A funny thing happened after I beat Ruiner: I started having fun. My first playthrough was exhaustingly difficult. I don’t mind a challenge, but I also don’t want to feel like I’m banging my head against a wall for 10 hours, unsure of what I’m doing wrong. However, retreading the 14 levels of cyberpunk brutality as the fully powered-up version of my twin-stick killer finally let me enjoy the frantic, stylish combat.
Revenge stories tend to be pretty straightforward, and Ruiner’s is no exception. You’re a man with VCR text for a face, being told by a mysterious woman in your head that you have to kill a bunch of people who kidnapped your brother. It’s pulling from common cyberpunk material like Blade Runner, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Escape from New York to tell a bloody tale full of technological horror, and it mixes in some pretty cool, disturbing characters. Menacing techno with industrial beats suit the violent, dirty world of Ruiner well. (Look for the soundtrack to be featured on your favorite Tumblr synthwave blog.)The flow of gameplay is similarly straightforward: Walk down a corridor, get locked in a room of death, fight off several waves of enemies, die a bunch, eventually survive, and walk down the next corridor to the next room of death. Ruiner has more variables to it than something elegantly simple like Enter the Gungeon or Geometry Wars, but it starts you with a simple machine gun and a bat, and you’ll have to die many, many times before you earn the fun stuff and learn how to make use of it. Eventually, gadgets like time manipulators, defensive barriers, explosives, mind control, and more provide a nice variety of ways to kill and not be killed.
Ruiner revels in this difficulty, taunting you at the game over screen, guessing you probably don’t have anything better to do than die over and over in a video game. Quite often, upon your death, your puppeteer will say, “That was painful to watch.” Yeah, it was painful to play, too. Under “tough but fair” circumstances this kind of taunting would egg me on to do better next time, but when some deaths didn’t feel avoidable it seemed like Ruiner was gloating over having wasted my time.
And as I said, things are better now that I’ve beaten Ruiner. I feel like a god blasting through the early levels, and the woman in my head who once taunted me now can’t stop telling me how awesome I am (you’re graded on every encounter). It’s too bad there isn’t a New Game Plus option, but you can revisit any level you’ve already completed to exact your revenge and continue earning XP.