After spending the start of May in the Scottish Highlands, scaling the heights of Ben Nevis, drinking too much whisky, and hopelessly searching for the Loch Ness Monster, Into the Restless Ruins felt like the perfect game to return home to.
This roguelite deckbuilder from Ant Workshop is rooted in Scottish folklore, with its world being inspired by Celtic legends such as witches, faeries, and other mythical creatures. There’s even the option to play the whole adventure in Scottish Gaelic, if you so wish.
Being fairly new to the sub-genre, Into the Restless Ruins made a positive first impression, and now I’m keen to explore more of this new, unfamiliar world of dungeon-building rogues.
What is Into the Restless Ruins?
As I mentioned up top, Into the Restless Ruins is a roguelite deckbuilder, where players build their own explorable dungeons using customisable decks. Each night, using the cards that they have drawn, they can expand the ruins around them to forge a path to the final boss encounter known as The Warden. The journey isn’t straightforward, though, as they need to unlock several hidden seals, each located on platforms shrouded in fog.
After playing your cards, you descend into the depths of your creation to uncover the seals and unlock your path to the final boss. The game features auto-shooter gameplay, much like Vampire Survivors. Defeating enemies earns you Glimour, and once levelled up, you can choose a brand new card for your deck. Another bar you’ll want to keep a close eye on is your torchlight. Once this drops, so does your visibility of the dungeon, and when it’s fully depleted, you lose health for each second you spend lurking in the darkness.
The game’s cards include a mix of corridors, pathways, and rooms where you can stop along your journey to acquire new weapons and buff stats like your health and damage output. Not only do you need to strategically place cards that connect without causing obstructions, but you also need to consider where you might need an urgent pit stop on your journey. The path to the boss can be long, so placing campfires to restore your torch and portals to quickly bypass sections of the map, for example, can be key to survival.
Making your route as efficient as possible is absolutely essential, otherwise, death is inevitable, and you’ll never be able to retreat to the exit portal. Sometimes in the later stages, it becomes like a memory test, as you can’t zoom out to a bird’s eye view and must progress from room to room towards your goal. I think I died more times due to my shoddy memory than to the hordes of monsters trying to claw me apart in the darkness.
Dying in the dungeon doesn’t result in an instant game over. Instead, it works to fill up an eerie purple bar known as the corruption meter. As this meter builds, you get dealt curse cards that inflict negative status effects and these remain in your hand until you eventually cave and play them. Each passing night the bar steadily increases too, ramping up the tension, and once it is completely filled, it’s game over and you’re forced to start a new run.
Into the Endless Meta
After completing runs, you receive experience points, and for each player level reached, you unlock new cards and game-altering mutators (more on that shortly). With 116 cards in total, expanding your deck can completely shift your strategy, and I found myself revisiting earlier levels just to test out new builds and create even more crazy looking dungeons. Adding to the replayability, the game also tracks your best score and completion time, which is perfect for speedrunners hellbent on chasing the most efficient runs.
While the game features six main levels that progressively delve deeper into the dungeon, its replayability is virtually endless thanks to its many Cantrips (mutators) that can be applied. These can bring both positive and negative effects, relaxing the difficulty for those new to the genre and giving more XP rewards for those who like to embrace a challenge. One positive Cantrip, for example, gave me an arrow guiding me to the exit portal, and a negative one dramatically increased enemy movement speed by 50%.
The Verdict
You might have noticed a strange lack of criticism, that’s because I had an absolute blast with Into the Restless Ruins. As a fan of simulation games, strategically mapping out my own dungeons really scratched an itch for me. Its game-altering mutators and best score system also encouraged me to keep exploring its depths long after I conquered its six main stages.
If you’re a fan of deckbuilders, roguelikes, simulation games, or hell, even just indie games in general, I’d encourage you to check out Into the Restless Ruins.
Into the Restless Ruins is out now on PC (Win), PS5, Switch and Xbox, and I played the game on Switch via access kindly provided by publisher Wales Interactive.
