Library of Ruina Review - Screenshot 1 of 8
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

This review text has been updated to include additional narrative impressions and late-game thoughts.

Library of Ruina is less than the sum of its parts. While this visual novel's dialog sets up a well-established, deep world with interesting characters, its grindy repetitiveness eschews plenty of opportunities to make the most of what it's trying to set up. And even with a compelling, card-based battle system that rewards clever play and a measured approach, this port's poorly optimized menus, input lag, and seemingly constant loading screens ensure that any narrative and gameplay momentum falls through the cracks. Even the smallest faults in this sprawling story become more glaring thanks to the Switch version’s shortcomings.

Library of Ruina follows a wide cast of characters, but focuses on Angela; an AI librarian created by a mysterious corporation whose fall sets the stage for most of the game’s story, and the protagonist, Roland; a street-smart, nihilistic, wise-beyond-his-rank, low-grade fixer (or mercenary). With her A-eyes set on becoming human, Angela recruits Roland to build out The Library and find the tome that will fulfill her wish by inviting outside people in, murdering them, and turning them into books which in turn earns you new cards to experiment with.

Library of Ruina Review - Screenshot 2 of 8
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

With side characters each managing a different floor of the library — History, Religion, Art, Philosophy, etc. — these Patron Librarians are all well-written, living characters whose personalities and stories play into their floor’s theme. They also all have some kind of existing relationship with Angela, and leveling them up through Abnormality Battles will often lead to learning something new about Angela, the Lobotomy Corporation, or the Patron themself, with each floor’s final level netting you powerful attacks called E.G.O. Pages. These Patron Librarians are at their best when chatting, arguing, sharing a drink, making coffee, or just hanging out with Roland and often provide some kind of foil, parallel, or opportunity for introspection which allows every character to develop and shine in their own right.

Fighting opponents boils down to a turn-based and card-based combat system that will click with you pretty quickly if you've played any sort of turn-based game before. Small tweaks to this formula pop up here and here, but this card combat is largely familiar. Status effects, rolling for initiative using Speed Dice, deckbuilding, and the like are all part of the equation in Ruina's combat. Knocking your opponents' health bars down to zero requires an understanding of both its combat system and attack weaknesses and exploiting those weaknesses damages a secondary meter called the Stagger Meter. Characters with a depleted Stagger Meter can't attack and are vulnerable to every type of attack.

Library of Ruina Review - Screenshot 3 of 8
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

This adds in mini-objectives to play towards and strategize around, allowing for more frequent moments of satisfaction and a stronger sense of progress within each battle. Expanding your repertoire through deckbuilding provides extra depth as you unlock a handful of cards for each enemy you defeat and book you obtain. You can even burn books to get new cards. It's kind of similar to executing or fusing Personas in Persona 5 Royal.

Combat makes up most of Ruina’s runtime. It’s also where the Switch version begins to (literally) lag miles behind its PC counterpart. The font for a lot of tutorials and descriptive text that explains specific status effects and abilities is downright tiny. Playing this game in longer sessions often hurt our eyes or caused headaches, with a lot of text being almost completely illegible unless we were up close to the screen. Abnormality Pages (which serve as really cool modifiers and supplemental abilities to help you out during combat) and Battle Symbols (which work like RPG-style equippable gear) are the worst offenders. Not only is their descriptive text usually written in bright or even neon colors over a dark background, but descriptions can get pretty wordy as you squint to suss out the effect of a specific page or the unlock conditions for a symbol. Grinding longer battles became eye-strain-inducingly difficult.

Library of Ruina Review - Screenshot 4 of 8
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

This manifested itself more in playing on a TV across the room, but the issue was still painfully present undocked. The least physically unpleasant way to play this game was at a desk on a computer monitor, and Ruina was clearly designed to be played with a mouse. A higher pixel density would make small text more legible, but you’d also be able to install mods to make text bigger and round out some of Ruina’s other issues, like its grindy progression and invitation structure (more on that in a moment).

Library of Ruina's mechanics hinge on being able to navigate its unwieldy menus. Slow and unresponsive, they are riddled with similarly tiny text. Paired with frustrating design choices that make simple actions a confusing drag and then exacerbated by a lack of touchscreen support, this ported version defines unintuitiveness. If this were a shorter game whose gameplay wasn't almost entirely driven by paging through menus to min-max a good build for a specific fight, this wouldn't be nearly as offensive as it is. But Library of Ruina took us well over 120 hours to beat. It may have been shorter had we played on PC, but the issues plaguing the Switch version made winning even the simplest battles an ordeal. Because menus drive nearly every aspect of Library of Ruina except for its visual novel-style cutscenes and make up most of the game's connective tissue, such a painfully prickly web of opaque options is unforgivable.

