Lost Ruins is a 2D pixel, dungeon crawling, platformer. In it you play as a high school girl who was supposedly summoned here by the Dark Lady and her minions as a sacrifice to her. However, your brainwashing didn’t seem to go to plan, so while you’ve lost your memories you are still a functioning member of society. You have to collect money, weapons, and food stuffs to keep yourself alive and find the Dark Lady’s shitty monster hordes.

Now with the story bit out of the way, yes it was tiny, this is a preview. It took me all over like 2-3hrs to play through the demo which goes up from the start of the game up until you’ve finished the first boss, a rude ass high school girl who tries to kill you for killing slimes that are her ‘friends’. I mean, I kinda get that, I love slimes in games they’re adorable and the best things ever, also I don’t know if you’re cultured or not, but monster girls, slimegirls, that is all. Anyways, the game seems to be focused on controller usage, which is fantastic, for the xbox controllers you have X and Y both attached to a melee weapon, any two you equip, including if you equip two of the same weapon, which would be stupid but hey, whatever, you do you. There are also ranged weapons, mostly throwables which are finite. You also obtain spells which are equipped to the bumper buttons, same set up as weapons. Other than that you sometimes get items you can equip that aren’t attack items, depending on the difficulty you have equipment slots that you can equip them into, be it leather armor, gloves, boots, amulets, whatever you can equip one.

There is some… I don’t know, humor maybe or maybe it’s just showing the world is sick and twisted, I don’t know which. After you beat the slime boss you get her piss-stained panties which, for some reason, give you an extra equipment slot. And I don’t mean that metaphorically, you get her striped panties and it’s description is it has yellow stains, they are literally piss-stained panties. I don’t know how I feel about that, just in general. This was the only time something like that happened so I don’t know if that was the writer’s form of exceptionally crude humor, which is kinda questionable when the game is based on middle to high school age girls, I’m not sure how old they’re supposed to be, the art style makes them look young but I would think they’re high schoolers, or, maybe it’s supposed to show how horrible the world is. There are other things that show how bad the world is as it seems like the only people being summoned to the world are school girls. You can find their skeletal remains and phones which have diary pages on them scattered around the world. You find girls dying of acid, being stabbed, etc, and their diaries provide you with answers to how to deal with issues where the other girls didn’t manage to continue forward and instead died of their injuries.

Miss Piss Panties Boss

The platforming is simple but it could use some tightening, I didn’t always jump when I wanted to. Sometimes you have to jump from one chunk of wood jutting out of a wall to another on another wall to work your way up a hole. When you’re doing this, if the jump doesn’t hit when you tell it to, you fall, but also if you jump too early you miss even though the chunks of wood are pretty small. There were a number of times where I fell and was annoyed because I should have landed, thankfully though, it’s not like any of that stuff is too hard to get back to and you don’t take fall damage.

The fighting is basic; different weapons have different speeds, and enemies have attack patterns that are quick and easy to learn, not always easy to time things but that’s on you, or in this case, me. The boss at the end was fairly difficult and I decided to cheese it by just equipping a magic regenerating weapon and using poison bolts on it while running around like a lil bitch, eventually I won. For normal enemies I tended to use the strongest and heaviest weapon in the game because one-hit kills for most enemies and two-hit kills for the stronger ones, until the boss anyways. I actually really like the combat, it feels hefty as the character has different attack patterns with each weapon, ones that are light tend to end body level, ones that are heavy to hit the floor because she’s just a kid. To avoid getting hit you dodge, you can dodge through attacks and enemies, get behind them and land a hit then do it again. I’ve gotten kinda used to this gameplay style thanks to recently playing The Surge and Code Vein. I don’t mind it, there was one annoying enemy type in the game, these big fuck off bees that shot posion at you or something, it was hard to avoid their hits and kit them, I really abhor them.

Overall, I think the game needs to have it’s platforming controls tightened a little but otherwise the game is pretty fun. I enjoyed what time I spent in it. The kickstarter has recently ended sadly, as such you can’t help support it on kickstarter. However, you can buy it when it gets its full release. It’s estimated to be release in Jan of 2021, and honestly I’m kinda excited to do a full review.

Lost Ruins is currently being developed by a brand new South Korean dev team called Altari Games as their very FIRST ever title. The kickstarter has already ended, but you can find the page here, which includes a demo, from the name of the demo file, I’d say it’s probably an even more up to date demo than what I played to write this preview. They currently seem to be planning to release it not just on the PC but also on the X1, PS4, and Switch which is exciting as I’d like to own it on both PC and the X1. I totally think everyone should be following this game. If this demo is the current level of the dev team, then I can’t wait to see the finished project or what the next project will be, cause they’re already really fucking impressive.