Instead of acquiring permanent upgrades that will unlock new traversal options as is tradition, most of what you’ll find scattered around the environment are different types of weapons, equipable accessories, or consumable items that will help restore health or grant temporary status buffs. I would hesitate to call this game a full-on Metroidvania – while there are some areas where you must make a choice about which way to proceed, and while the overall structure of the world is fairly interconnected, there’s not a huge need for backtracking in this game unless you want to. That excitement of never knowing what could be around the next corner felt very real throughout my entire playtime, and always kept me on my toes. It could be a small physics-based puzzle, or it could be a massive, room-filling boss that can take you down in a few hits if you enter unprepared. It could be a room filled with enemies waiting to try and surround you, or it could be a storage room filled with valuable and hard-to-find weapons or accessories that will make your character more resilient. The ruins themselves are a series of large, interconnected areas with multiple diverging pathways to check out, and you really never know what will be down the next hallway. I think a big part of that pull, at least for me, was in exploring more of the world of Lost Ruins. Somehow, though, Lost Ruins managed to evoke that same desire to progress in me despite its lack of focus on the narrative. Personally, I generally prefer when games have a little bit more going on in the narrative department as it makes it easier for me to motivate myself to see the experience through to the end. That’s pretty much the extent of the overarching mystery, although there are small bits of lore scattered around the environment that add a small bit of flavor and context as to what might be happening in this strange place. From there, you’re tasked with finding and eliminating the followers of the Dark Lady who supposedly runs the place. The game’s unnamed heroine finds herself mysteriously transported to another world – with zero memories, of course – and is told by a mysterious being named Beatrice that many others have been summoned to this strange place before her, but none have been able to escape. Lost Ruins does have a story to tell – although it mostly exists in the background and is little more than an impetus to explore and fight some bosses – at least until the very end. It’s also a very high-stakes game – this is a world containing finite resources to help keep you alive, so exploration is both necessary and very dangerous. But the more I played through Lost Ruins, the more I began to appreciate the way in which it takes that classic game structure and melds it with new ideas, namely a very deep and challenging combat system that allows for a surprising selection of options to dispatch foes. There’s a high probability that players will notice a game like Lost Ruins and think to themselves, “that looks like something I’ve played before.” And that’s fair – there have been no shortage of nonlinear, side-scrolling action platformers with a pixel art aesthetic in recent years.
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