Library of Ruina Review - Screenshot 5 of 8
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

The game's progression is also very strange. Sending invitations often requires at least one specific book. Earned from defeating your guests and completing invitations, each one is single-use only. You’re usually rewarded with multiple copies of any book you might need to progress in Ruina’s story, but losing them on a failed invitation will eventually send you back to grind previous battles. Instead of providing you with a sense of accomplishment by rewarding you with potentially cool new powers for your next battle and some new lore, this implementation of Ruina’s otherwise cool book system shackles you to a meaningless grind that exacerbates every single issue with this port.

This rotten cartilage undermines so much of what Library of Ruina sets out to accomplish. Suddenly, every mechanic becomes less approachable as you fumble between different screens to make sure you're adding the right cards to your deck before a battle or try to find the right page to help progress the story. It eventually clicks after hours of trial and error, but it never begins to feel natural or good. The best way we can describe it is like a mild bout of Stockholm Syndrome.

Library of Ruina's world is pretty interesting, though. Ruled by the Head, a looming, all-powerful government, you meet murderous denizens, each with their own reasons for coming to the library and facing death. "The City" is painted in dark colors: cannibalistic Sweepers speak in tongues as they eat in the slum-like Backstreets in the wee hours, cult leaders and criminal syndicates draw innocent people into their web of extortion, and despotic corporations grind people into pulp as they work mundane office jobs. Late in the game, Roland describes this futuristic dystopia as a deeply flawed city where tragedy, violence, and loss are bound to follow each other in lockstep. This summative moment rings true for so many characters in this game, but especially the Distortions; humans who succumb to and lose control of their emotions. These twisted creatures exemplify Ruina’s mastery and understanding of its themes and give its character designers a chance to flex.

Library of Ruina Review - Screenshot 6 of 8
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

With expository dialog that makes Hideo Kojima or George Lucas’ verbose writing look like Curious George, it’s sometimes easy to feel like you’re drowning in exposition. For the most part, this helps establish the City as a seemingly unending, all-consuming, inescapable hellscape but if you haven’t played the previous game in this series, Lobotomy Corporation, these vignettes can present an overwhelming amount of proper nouns to keep track of. Lobotomy Corporation isn’t on Switch, so you’ll need to play it elsewhere or read up online to fully grasp what’s going on.

Ruina’s overall narrative structure of inviting guests into the library before turning them into books—when compounded with its progression and underlined by its porting issues—renders its moment-to-moment pacing fairly cyclical, though it does do a solid job of threading the needle and constantly teasing something on the horizon. It’s best approached in chunks and played like a weekly comic or manga. This is how it was originally released in early access on PC, and taking it slowly makes its pacing much more enjoyable and helps alleviate some of this port’s sometimes physically painful flaws.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

Fully voiced in the original Korean or Japanese, most of the characters fit within that one-off structure: you meet them during invitation scenes and spend a little time getting to know them before turning them into books, with most vignettes feeding into something bigger. At their best, invitation scenes set up an interesting concept or character, putting subplots in motion. One of our favorites follows Philip; a mild-mannered, low-grade fixer stuck making tea for his boss and becomes… something else as he grapples with an important decision.

Roland’s relationship with Angela becomes the lynchpin in an interesting way, too, with plot points coming together to form a conclusion for Roland that fits the fixer’s character arc like a glove. It also explores Angela’s all-consuming quest for humanity in a satisfying way as she grapples with selfishness and free will — major themes in the game overall. The finale felt like a structurally bulletproof answer to both of their struggles, though the same can’t be said for the story overall. Instead, this somewhat abrupt ending leaves a few threads open and concludes with a tease for the next entry in Project Moon’s ongoing series.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

Even if you’re a hardcore Switch-only player who’s jonesing for this exact type of experience, though, we can't recommend this version of Library of Ruina. While its issues are annoying in small doses, completing a 100+ hour game with these pain points feels like death by a million cuts.

Conclusion

We wish we liked Library of Ruina more than we do; its world and characters touch on clever themes and storytelling devices, but slapdash pacing coupled with sluggish, nerve-wracking menus makes playing on Switch an exercise in courting digital whiplash as you cycle between tight story beats and glacially-paced menus. Unforgivable porting choices and grating performance issues make the most minuscule complaints much more severe thanks to the game’s long runtime and, in turn, kneecap a story that has so much going for it. If this unending deluge of compounding problems somehow doesn’t bother you, Library of Ruina presents a spectacularly well-realized world and a memorable story whose characters will likely stick with you after the credits roll.