Lone Ruin (2023) is a spell-slinging roguelike twin-stick shooter that doesn’t immediately murder you the second you boot it up.
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Lone Ruin (2023) is a spell-slinging roguelike twin-stick shooter that doesn’t immediately murder you the second you boot it up.
It begins gently with small rooms and manageable waves, then escalates once you start stacking spells and upgrades. The loop is quick, improvisational, and satisfying—runs feel intense without ever being overwhelming.
The presentation, though, is divisive. I like the vaporwave ruins drenched in magenta and cyan, but if you’re colour blind this game is borderline unplayable. Plenty of players on Steam point out that projectiles and enemies disappear into the palette, which helps explain its “Mixed” reception.
What makes it stand out are the little details. The Steam page lists minimum requirements as 2 MB of RAM—like you could run this on a Pentium II pulled from a recycling bin. The Survival mode is capped at exactly ten minutes, which makes leaderboards a test of how fast you can escalate damage rather than how long you can grind. And if you buy the soundtrack, the track titles double as spoilers for boss fights, casually revealing names like The Mana Drinker and Turtleman.
On the technical side, it’s a split personality. On Steam Deck it runs beautifully—smooth and stylish, perfect for handheld bursts. On my Pop!_OS desktop it was oddly cranky, even after Proton tweaks, with frame pacing rougher than you’d expect. Strange behavior for something that claims to run on two megabytes of memory.
For me, though, Lone Ruin works. It’s short, stylish, and unapologetically arcade-pure—no grindy meta-progression, just runs that rise or fall entirely on your choices. It won’t dethrone Hades, but it’s a fun little blast of chaos and synths, best played on a handheld screen where it really shines.
