Library of Ruina (2021)

honestly... you gotta be special in the head to like this game. the gameplay mechanics are obtuse, the UI is terrible. boss fights (in the form of realizations) are five phase bosses that can take upwards of an hour to beat, and if you die on the last phase, well get fucking ready to do it all over again.

the finale boss rush is tedious as all hell, but you beat it and you're like "ok! made it!" except no, the game has another boss rush planned for you. for a game that is all about swapping cards and making decks on the fly, it's really obtuse and annoying; it won't let you remove attributes from a page (characters) so you have to back out, find the page (you can't search for them), remove all attributes, THEN apply passives to a different card. you have to do this several times.

the game also has a grind component, you burn books in order to get cards but the rewards are random so you might have to fight some annoying fucking enemies more than once

the story is presented very sparsely in a way that i think is a detriment (80 minutes of fighting, 3 minutes of roland saying "wow, that guy was an oddball huh, haha")

it's hardcore in a way that is almost nearing sadism becasue you're constantly wrestling with things out of your control; when it's not the enemies, it's the UI, when it's not the UI, it's the pages, etc

i think it's worth the experience, and i liked it until the end-game, which is why it gets such a high star rating. the world-building is really cool, the characters are nice (play lobotomy corp or they're all irrelevant to you). the writing can be a little TOO grim-dark but it doesn't make me uncomfortable in the slightest so i can just brush it off as edginess (which it is). if you're more of a casual person, unable to bash your head against the wall until something happens... just watch it on youtube.

Finally got the time to give this game an honest go . I've tried playing this game both during early access and when it first came out of it and I just found it really difficult to get into compared to Lobotomy Corporation. Lobotomy, in my opinion, while difficult to wrap your head around, was instantly appealing to me with its idea of "SCP management" and didn't take too long to start feeling the satisfaction of managing and surviving days against fairly difficult "SCPs".

Library of Ruina is a card battler that is incredibly dull and slow for the first two hours or so as you're extremely limited in both the characters you have and the cards you are able to play with. However, once you get past this initial hurdle, the game pretty much pops off. You have multiple teams that can actually start making proper builds instead of just winging it with your limited amount of cards. At the same time, the battles start becoming more complex as a result and it finally starts feeling like a proper card battler. That said, this game is quite brutal. For just a short while you're able to enjoy feeling really strong with your new cards before the game moves on to the next tier of the story, where it promptly starts to beat you up without mercy. The difficulty spikes in Library of Ruina are kinda nuts and I'm greatly enjoying it. The presentation is great and the music is even more so. Alot of these fights feel like a pretty ridiculous anime fight as a result, as even card effects also start getting flashier to reflect how powerful they are when used properly. If you played Lobotomy Corporation you probably already played this, but if you haven't I would highly recommend giving both games a go. Though keep in mind they're both pretty brutal games and Ruina benefits greatly from playing Lobotomy first. They're currently both at 66% off as well.