Library of Ruina — Review (Spoilers)
or The Will to Keep Reading and Living
Library of Ruina took me 217.9 hours to beat from start to finish with no mods and as minimal aid from outside sources as possible. It is the longest single-player game I have ever beaten that isn’t a visual novel with minimal gameplay. Even Lobotomy Corporation took me just around 188.3 hours for my 100% clear of that game. Both of these are some of the most challenging, exhausting, and outright painful experiences I’ve ever had with video games as a medium. Neither of them have been able to leave my mind since completion, and both are some of my favorite games that I feel genuinely fortunate to have experienced from start to end.
Library of Ruina is a direct sequel to Lobotomy Corporation. Its main plot focuses on The Library growing in knowledge and amassing power following the events of the 100% ending for Lobotomy Corporation. This is less of a plot point just to setup the story, as it is a core element of the narrative for not only the start of this game’s events, but the development of the main characters. As such, events from Lobotomy Corporation are revisited in Ruina that were not only late game revelations, but also very central themes to the continuing story. This review will include Lobotomy Corporation spoilers as well as Ruina spoilers from a certain point onwards.
This is not a game or series for casual or even some hardcore players. The first game is a management simulator, and the second is a team-based deck builder with RPG elements. Both of these having multiple directly vertical difficulty spikes after upwards of 50 to 100 hours of already invested playtime. As such, I can not readily recommend these games. I can’t recommend a game that I’m unsure if the person I’m recommending it to would reasonably beat. If that warning has caught your attention and curiosity, then please let me continue and explain why Library of Ruina has quickly became one of my favorite games of all time.
Library of Ruina is a direct sequel to Lobotomy Corporation. Taking place a relatively short time after the events of the first game’s 100% ending, the first two characters you are introduced to are the Library’s head director Angela, and a man who suddenly finds himself in the Library named Roland. The main plot of the game centers on the growth of the Library as Angela seeks to obtain The One Book that is claimed to hold the answers that she seeks. Over the course of the game, other floors of the library begin to open up. Each unique floor is headed by a Patron Librarian who is a returning Sephirah from Lobotomy Corp.
Over the course of the game, each floor will grow in strength the more you invite guests to the library and battle them to obtain their books. These books serve as stat sheets, skill pools, and different cards that you can acquire to use for your next battle. Beating an enemy leads to being able to use that enemy’s stats, passives, and cards for your own uses. The catch being that you get a limited number of books per reception. In order to obtain these useful elements from enemies, you need to “burn” their books. This results in the book being destroyed, but functions effectively as a card pack. Some packs have more powerful cards than others, but you also need certain books to invite certain guests or to do some of the encounters to level up your library floors. Losing receptions means you also lose the books you had to offer for those invitations.
All of this creates a very stable and relatively simple system to manage outside of combat with plenty of choices to be made regarding the best use of your currently available resources. In combat, the system is more akin to a table top card game. A resource called “Light” is effectively your draw power. Each card has a cost ranging from as low as 0 to as high as sometimes double digits. The only thing limiting what you can use on any given turn is the amount of light your character has. Starting with 3 light, the player is able to use that light to use a card. If you have three light, and a card that costs one and two respectively, you can play both cards so long as you have two usable speed die. As battles go on, emotion level rises. As emotions rise to new levels, you gain more total light. Essentially, your ability to use more powerful abilities more often gets easier the longer the fight goes on and emotions run high. This applies to your enemies as well. The higher their emotions, they gain different buffs, but they also drop more books the higher things go for their side. Harder fights end up having the benefit of rewarding the player with more books and resources at the cost of tougher/closer battles.
Light, emotion levels, books, and various other aspects of this game are also more than just set dressing. Just like in Lobotomy Corporation, these elements are acknowledged and understood by the characters in the setting. The nature of “light” is something the characters spend a majority of the game debating and hypothesizing over. The intense emotions guests and librarians experience during battles is relevant to the development of several characters as well as an observable phenomena that is deliberately being replicated for Angela’s research.
The main bulk of the story are the number of “receptions” you will take over the course of your playtime. Each one comes with a short vignette that gives Angela, Roland, and the player a brief look into the soon to be guests’ life either prior or shortly after receiving an invitation. Through these seemingly unrelated stories, you grow to learn more about not only the setting of these games (in far greater detail than previously explored in Lobotomy Corporation), but also the various beliefs and philosophies many of these people adopt to survive in such a place controlled by various unregulated corporations and criminal syndicates.
If these systems and story premise sound interesting to you, then I can not stop you from checking the game out. It was recently ported to Switch (albeit with some technical and performance issues) and has mod support on Steam. I would however request a bit more of your time to explain some elements that come into play slightly later. I wouldn’t call these significant story spoilers, but they are where the game begins to show more of its true face long after the refund window. Significant story spoilers will not be given here, but these are gameplay spoilers.
