After years of searching, the Harvest Maiden agrees to fulfill your heart’s true desire if you do what she asks. That means you need the Wardens guarding her power, after fighting your way through hordes of monsters infesting the dungeons where they live. And before you can conquer the dungeon, first you have to build it.
Earlier this year, Blue Prince found great success borrowing from tabletop games that let players build dungeons as they explore them, adding layers and layers of puzzles on top. Into the Restless Ruins is a more straightforward adaptation of the idea by comparison, but its surprisingly deep dungeon-building still feels fresh in the realm of video games.
At first, Into the Restless Ruins seems pretty simple. It starts with a grid-based map, mostly empty except for a starting hallway and few disconnected rooms shrouded in fog. You have a small hand of cards, each representing a room or corridor you can add to the dungeon, and three Build Points you use to place them. They range from a simple square with doorways on two sides to curved a corridor with multiple openings along its edges. Some rooms grant bonuses like increased health, and others just get you closer to the top of the map where the Warden waits.
After placing your cards, you enter the dungeon, the view zooming down to hover in third-person above your character. Your goal is to make it to those fog-shrouded rooms to find the ones holding a seal, which you need to break to unlock more room to build and eventually to get to the Warden’s lair. Along the way, you can activate rooms you’ve placed to regain health, swap weapons, and crucially, refill your torch. The longer you spend in the dungeon, the more your torch’s light dims, making it difficult to see more than a tiny circle around you and eventually harming you when the dark closes in.
Also lurking in the dungeon are all manner of monsters eager to make you a meal. Combat in Into the Restless Ruins is automatic, somewhere in the neighborhood of Vampire Survivors but much slower, and without that game’s mechanical and visual overload of multiple weapons and powerups. I’ve never been a big fan of this kind of auto-battler, but the more restrained take on it here actually works, while keeping the game’s focus where it should be: on your ability to build and navigate rather than fight. Take down enough enemies, and the Harvest Maiden will reward you with a new card, adding more layouts and bonuses to your growing deck.
I made my way through Into the Restless Ruins’ first of six dungeons with no trouble, scoring a nice bow to complement my sword along the way and slaying the Warden without coming close to defeat. Then I entered the second stage and got absolutely walloped. As you progress through Into the Restless Ruin, the maps get much larger and more tangled, forcing you to spend longer in the dungeon and build increasingly chaotic routes through. Enemies quickly get stronger, too, and my hubris resulted in me falling again and again. Dying doesn’t stop your run. Instead, each time you fall, you fill a curse meter and gain a penalty card that hinders your next run. Fill the curse meter entirely and it’s game over.
While in the first dungeon I was fine just stacking as many bonuses I could in no particular order, I soon learned that facing the dungeon takes an architect more than a fighter. I experimented with different floor plans for its ever more dangerous dungeons. I built in one straight line as much as I could to keep from getting lost. I distributed healing and torch stations at regular intervals to keep from ever running low on health or light. I organized the dungeon into districts, each with a different type of bonus so I could choose whichever path suited my needs.
Half of Into the Restless Ruins is an action game, but drafting halls and finding ways to keep from getting lost are where the real fun is. At its best, Into the Restless Ruins feels somewhere between playing a city builder and drawing winding labyrinths on a big sheet of paper like I loved to do as a kid. Roguelike deckbuilders are everywhere these days, but Into the Restless Ruins is one of a kind.
