Ruin is a medium-length JRPG, built in OHRRPGCE. One incomplete run on casual mode took me a bit over seven hours; your mileage will vary depending on how many quests you choose to complete and how many skills you want to grind for. The game is intriguing and has some great gameplay elements, but falls short in a couple of key areas. Here’s my thoughts.

GRAPHICS: This is one of the areas in which Ruin breaks down for me. I should mention that I have no problem with low-end or retro graphics, even in big-budget games. What bothers me is lack of a good aesthetic, and this is where Ruin falls short. There's no way to sugarcoat it: the game is unpleasant to look at. Early on, you run around in a lot of grassy environments, which means saturated lime greens; in cities, the floors are frequently “louder” than the foreground objects, meaning characters disappear into the bricks. Hovering over a menu item causes it to rapidly flash black and white, and the text tends to be green or white over black backgrounds. Ruin really could have benefited from a specific art direction or a limited color palette--as is, expect to take frequent breaks and use caution if you have certain medical conditions.

This is coupled with rather questionable art decisions, such as some very goofy-looking enemies. Mapping also tends to be poor, with unclear level boundaries and problems like one-tile-wide halls where NPCs can easily trap you. Overall, this is easily the game’s weakest area.

GAMEPLAY/MECHANICS: All that said, most people are after gameplay, and Ruin is fun to play. The game has a small crafting system; one item, "scrap material", can be used toward weapons and armor, while "mystery meat" is used toward recipes. This means you don’t need to scramble around for thirteen different types of ore to make your next armors--it functions a lot more like an upgrade or trade-in system than a crafting system. Sounds simplistic on paper, and in fact it is--which is why it works. For a while it seemed like every developer and their dog wanted a crafting system, which led to an awful lot of three-hour games trying to be Minecraft, except with clunky and overcomplicated menus. If you’re really going to include crafting in an RPG the length of an afternoon, you could do a whole lot worse than Ruin’s approach.

There are other nice features as well, and a generally high level of polish--the game plays well and never feels like its menus or systems are getting in your way. There is a pretty ridiculous amount of loot to be collected if you choose. The skill system involves using old skills in battle for a chance to learn new ones, making it one of the few reasons you might want or need to do extra battling. I know a few people out there love level-grinding, but there is little reason or need to do so in this game, which is something I appreciate.

Granted, as with almost all JRPGs, once you have a decent number of skills, the battling is pretty mindless. But having the option to turn off random encounters after a certain number of wins really helps, and it makes me wonder why every RPG doesn't implement this. There's usually a “repel” or “ward” type item that prevents most battles, which seems reasonable on the surface. But now that it’s been brought to my attention, I can’t think of any good reason NOT to allow the player to simply turn off all random encounters when needed. Players who don’t do any fighting will still be forced to backtrack when a boss keeps cleaning their clock, and skilled or speedrunning players waste less time on level 2 slimes. There's almost no downside.

In the end, there are only a few problems with the gameplay. One is that it tends to clash with the story, which I’ll explain below. Second is that while the characters move at a good clip within levels, they slow to an absolute crawl on the world map, and it gets irritating. Third is that it’s a little on the easy side--I ground for about three extra levels very early, then just battled as normal for the rest of the game without really running into anything difficult. These are all rather small problems, though, and none is really enough to put a dent in the experience.

SOUND: Nice to listen to, mostly unmemorable, with one minor nitpick: the tracks sound too modern to match the game's look. I still can’t complain too much about a completely custom soundtrack in a small indie game, though--I've rarely even seen that attempted, and it goes a long way toward making a game stand out.

STORY: JRPGs have a tradition of ambitious stories, and Ruin sets itself up in the beginning to follow that tradition. The problem is that it doesn’t follow through. The game begins with a series of cataclysmic earthquakes. The main character, Fred, is separated from his homeland and has to find his way back. Along the way, he gets sidetracked into a story of increasingly wide scope, from helping a man find his brother, to encountering the mysterious villain Samael, to discovering the source of the quakes themselves.

While a bit generic, this is a reasonable set-up that could easily lead into an original plot. The cause and mechanism of the earthquakes, the identity of the villain, and the fate of Fred’s home are all areas in which the plot could branch into new territory. Unfortunately, it largely doesn’t. There are an awful lot of clichés that get trotted out, and not enough new material to counteract them. Sometimes the story just fails to make sense; while I saw the identity and motivation of the villain coming miles away, his evil plan was confusing enough to leave me just scratching my head. He does things in such a convoluted way, and the logistics of how he did certain things are left so unexplained, that it throws a monkey wrench into the entire story.

It doesn’t help that the plot tries to take on topics it’s clearly not prepared to handle, from emotional trauma to murder, to mass disaster, to rape and child abuse and forced labor camps. All of these things go by so quickly and are given so little room to breathe that they never quite manage to be meaningful. Some situations that could be original or interesting are thrown in for emotional torque, then promptly ended by just killing off everyone involved, leaving only blood spatters and a sense of mild bewilderment. As I mentioned before, the story also clashes with the gameplay at times; the main character will declare to thieves that they are preying on the weak in the wake of the disaster, then happily loot hundreds of crates and barrels over the course of the game. An entire city seems to exist to preach about the evils of economic oppression, while the player collects hidden money and food from every square inch of the poor side of town (you can’t even go into the houses on the rich side, much less rob them blind.) At first this was so blatant I thought it was intentional--that the game was setting up to incorporate the hero’s hypocrisy into the story. Nope. In a game where thieves are charming rogues and villains are mostly mad wizards and such, you can get away with this kind of thing--but Ruin sets up a different, more realistic sort of morality, and then never addresses it. Overall, Ruin's story is confused; confused about what it is, what it should be, and what it wants to say.

OVERALL: 3.5/5
I feel conflicted about this score; a full 4 seems too high given the problems, and yet the game still plays smoothly and is quite enjoyable. Overall it’s worth a download, but even mediocre art direction and one other pair of eyes on the story would have left me a lot more comfortable recommending it to others.