As you unlock more of the library floors, you will gain access to “suppressions”. These are unique fights per each floor of the library that usually go up to five. Completing each suppression improves your overall library level, and serves to increase the strength of the floor the suppression was on. Completing these also unlocks a story segment relating to that patron librarian. The first few of these are little more than puzzles that require a bit more reading and problem solving to figure out. Many of these suppressions are returning abnormalities from Lobotomy Corporation and carry over their unique abilities remarkably well for a completely different type of game.
At the end of those five suppressions, there are “realizations” that serve as a final test. These involve a multi-stage reception locked to that specific floor, suppressing those previously suppressed abnormalities again, and an additional suppression phase of an abnormality not previously seen on that floor. These fights can be very long, very difficult, and defeat at any stage means doing the entire fight over again from the beginning. They are very comparable to the Core Suppressions of Lobotomy Corporation.
These suppressions and realizations are not the only boss fights in the game. As the story goes on, there will be multi-phase bosses that have different passives that may completely nullify a strategy used to even reach that very phase. Many of these bosses appear as the end of some multi-stage fights, after a phase/scene transition, or are even invitations that you aren’t properly able to get full information on prior to being in the fight and after multiple transitions. The non-suppression boss fights are also subject to the same rule as general receptions. Meaning, if you lose the boss fight, you lose the books used to invite that boss. Resulting in the player having to redo any previous fight to reacquire those books again before you can attempt to fight the boss a second time. The most difficult, and standout fights of the game usually also have a song commissioned by Japanese indie music group Mili to accompany them.
Upon completing suppressions, each specific floor gains access to Abnormality Pages. These are unique pages that serve as additional passives to either a specific librarian, all librarians, or all combat participants during the reception. These pages only become available after a certain emotional level has been reached across all your librarians in play. These pages are divvied into green and red cards as well. Green corresponding to positive emotions ( built by winning clashes and dealing damage to enemies) and red corresponding to negative emotions (built by losing clashes and taking damage from enemies). Some green pages have more severe downsides than red, while some red pages come with direct buffs with little trade off. You can influence which cards show up for your selection (you can only pick one of three per stack when emotional level rises) by keeping track of how much of specific emotions you are building. Winning clashes is generally good, but you can better build your chances of getting an Abnormality page you need by taking clashes you know you’ll lose instead.
I’m not particularly a card game player. I’m especially not a fan of deck builders. Yet, I was strangely engrossed by Ruina’s gameplay for a lot longer than I thought I ever could be by a game with its structure. Its entirely possible to top deck, or even get a bricked hand in this game. The cards you fill your decks with are distributed just like most other card games: at random. You draw one card at the end of your turn, and restore one light if you didn’t perform an action. Different cards have different buffs, debuffs, stat modifiers, or even draw/discard effects. Combine that with the different passives each identity page can give you (with the later ability to mix and match passives of different pages/units) and the system starts to open up incredibly. Cards you might previously have considered worthless can suddenly become your win condition if you have passives and a team focused around getting the most use out of those cards.
For example, bleed is a very common status effect in the game. Per each stack of bleed, when that unit makes an attack, they will take fixed damage according to the bleed stat, before the total amount of those stacks decreases by 1/3rd. However, some characters have a buff that actually increases their damage output per set stacks of bleed they have on themselves. Mix that with cards that self-inflict bleed on use, and suddenly you have a character using a debuff as a buff to increase their damage output. There’s builds you can make focused around each and every status effect in the game with the only limit being what you can come up with and the cards currently available to you.
On the mention of status effects, this game has possibly the most I’ve ever seen in any card game or possibly RPG I’ve played. Aside from the few secondary-resource based status’, the different abnormalities and certain bosses use unique passives. Some of them can be buffed versions of the usual passives in the game, or they can be entirely unique abilities that fundamentally change how you’re supposed to play the game for a fixed encounter. Some of the later effects have you attacking your own units to prevent them from dying or purposefully giving one unit a near unusable deck to prevent certain fights from mimicking it. The very roots of the game are a card-based combat system but those roots are often upended or completely reframed to keep you from getting too complacent.
Ruina’s most standout aspect however has to be its deeply engaging story. From this point onwards, there will be significant story spoilers. I won’t be speaking about each individual part, but I will discuss how many of the game’s separate plot threads find ways to come together to create an experience that is as inspiring as it was painful to see to completion. This is the final spoiler warning.
