Game Spotlight #24: Dragon Ruins and Dragon Ruins 2 (2024/2025)
Did you not get enough of spooky season? Looking for something to help keep you in the Halloween spirit as autumn rolls on? Ash is back with another spotlight, this time on a duology of indie games that are heavy on atmosphere and probably flew under your radar. Read on to learn about one of our coolest and most unexpected experiences of the year!
Games and anime have been among our lifelong obsessions here on the blog. They're such a wonderful intersection of art, culture, history and entertainment and we absolutely love how much of our lives they consume. To this point, long before we started the blog searching through Steam's discovery queue has been something of a hobby (or perhaps more of an obsession) for me. I love tracking down obscure, niche little gems that most people miss, and to that point at the time of writing this piece I've viewed over twenty thousand games using it, and my wishlist is currently sitting at a whopping 2533 games.
We live and breathe this stuff, and channeling it into making this blog has been extremely rewarding. All that time spent tracking down the coolest experiences on Steam is exactly why it was a surprise for me to discover this series not through Steam (where I'd previously wishlisted two of the developer's games already) but through a personalized recommendation on my comparatively scarcely-played Playstation 5.
Dragon Ruins is a minimalistic dungeon crawling role playing game, or DRPG for short. DRPGs are a fairly old school style of game that hasn't historically been all that popular in the west but has been a staple of the Japanese game scene for decades, and today they're probably most known in the west through the Wizardry series being among some of Ryoko Kui's top inspirations for creating the fantastic Dungeon Meshi manga. They're extremely antiquated and not particularly glamorous by a lot of today's standards, often containing an abundance of interesting art and atmosphere and a similar amount of cumbersome, slow mechanics that can render them impossibly dense and difficult to many modern gamers. It's a genre I've always had a lot of interest in but very little ability and patience to get through some of the best titles.
Advertised as being a DRPG "for tired people", Ukranian developer Graverobber Foundation has stripped the concept down to its bare essentials. Gone is the cumbersome menu navigation, the overly punishing level design, the tight resource squeeze and the ability to royally screw yourself with choices you might not know about until it's too late. Players will assemble a party of four characters from a selection of preexisting characters and be tasked with navigating a dungeon rendered in a wonderful, classic wireframe style to hunt down a dragon. It's very standard Dungeons and Dragons tabletop fare, and a perfectly serviceable baseline story.
The dungeon is populated by hordes of monsters who's portraits will pop up over the course of navigation, upon which battle will initiate automatically. Auto battling in DRPGs isn't really a new concept (there are occasionally ways to automate combat to some extent in the genre), but the whole game being built around the concept and sidestepping some of the difficulty level that often comes part and parcel with the genre is a brilliant idea.
Dragon Ruins has been stripped down to the genre's essentials, and although that has meant stripping a lot of the genre away it's also meant maximizing what is truly essential. The art, sourced from Pixiv artist Torio, is absolutely incredible and full of so much personality. The music is a blend of synth and string at times reminiscent of vaporwave artist Windows 95, with plenty of ominous droning and keys to help set the mood.
As previously mentioned, the gameplay's auto battle style keeps the pacing moving nicely and the level design isn't prone to devious tricks or instant death pits that can plague some of the mainstays of the genre. There's a surprising amount of esoteric lore built into the game, with tons of names for regions and characters offering a tantalizing look into a world that may or may not actually have a whole novel's worth of thought put into it. The art style is capped off with a fantastic filter that buzzes with a pseudo-CRT television effect that really sells the vibe and almost leans into an analogue horror aesthetic.
And that, to me, is the real measure of success for Dragon Ruins. In stripping the game down to genre essentials and then maximizing them, the game is immensely immersive. Despite its small size (the first game took a mere 2 hours to beat) and simplified gameplay that focuses more on navigating the dungeon than on combat, it is easy to find yourself wrapped up in the experience in a way that scratched really similar itches to the first entry in Blizzard's Diablo franchise, my personal favorite in the series. The best media are the kinds you can at least for a moment feel as though nothing exists between you and it, all barriers having melted away. To forget that you're a brain inside a fleshy form and to have your attention grabbed and not let go of. The best media immerses you, it makes you feel things, and Dragon Ruins accomplishes exactly that.
And then there's the sequel, bigger and better in every way. And when I say "bigger" I mean it, having taken roughly 9 hours to experience all the content in the game as opposed to the 2 hours the first game took. More characters to select from, an upgraded visual style to the dungeon that takes the wireframe of the first game and transforms it into a fully realized eerie, retro monochromatic (with several different color palettes) feast for the eyes. Many more characters in the form of both questgivers and NPCs, many more monsters (which you can also view in the bestiary for a better look), much more esoteric nonsense lore (a term I use very endearingly) that rounds the world out wonderfully, different dungeons to explore with different looks and layouts, skills, equipment, more than double the amount of music and even an optional superboss.
Much like the first game it is infinitely repeatable without having to start from scratch, and beating the game's final boss will raise the level of all monsters essentially providing a form of New Game Plus (which is a feature that should exist in so many more games). Dragon Ruins 2 even incentivizes further runs through the game by giving unused party members a level boost so you can more freely experiment with party compositions.
Dragon Ruins 2 proves that the magic in this series isn't solely in having stripped daunting parts of the existing DRPG genre away, but that there is a real grasp on what makes for an immersive and fun experience. Adding mechanics doesn't bog it down or detract from the premise because the developer really understands all the necessary ingredients to make an engaging game to begin with. The upcoming followup to Dragon Ruins 2, appropriately titled Aftermath, looks to be another dramatic expansion upon the mechanics and content of the second game and we can't wait for it.
If you're looking for an entrypoint into a notoriously dense genre, looking to dip your toes into the sorts of games that inspired Ryoko Kui, looking to engage with a very particular flavor of Japanese-influenced sword and sorcery the likes of Record of Lodoss War or to a lesser extent even something like King's Field, or just looking for a cool title to spend some time and just a few dollars on, the Dragon Ruins series might be exactly what you're looking for. It certainly was exactly what I was looking for after spending so much time playing Halloween-related games to post content from last month.
It's easy and simple enough that you could even get away with calling it a casual game, but it oozes so much charisma and coolness that rather than feeling like it wasn't engaging enough I was happy to put more and more time into it, and between now and the upcoming release of Aftermath the dungeons of Faselei likely haven't seen the last of me. The only real disappointment I have is the lack of profile features on Steam, particularly the lack of achievements especially given their existence in the console ports.
A gem hidden among the stones, Dragon Ruins and Dragon Ruins 2 are undoubtedly stardust.
I know it's been like a few weeks since I finished ch 2 but I feel obligated to put something out (lost my drawing glove and haven't been able to make more fanart :sob:)
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