Ruinarch

Unfortunately abandoned. Alot of potential and honestly I think its not too far from being really good. But it just misses the mark sadly. The base idea of slowly corrupting villagers through different means is a very neat concept so at the very least I hope someone else runs with it further since it seems this dev either ran out of funds or ditched the product.

abandoned

My second run in this game, when I finally started to learn the ropes, I had captured a human man. Keaton was his name. I initially tried to brainwash him to become a cultist of mine, but he resisted, even through grievous torture. So instead, I made him a serial killer. He ends up killing maybe 1 or 2 people, and gets cast out instead of killed. He wanders in the wilds for a brief time, and then I spot him going into a cave. I look inside... The Necronomicon. Keaton walks up to it, and he reads. He is now a Necromancer. Keaton now begins a intricate process of slaying trolls found in the region and resurrecting them for a purpose I do not know. He then travels to his original village's graveyard, and I kid you not, resurrected the people he murdered back when he was just a man. Then... He began his assault. Of his own volition, he began to ruthlessly slaughter and resurrect the people he once stood by, causing nothing but misery and plague. I don't know what Keaton has planned next, but the thought frightens me.

Great idea, except very poorly executed and is now abandonware. As others have suggested, this does NOT feel like a 1.0 release by any means. The biggest disappointment is the Puppetmaster. You'll find yourself spending a lot of time (like I did) and getting nowhere very fast... simply because interpersonal relationships take a long time to develop and the payoff is completely insignificant. Take for example: you set up a frame job by moving someone's possession into another person's home, and the original owner finds it and assumes they "stole" it (except this doesn't even work half the time because it bugs out almost every time)... okay... now that guy gets put on trial and is found guilty and is removed from society. Now what? That's literally the payoff, you got one guy exiled... so what's the whole point of this system, really? I mean, sure, you can found a cult, but more often than not, they'll either do something stupid and get themselves killed or they'll get caught and outed regardless of your intervention. And even if you do build up the cult big enough, again, there's not really a good payoff here. Compare that to the other archetypes. You'll have more effective, direct, and immediate results by blowing everyone sky high playing as the other demon lord archetypes. It's very apparent that the subtle approaches feel very, [b]VERY[/b] undercooked, as if there was supposed to be 4 times more content than there currently is, but the developers either: [olist] [*] didn't have time to work on them and add them in, [*] didn't cook up those ideas in the first place and left the system as-is, [*] had no clue how to tie them into the current gameplay loop without making a bunch of code spaghetti, or [*] the engine didn't support their ideas and they didn't want to put any more work into it. [/olist] In any case, I found myself getting multiple headaches from the long play sessions trying to make Puppetmaster work in any feasible way. And again, play any of the other demon lord archetypes and you can win extremely easily since it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to generate chaos orbs needed to tier up nor is it that difficult to complete their corresponding ultimate objectives.

People complain over dumb things. So what if the game was abandoned? Games are abandoned all the time. Here is the honest breakdown without just automatically dismissing the entire game just because its "abandoned" which doesn't actually matter in some cases (Some cases it DOES matter like Stonehearth for example, but i digress) What Ruinarch does well. It has a simple gameplay loop. It's not a game that necessarily needs a ton of crazy updates really, it's fine the way it is. You play an evil deity figure, You observe a map of inhabitants, with their own individual autonomous AI behaviors. And then you use your demon powers to mess with them, and watch their reactions and how messing with them changes up how their community acts. That's it. its fine. it's fun, it has a specific type of gameplay, it does that 1 thing well.

They replaced all the original art with AI garbage. The game is genuinely difficult to look at now because of how low-quality all of the icons and portraits are. IT'S SO UNBELIEVABLY UGLY.

Very good concept, very poor execution. Game is effectively abandoned in an unfinished state. It's a classic example of incompetent developers leaving Early Access too early just to make the game look more complete than it really is to justify taking the money and running off with it. At first it's really interesting, but after only a couple of campaigns the game becomes very repetitive and you start to realize how static and predictable everything really is. There's almost zero difference between campaigns. Someone else should make a better alternative, a reverse RimWorld where you're the storyteller is a great concept that has been entirely squandered as-is.