the game and while it’s not perfect, I definitely do not regret buying it and would even recommend it to people who are also interested in these types of games. Have you played Lost Ruins yet, what are your thoughts on the game? Did you like it? Or if you haven’t played it, are you interested in picking it up? Let me know in the comments either here or on YouTube.

Technical stuff

Just in case it somehow matters: All footage was recorded on a 2019 16″ MacBook Pro (2.4 Ghz 8-Core Intel Core i9, 32 GB 2667 MHz DDR 4, AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8 GB). The version of the game was 1.08 on Steam for MacOS. The resolution was set to 1080p60 with Vsync enabled and rendering set to full.