Ruiner

When faced with Linux Format Towers, Omri Petitte still preferred to escape into a brutal, ultra-violent, dystopian cyberpunk future. Who doesn’t?

Ruiner is gorgeous, a sensory feast inspired by the works of cyberpunk’s 1980s heyday, in which a silent, masked protagonist travels through the nightscapes and industrial jungles of a grit-tech 2091. Underneath, a thumping top-down action game delivers sword-sharp combat, the familiarity of its design offset by the constant urge to simply stand still and drink everything in.

The brutal strength of Ruiner’s aesthetic will send you reeling. It’s shoved into your face the moment New Game is clicked: huge, bold letters slammed across the monitor in bright red, Chinese characters and warning stripes scattered upon cablechoked walkways, strobing bursts of light whenever an objective updates, and enough chromatic aberration to make Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon look like a pleasant still life. Thankfully, the migraine we dreaded never happened, but we wouldn’t recommend Ruiner as a nightcap to relax with before bed.

Ruiner’s colour palette reaches deep into the cyberpunk spectrum of neon-hued primaries and oversaturated artificiality. Enemies and friendlies alike wear crude 1980s futurism fashion, mohawked urchins in dirty tank tops leering at buzzcut enforcers with rectangular sunglasses and stony expressions straight out of a Katsuhiro Otomo manga. It’s a look firmly anchored in cyberpunk anime and film, giving combat areas a claustrophobic overabundance of machinery and electronic clutter. But like most works in the genre it’s the city that plays the most crucial role in establishing the tone. For Ruiner, that’s Rengkok.