To start, the main characters of Library of Ruina are both Angela and Roland. Starting from the middle floors, the “realizations” stop focusing on Angela and the trauma she endured during Lobotomy Corporation, but instead onto Roland. Slowly Roland begins to unbecome. Starting off initially as the main character the player gets to control, as well as the general informant about the setting, Roland hadn’t brought much attention to himself nor spoke about his past too often. From the middle realizations, it becomes more clear as to the type of life Roland lived and the number of ways The City (the central setting location of the Project Moon titles) slowly stripped him of the things he wanted.
Meanwhile, the first section of floors focus primarily on Angela and her perspective during the events of the last game. Addressing the results of her actions, and what caused her to become so angry and pained. Each of the Patron Librarians having their own thoughts and feelings on the matter while carrying the resolve to address Angela about her actions directly. The parallel that starts to form between the two of them blossoms into a crescendo towards the end that makes both characters absolutely infectious. Roland’s respect — and seemingly fear- for Gebura (Formally the Red Mist) clues you into not only more about him, but how Gebura used to be as a foil in comparison to the person she became as well as the circumstances that brought both of them into service of Angela.
Multiple connections work on these multiple different layers at the same time while mostly told through vignettes of wholly separate people living in The City. From the downtrodden, those living on the outskirts, and casual business men, all the way up to leaders of some of the most powerful corporations and crime syndicates in The Nest. The setting is beautifully explored and fully realized on multiple levels despite how distinct the different districts operate as a result of the relationship between corporations and syndicates. As the player grows to learn more and more about the setting, the more you realize how deep the issues ran long prior to the existence of The Library or the events of the White Nights and Dark Days.
The Nest is bleak. Capitalism and Corporatocracy far past the extremes of “late-stage” and fully into dystopian. Life is quickly and often discarded at the drop of a dime if it means someone else can make back the 15 cents it cost per 25 cent bullet. People work hard for most of their lives in the hopes they can move to a different district just to be subjected to a different version of hell than the one they grew-up in. Each of them taking chances to hopefully minimize risk and avoid landing on a mine that sends their life crumbling to pieces. Cruelty is simply the nature of things in this setting and each resident has grown fully accustomed to it. Even then, the few scraps of happiness they have can still be stripped from them at a moment’s notice.
From a simple restaurant they like being shut down, not getting the raise they wanted, losing their beloved, or even simply being rejected by the one they wanted to ask out. The Nest gives these people so little that the few scraps they can grab onto, they hold with as much force as they can simply so that they’d break before their precious does. Many of the Patron librarians are so readily able to move-on and seek a new future than what they had before that it makes their mentality seem easy. “Face The Fear, Build The Future” was Lobotomy Corporation’s tagline, yet that theme feels more apt in Ruina. The fear of losing everything that these people have spend their lives building towards in the hopes of a secure future, and when that fear comes to pass, they are left with two choices: To either fall to distortion or to affirm themselves and carry the resolve to strive forward.
For as difficult, obtuse, and outright cruel both Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina can be, it is rare that I see a series so committed to its theme of perseverance that I felt equally as tested as the main characters. Neither of these games are easy, and they will test your resolve to see things through to the end multiple times, but it does so to only enforce the very themes that the game itself is also asking the characters to face. What do you do in the face of overwhelming adversity? What do you do when the world is cruel, uncaring, unkind, and outright hostile towards your very existence? Some people crack. The pressure becomes too much, and their worst inhibitions manifest in destructive ways that only bring down themselves and everyone around them. Others can face that adversity. Some can steel themselves, grow from their pain, and use that as their armour and arms to proceed further with renewed resolve to still reach for a new future they may not yet see.
You may not get the ending you wish for, or achieve what you initially set out to accomplish, but that doesn’t mean you failed to succeed. Neither Angela nor Roland get what they sought when they initially began their journey, but that very growth is what they needed more than what they thought they desired. Sometimes getting what you want only leads to your own destruction. Growth isn’t about the journey to getting what you want, it’s about learning what you need. When your world crumbles around you, and you become stripped of everything you once knew (both good and bad) the only thing you can do is walk forward. Stewing in one’s own painful past just leaves you to fester and grow resentful to those who aren’t making themselves suffer alongside you. Binding yourself to your past as a victim of horrific tragedy does nothing but further define yourself as that very pained victim. As much as that past hurts, as much as the future seems empty, and for as much as there is comfort in that cathartic painful mulling, staying there won’t make the pain go away. It becomes your “safe”.
Nobody can save you if you don’t have the desire to save yourself. All you end up doing is waiting for someone to put you out of your own misery. So strive towards that light. Even if you can’t see it, or nobody can point you to where it is, it is up to you to find it. Else you wander in the dark for the rest of your pained existence. Realize what it is that gives your heart a reason to keep beating and your legs strength to keep carrying you forward.
