Into the Restless Ruins gets you to deck-build a dungeon and then explore it

Into the Restless Ruins is a rather different dungeon crawler, one where you build the dungeon over time with a deck of cards you continue to gather and upgrade. Disclosure: key provided by their PR team.

Inspired by Scottish folklore, what you get is a thoroughly interesting experience when it comes to the exploration, since you start off with nothing but a single blank exit room and a few dungeon room cards. You place down these cards to build the dungeon to explore, with many of them having different functions to help you (like healing, increasing your damage etc). As you explore your torchlight gradually fades, making it more difficult to explore since there's no mini-map so you have to learn your own layout.

That torch I mentioned? You need to get out of the dungeon and back to the initial exit room before it completely goes out or you're a bit screwed as the darkness will rapidly drain your health. So it's also in part an extraction game, with you running around your creation to collect and explore, before getting back to the exit, to then build even more.

The idea here is that you start off with a limited space to build, as you're trying to connect up your rooms to various special areas with a Seal inside that allow you to unlock more of the map to continue build up towards the end of the level. As you progress you unlock more and more cards and eventually you can upgrade your cards as well. Some upgrades give cards more doors to make connecting them all up easier, other upgrades will increase the buff you get from certain special rooms. Like a Campfire room, that adds more time to your torch to explore further.

When you extract from a run each time, you gradually build up a corruption meter, which ends up giving you curse cards which can make things a little bit more challenging. So you do want to explore as far as you can, as quickly as you can in as little runs as possible. If you meter gets full, it's also game over.

It's also an auto-battler. As you run around your dungeon various enemies will spawn and come floating towards you, with your character auto-attacking them all. As you take down enemies, you collect XP in a Vampire Survivor-style progression system which gives you an additional card on level-up.

The combat in it is where the game falls pretty flat, because it's really quite lifeless and uninteresting which is a shame. All that matters for the combat is your positioning, since you swipe most enemies away automatically with a single auto-swing of your weapon. Once you get another weapon, it makes it even easier, there's just pretty much no challenge at all to the combat. If they had expanded this even just a little bit, the game would have been vastly better. As it is, the combat is so simple it's boring.

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There's another problem big with it though. As much as I truly like the dungeon creation, you can break the game entirely with it and have to restart. There's no way to remove a room you've placed, so if you accidentally block access to one of the special Seal rooms and carry on building and exploring, you'll have to just restart since that is the only way to expand the map and keep going. The developer said you just need to avoid that, but to me that's simply not good enough. If the game allows you to get completely progression blocked - that's simply bad design and feels like it wasted my time when that happened.

I love the dungeon creation side of it. The way you build up a deck and then craft the dungeon to explore, along with the torchlight mechanic make it quite a challenge and it is a genuinely great set of game mechanics. Aside from the progression blocking issue (that they really should sort). It's also let down by lifeless combat. So overall I don't really recommend it. Some nice ideas and I get their vision for it but not good enough on the implementation of them.

Into the Restless Ruins perfectly on Desktop Linux / SteamOS with Proton. Valve rated it Steam Deck Verified.