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.