Story

The heroine of this game is a Japanese schoolgirl who wakes up in a dark and dank dungeon somewhere and immediately has to do battle with a green goblin. She has no idea why, or who she is or how she got there. After defeating the goblin, the young amnesiac encounters a mysterious woman named Beatrice who introduces herself as the guardian of the castle and explains to the heroine that she has been summoned here by followers of the Dark Lady who is trapped inside the castle above. They had intended to brainwash the girl and sacrifice her in order to break the seal on the Dark Lady’s prison. There are others that have been summoned before.

Your task then, Beatrice explains, is to defeat the followers of the Dark Lady in order to get your memories back and figure out a way to get back to your world. So, you set out to do just that.

You learn more about the castle and what has happened to the previous victims in the same epistolary manner that you usually do in Metroidvanias. This time, however, the genre innovation is that most of the notes you find are on cell phones.

Someone also has been writing handwritten notes in various journals you stumble upon out in the castle rooms, evidently the villain.

The pacing is brisk, and you do meet other characters out in the rooms, such as the ghost of a girl who was summoned before you. You also meet her friend who is still alive. This is its own little mini story or “quest” as the game calls it, and you learn about the two girls’ relationship and why they split up from the epistolary entries you find.

The characters are designed well, and they are written well. Even though the interactions are short, you do feel sorry for them. They manage to feel real in a very short time.

When you talk to actual characters, it unfolds in sort of a comic book fashion with portraits of the characters highlighted and a text box in between. Nothing is voice acted. That being said, I didn’t mind reading the dialogue conversations.

It’s an interesting story. The heroine is believable in her reaction to all of the events and even though it’s a simple story in a lot of ways, it’s professionally done and can be funny at times. The characters are sympathetic, and that’s probably the most important thing.

Gameplay & Controls

This is a slower paced game when it comes to actual gameplay than the previous Metroidvanias. The little schoolgirl is not a warrior, she struggles to swing a sword and when she does, it’s a very deliberate movement, like she’s using all her might to do so.

Consequently, you pay more attention to your attacks in this game and try to make every one of them count. It’s not a button masher.

The enemies are likewise a little slower than other games. The monsters sort of lumber towards you. There are a few quick moving ones, and frankly, more often than not they will hit you at least once.

This is an adjustment from the other games in this series that I’ve been playing recently. I didn’t like it at first, but once I got used to the different pacing of the gameplay in this title, it was fine. I think they deliberately did this because of the type of character you are playing as. It would be ridiculous if she wielded a sword like a vampire hunter or something like that. She’s just trying to get back home.

You also have spells at your command which you learn from scrolls. They are typical elemental magic type spells but they are very useful.

Apart from your melee attacks you also have ranged weapons, of course, such as a slingshot, or even just hurling jars of electrical current at your enemies.

There is an interesting gameplay mechanic that sets this game apart from the other Metroidvanias I’ve played, and that is a time element to damage and recovery. So, if you use a water bottle, for example, to recover 10MP, you don’t recover it at once. Instead, you will recover it little by little for a certain time interval. A little countdown timer appears underneath your health and magic bars. Same with health. If you eat an apple from your item inventory, to recover 5HP, you don’t recover it immediately. You have to wait for whatever the prescribed time interval is in the item description before you’ve regained the entire 5HP.

The same is true for all items, like antidotes for example.

What this means is that you can’t let your health bar get to like 1HP or something and then open your inventory and eat a bunch of apples and come back to live gameplay with full health. When you come out of the inventory screen, no matter what you’ve selected, you’ll have the exact same HP as when you entered the inventory screen. It will start to increase from there, but this means you have to stay alive for that number of seconds it takes to get your HP back.

The same thing happens with damage. If you step on some floor spike traps, you will take an HP hit, but you will also start bleeding out every second. A little timer appears underneath the health bar to show you how long you’re going to bleed out for. This gives you the opportunity to go into your inventory and select a healing item before you bleed to death.

Which can be hard to do in time but at least it gives you the option of trying to save yourself.

And that gets me to the difficulty level, which is difficult. The girl is not as tough as she looks. You die a whole lot. Maybe even more than Ender Lilies.

Fortunately, the game provides you with liberal autosave statues. You will be thankful for them all the time.

You save the game properly, and you have to save the game properly if you are exiting the game and you want to save your progress, at computers you find out in the castle rooms. They look like old CRT monitors. This is the genre convention of the save point.

Usually, the computers are accompanied by a portal, the genre convention for speed travel in the game. It looks like a star gate.

You also sometimes have vending machines, which are this game’s item shop.

I think it’s funny how they use things form the modern-day world to satisfy these obligatory conventions of the genre. It’s kind of fun to buy things for your assault on the monster’s castles out of a vending machine, like toilet paper to wipe off poison or water bottles to replenish MP.

Atmosphere

Lost Ruins is not as dark as the previous Metroidvanias, but it’s still dark. I kind of think of it as a splatter flick with a teenage girl in it. It’s a splatter flick because the enemies usually just don’t vanish when you kill them, but they explode or splatter. This splatter can cause injury if it hits you. And then the remains don’t disintegrate or something like that. The body parts remain on the floor, like severed heads.

So it does have a kind of gruesomeness to it.

But you’re also playing an anime style Japanese schoolgirl who buys her supplies out of vending machines and uses everyday items to fight her way through the castle, like water bottles and toilet paper. There is some tongue in cheek humor to some of the conversations. She dons the (in)famous Japanese one-piece swimsuit to get around the sewers faster. She sways a bit side to side when she’s just standing there, almost like a little hula. You can tell that the game isn’t taking itself too seriously and wants to give you a chuckle or two in between frights.

The sound effects are kind of cute. When the heroine swings her mighty sword, she says “Haaa!” like she’s doing a judo chop. Most of the soundtrack is actually just sound effects, like the slushing of water, or the pattering of feet, or the grunts of someone getting hurt. Thing’s breaking. There isn’t really an orchestral score like most Metroidvanias, although there is at times a sort of subtle synth track that accompanies you along.

The art style is pixelated. It’s pixel art. I happen to like pixel art so the art style works for me. When the conversations take place, an illustrated anime style image appears of the characters speaking. These illustrations are really well done and it is impressive how subtle differences to the basic design of the Japanese schoolgirl create entirely different feeling characters (there are several girls of similar age).

I think the atmosphere captures the spirit of the Metroidvania genre, and that works for me. Although it does do “cute”. Even on the game’s Steam store page, it’s offered as part of a bundle called Cute and Doom.

Intangibles

I like the uniqueness of it. It’s a Metroidvania with modern day stuff in it, like computers and cellphones.

And it has the best main menu screen I’ve seen on a Metroidvania. There is something about the image of the iconic Japanese schoolgirl looking off into the distance at the scary castle that she has to enter, very much like Simon Belmont of old or something, that just seems like the perfect juxtaposition of elements to me, and makes you want to press start.

And it’s not a big budget production. But what it lacks in graphics power it makes up for in charm and fun. It has a fun factor that makes you want to keep playing.

I try to stay away from commenting about price, because it changes over time, especially on Steam when you can find things on sale all the time. But for the twenty dollars it’s listed as on Steam right now I think it’s definitely worth it.

I’ll give Lost Ruins four out of five Pellegrinos.

Take care!