Ruiner (PC, PS4)

[IamLEAM1983]

A few years ago, a wee little studio called Destructive Creations unleashed Hatred upon the world. It wasn’t much more than a twelve-year-old Black Metal fan’s idea of violent rebellion, a twin-stick shooter based in the grit and grime of the psyche of a fictionalized spree killer. It packed recognizable mechanics and controls in the kind of format that screamed Notice us at the top of its lungs, and it earned a few pearl-clutching warnings and ultimatums from the usual crowd clamoring for the wholesale sanitization of the industry. Fast-forward a few weeks and most people had forgotten about it. 

Hatred was more of a marketing and stylistic exercise than a game, the Beta phase of the Twin-Stick with an Attitude. Ruiner, however, published by Devolver and developed by the Polish Reikon Games, has more than a decent shot at being remembered for its stylistic and mechanical trappings. Its Cyberpunk veneer is grimy and blood-soaked, echoing Akira more than Ghost in the Shell, and it drenches its high-octane violence in the darkness of automated factories and red warning lights. The world-building is both slight and superfluous, as Rengkok South fails to really come across as a fleshed-out environment – but it really doesn’t fail by much. There’s just enough out there to imagine yourself with ringing ears in the dark, cordite and depleted uranium in the air. You’re stuffed with chrome and wires, lightning-quick and lethal. William Gibson might be caught smirking at that.

The plot lingers in the usual Noir-esque stretches between Masamune Shirow and Philip K. Dick and opens in medias res. The year is 2049 and we’re in a Southeast Asia overtaken by a cosmopolitan urban sprawl. Technology’s gone nuts, and your average human brain is entirely hackable. You’re a victim of one such brain hack, your head’s been covered by the cross between a BDSM helmet and a hockey arena’s billboard -  and you’re being compelled to go kill the boss of Rengkok’s leading corporate entity, HEAVEN. Like you do. You’re freed from your compelling instance just short of doing the deed by a mysterious woman only referred to as HER or SHE, and, well, SHE tells you that whoever commissioned that aborted murder also kidnapped your brother. You take to Rengkok South’s slummy corners to patch your wounds and soon find yourself trudging across factory floors and parking garages with various implements of death at hand.

If you’ve ever read anything between Neuromancer, Burning Chrome or Snow Crash, you’re probably aware of how things might turn out. Expect surface-level double-crosses, allies you’d sooner shoot than implicitly trust, and packed, dehumanizing architecture crawling with Chinese and Japanese ideograms. There’s approximately one neon billboard every three feet, and Rengkok is appropriately drenched in a permanent drizzle. The ambiance is otherwise sold thanks to a choice soundtrack including the likes of Skeletons and Sidewalks, Memotone, Zamilska and Susumu Hirasawa. That suggests a mix of pulse-pounding cryptic Electro ditties verging between dark EDM and Techno-Pagan fetishism, and breezy synth stretches suggesting endless highways and the towering nighttime spires that dominate contemporary Japanese urban imagery. You’re either digging deep in guts and integrated circuits with a rusty blade, or you’re cruising along brightly-lit on-ramps under pitch-black skies, finding some kind of ethereal beauty in your surroundings. At least, these are the impressions the soundtrack manages to evoke, sometimes in close proximity to the core gameplay.

Said gameplay remains simple, if fairly challenging. One stick or the WASD keys control your character’s overall movement, the other (or your mouse) controls your direction. Bring the mouse further away from your character and you see further ahead by some margin. RT or your left mouse button shoots or swings, LT or your mouse wheel switches between your mêlée weapon and your firearm. The face buttons or the spacebar, Q and F buttons control additional abilities. Killing enemies nets you Karma, the game’s levelling metric. Fill the bar, and two Ability Points are yours to allocate and remove as needed. There aren’t enough enemies to unlock every single ability in a single playthrough, but abilities can be freely reallocated as needed. The game then frequently encourages you to respec on the fly, which can be a tad frustrating if you haven’t had the time to familiarize yourself with a suddenly-required ability earlier on. Some levels alleviate the problem by adding weapon grinders that turn the enemies’ discarded ordnance into additional Karma points, others pack several boxes per level, containing a generous amount of points and maybe one occasional bit of higher-tier loot. Ruiner being fairly arcade-like in its focus, SHE gives you combat ratings at the end of every bout, the only post-game content consisting of optional replays of earlier levels for the sake of a better score. Using this, Ruiner tells a fairly standard Cyberpunk revenge tale with a few predictable twists and turns. From the get-go, however, it’s fairly obvious that the game isn’t focusing on its story on more than a perfunctory level. You’re here for the old ultraviolence, and it’s ultraviolence of the particularly punishing kind.

