The boss fights pose a healthy challenge and are likely to take several attempts to learn their patterns and abilities. We would have liked more puzzle-solving integrated into the game, but the puzzles that are there are interesting, if a tad simple. Quick travel points, vending machines, and ancient desktop computers are scattered around, allowing you to use some of the gold that enemies drop to purchase new weapons and armour. There are the occasional puzzles to solve, but usually it is just moving from one side of the map to the other, either avoiding or killing the monsters that populate it. An early quest, for example, rewards players with backstory on the first boss as well as a swimsuit that makes them immune to lightning damage in water, something that changes the first boss from overwhelmingly difficult to merely challenging.Įxploring the castle is pretty straightforward for the most part. There are also quests to complete, most of which are totally optional but also give valuable bits of equipment and lore. The exploration aspects of Lost Ruins are more fun, with weapons and equipment scattered around the castle in regular troves. Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked) The balance between difficulty and payoff is crucial to these games and it doesn't feel like the developers got it quite right here.

This makes the few restoration items that you pick up even more valuable. These are frequent enough that it won’t feel like a huge setback each time, but, unlike many Metroidvania titles, the save points don’t restore health or mana. You are going to die a lot as you play, which will poof you back to your most recent save point. This can be a slow, repetitive process and the game is crying out for a quicker way to toggle between equipment sets. This means you’ll spend a lot of time switching between weapons and equipment in the menu. Picking and choosing how you engage in fights is one of the most important skills, with certain monsters being weak to different spells and weapons or having easily learned attack patterns.

Many of the enemies can throw combos at players that instantly kill them, especially on the higher difficulty levels. Because there isn't a levelling system in the game, there isn’t much reason to engage in combat with all the enemies you come across, aside from the items of wildly varying quality and usefulness that they drop.Ĭombat can be frustrating at times.

Monsters range from slow and easy-to-kill to annoyingly fast and deadly, but most can be avoided through liberal use of the dodge roll feature. There are the kinds of environments that you’d expect, starting in the dank sewers you’re initially dropped into. The game takes place across the sprawling castle that the Heroine finds herself in. Unfortunately, that isn’t always a good thing. Between the pixel art style and punishingly difficult combat, this game is a retro love affair. The story of Lost Ruins has a few twists along the way, but it is largely confined to the background while players focus on the exploration and combat that fans of the Metroidvania genre will expect. According to Beatrice, defeating the monsters that guard the Dark Lady is the key to restoring the Heroine’s memories. She is told by the suspiciously helpful mage Beatrice that she has been summoned to the castle to defeat the Dark Lady that has been sealed away in the castle. Lost Ruins shows a more brutal side of the isekai formula, sending a young woman into a dark and dangerous castle and tasking her with surviving.ĭeveloped by Altari Games, Lost Ruins is a survival-focused Metroidvania in which the player controls a young woman who has been summoned to a dungeon with no memories of who she is, even forgetting her own name. Normally, it is a light-hearted affair, with the main character settling into their new life and eventually managing to save their new home while also falling in love with one or more well-endowed ladies. In anime, there is a popular genre called isekai, which means “another world” and is characterised by the protagonist travelling from their normal, boring world into one filled with magic and monsters.

Lost ruins map