My library’s in ruins.
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 talky 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, both story and gameplay move too slowly to lend a tangible sense of progress thanks to poorly optimized menus, which ensure that any momentum falls through the cracks. We can see its charm for fans of a very specific type of visual novel, but coming in as fans of the snappy, tactical, and luck-driven satisfaction of other deckbuilders, this didn’t scratch the itch we’d hoped it would.
You play as Roland, a street thug in Library of Ruina’s cyberpunk dystopia who’s been magically teleported to a mysterious library. Library of Ruina follows Roland and his custodian Angela as they attempt to build out the library and uncover its secrets. In order to fill the library’s seemingly infinite credenza, Roland must defeat and kill other humans in battle to gain possession of their books which in turn earns him new cards to experiment with.
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