There’s a trope I don’t like that’s been floating around for the past few years, specifically the one where any game that packs a challenging curve is referred to as the Dark Souls of its genre. Ruiner isn’t the Dark Souls of twin-stick shooters, it’s lacking that game’s in-universe narrative approach and actually relies heavily on codex entries to flesh out its world. The only thing it has in common with From Software’s series of games is its demanding nature. Ruiner asks that you make your shots count, that your orientation be deliberate and your swings accurate. You’re appreciably lethal, yes, but so are your enemies. Every ability you unlock should be investigated thoroughly, in order to find out when and how their optimal use scenario comes into play. Enemies that drop their guns or blades upon their death should be felled with careful tactical consideration – you’ll need their ammo or their steel to keep going. You’ll never have enough health to carve a path through mooks with your lead pipe alone, and your energy reserves aren’t so large as to ensure your experience feels godlike. Your powerup budget is finite, Karma points have to be worked for, and weapon grinders only ever drop if you’ve been particularly satisfactory, netting yourself combat ratings above B+. Thankfully, neither of the two main control modes hinder the overall experience. 

This isn’t to say, however, that Ruiner doesn’t pack its own small structural annoyances. For starters, while the aesthetic wonderfully fits the theme, it makes navigating environments in an isometric perspective a bit difficult. The first few levels’ factory floors feature perspective and parallax effects that can sometimes lead to a sense of navigational confusion. Is that ramp you’re seeing on the same level as your murder machine, or is it a floor higher? Add to this the fact that holographic gates and corridor indications are easy to miss in that sea of chromed steel, and you might occasionally set yourself up for cheap deaths or a generalized sense of confusion. Pressing Z or down on the left joystick pings your latest objective and shows you a rough estimate of its direction, but everything looking roughly the same as everything else doesn’t really help you to finagle a decent path through to said objective. The art direction sublimely fits the tone, but dehumanizing architecture does come with its usual gameplay caveats. I can’t fault the game’s desired atmosphere for requiring that kind of level design, but warning lights along the floor or some sort of onboard GPS system could’ve helped to alleviate pathing issues. NPCs might not have any trouble getting to me, they’re not the ones wondering if I haven’t dashed across this industrial overpass for the sixth time in a row without realizing it.

I’d also have to mention that for a game that’s so intent on fleshing out a Cyberpunk metropolis, its offerings outside of combat are rather scarce. Rengkok South is packed with jaywalkers, hookers, pimps, doomsday prophets and black market cybernetics specialists, but it’s all largely window dressing. There’s maybe six or seven NPCs to interact with, only four of them giving access to any sort of worthwhile content. You can exchange coins you find in the game for fortune-telling sessions, or hack corporation-controlled cybernetic cats to prevent the district from falling prey to its Orwellian masters. You can pick up bounties for named NPCs in the main levels, or you can spend a few minutes watching a dishevelled old lady remind you you’re likely to die in a variety of upsetting ways. The tone and atmosphere are expertly created – you hear teriyaki sizzling and hydraulic pumps whining, the distant bass of a nearby nightclub’s music thuds through the walls and through to you, the streets are packed with gobs of people speaking anything between Hindi, Chinese, Japanese and English – but you can’t meaningfully interact with any of it. If you were on your master’s leash when previously asked to go kill HEAVEN’s CEO, you’re on HER leash, now. SHE doesn’t seem intent on allowing you to do much of anything that falls in the pro-social category. On one hand, this does show that Reikon wanted to focus on a lean, efficient and cost-effective feature set. On another, it leaves much of the world-building to the imagination and to unvoiced codex entries occasionally sporting rather ho-hum levels of grammatical correctness. A few concepts are born out of wordplays – implanted “citizen chips” standing in for “citizenship”, karma being a cynically hackable and exploitable monetary device – but you don’t get much more than that. Life is cheap in Rengkok, but it’s missing that balancing allure that’s part of even the grimiest corners of William Gibson’s post-nuclear Japanophile world, or the hopeful notes of Neal Stephenson’s works. 

Chiba City is a place expats go to for easy jobs, anonymity, cheap electronics and access to the bottom-tier rungs of megacorporations like Tessier-Ashpool. Rengkok South is briefly eluded to as where people across Southeast Asia go to disappear as of 2049 – and that’s it. There’s no filler dialog from extra NPCs, no real sense of place. The game basically checks off a box in order to qualify as a Cyberpunk product and then stops there.

On the whole, Ruiner offers a compelling suite of mechanics and an alluring tone, but keeps everything in the shallower ends of the pool. It’s Cyberpunk for the Matrix fans who only remember the shootout scenes or the martial arts bouts, or the Akira fans who only really remember the movie’s first half. It’s for virtually anyone who hasn’t cracked open a book in the genre or anyone who wouldn’t have really paid attention to pen-and-paper systems like Shadowrun. It’s a fun little ditty, as could be expected of an indie project, but this is largely where the buck – or nuyen, as it were – stops.