There are games that arrive silently and only when the days go by and some daring do not hesitate to try it, it begins to transcend. This is the case of Lone Ruin , which arrived for PC and Nintendo Switch on January 12 and is conquering all those who have decided to give it a try day by day. And it is that despite its simple appearance, a title is hidden inside that is ready to redefine everything.
An ancient power: fun
As we tell you, Lone Riun hit digital stores (only an overwhelming success would guarantee a physical release on Nintendo Switch) just a few weeks ago and he did it with one idea in mind: to infect us with its enormous gameplay that inherits directly from the early days of the videogames. Specifically from that time of arcades, spectacular coin-op and games for five dollars (25 pesetas).
In any case, despite its simplicity, Lone Riun tries to tell us a magical story. That of a character who has to enter a ruin in which an ancestral power is kept and that he must defeat, and who entrusts everything to the control of his character and the powers that he can accumulate as he progresses through his rooms. Because it is not an open world with missions to complete, but here things are simpler and more closed than they seem.
For example the layout of the map. When we enter the ruins we will see a character who offers us a power that we can learn at that moment and on the left some dolls to test our attacks with. This is not free because getting used to the controls of Lone Riun can take us a few minutes since it uses a twin stick system similar to the legendary Smash TV of the 90s: with the left stick we move the hero and with the right we mark the shooting direction .
Maximum difficulty and short games
The key to the success of Lone Ruin is in its coin-op essence that leads us to set ourselves the goal of simply overcoming the room we are in and getting to know the one that is after. And if we succeed, try to go one further until finishing the dungeon which, it must be said, is generated randomly every time we start a new adventure.
That is the second key of Lone Ruin , that there will not be two identical games , nor two identical dungeon runs, in the same way that we will not reach the same score every time we are killed and the game asks us if we want to publish that number in the World Hall of Fame that works as a classification of an arcade.
Both the difficulty (eliminate the enemies as if it were a martian killer), and that score that we are improving and going up to the Hall of Fame , make this title an addictive entertainment , which invites us to try once more without stopping trying to overcome , first, our highest score and, later, show ourselves if we are good enough to engrave our name in gold along with the rest of the players on the planet.
Give it a chance. It’s cheap and in return it will offer you a whole battery of hours of unbridled fun.