I’ve long enjoyed a good physics sandbox, and the merging mechanics popularised in Suika Game have put this sub-genre of casual gaming on the radar of many people, myself included.
I thoroughly enjoyed Dogpile the last time I played it, and now another physics-based Suika-like is here to help us relax, possibly on a Sunday afternoon. Rutrum is the name of the game in question, and as someone who has always enjoyed shiny things, the theme here is quite delightful to me.
Instead of fruit, Rutrum has you dropping coins and stones. They merge on contact with a matching item, and most of the game is spent trying to get your stuff together at the right moment. Not only is there an element of luck involved, but there’s a bit of deckbuilding thrown in for good measure, as you upgrade your gear during a run.
The game plays out on a node-based campaign map where you can visit locations to upgrade your hand directly or stop at shops to buy new gear. This way, you will discover several artefacts that open up new play-styles, including trowels that dig through rubble, or various handles that pay out bonuses when certain items appear.
There’s a nice gameplay twist in the sense that your enemies are protecting chests, and you create keys to unlock them by making specific combinations of coins and stones during play. This gives your gem dropping an added dimension, because you’re not just trying to merge things, and if you can get into a chest, the health potions and gold it contains will drop into the level, ready for you to claim later.
Stones and rubble are constantly thrown into the mix to slow you down, and some of the items that drop have negative effects, such as bombs or the poison that nibbles away at your health once activated.
Normally, if you fill up the space in a game like this, that is the end of the run. That’s not the case here, however. As you lose health in Rutrum, the sides of the box lower, which makes things even harder to manage, until eventually there’s no box left and then it’s game over.
You can counter this by having items that grant health potions, and my winning builds have all incorporated some sort of economy to counter the enemy drops. In between levels, you can even imbue your stones with runes that pay out potions when activated.
I’ve played for several hours already, and as someone who finds this sort of game soothing, the gently reactive gameplay and slowly escalating challenge were just enough to keep me engaged. There are five characters to unlock, each with a second level to work through, but so far they don’t seem to change things up drastically.
As far as relaxing roguelikes go, Rutrum sits on the cosy end of the spectrum. There’s a bit of a challenge here, but it seems like the main point of the game is to pop rocks, merge things, and enjoy the vibes. Given how many games want you to kill almost everything in sight, I didn’t mind the change of pace at all.
Rutrum is out now on Steam PC (Win), and I played the game via access kindly provided by the developer, uncertainkey.
