I wouldn’t immediately recommend Lost Ruins in the way that I might with other Metroidvanias, but it’s still a fun time overall. If you’re looking for a different kind of Metroidvania and don’t mind intentionally awkward controls, then give Lost Ruins a try. It’s honestly a nice feeling when you get all the way through it.

Lost Ruins is a very simple, but still exciting game, which offers a complex magic system and exciting opponents. Probably, by the release on new consoles, it will become even more polished, and some animation flaws and sections with jumps on platforms will be corrected. But even now, Lost Ruins delivers a lot of nice emotions and fun.

It's easy to say "Dark Souls with cute girls." It's hard to commit to it. What will likely forever be the point of contention with Lost Ruins is the implementation of its extreme difficulty. How much suspension of disbelief can players afford when it comes to teenage girls with heavy weaponry, and will it be enough to justify the slow combat? Despite great fidelity in pixel artistry/animation and concrete battle conditions, it will always be the difficulty at center stage. That will likely be the deciding factor on whether or not it's worth playing.

Lost Ruins manages to stand out from others in the genre and establish itself as a unique experience. The masterclass of pixel artwork alongside the conceptually engaging gameplay ideas more than shows that much effort and care went into this adventure. Still, implementation is everything, and sadly, Lost Ruins doesn’t seem to have a clear idea of what it wants to be. Opting instead to throw everything at a wall and see what sticks.

The visuals are strong and most of the elements are competent, but this is a middle-of-the-road game that squanders its potential with some baffling decisions.

Lost Ruins is a retro-inspired cautionary tale. For every Metroid or Double Dragon back in the day, there were a hundred clones that just did not get it perfectly right. Even 30 years later, developers can’t always figure out the secret sauce or how to make it all work. In some ways Lost Ruins is a proper testament to the classics, they were just so much more nuanced than their visuals let on. This game has some great ideas and a concept that works on paper, and from time to time it works in the game too. But all too often it stumbles when it should have soared.

Lost Ruins is nothing more than a cumbersome, unnecessarily frustrating and unbalanced video game. In short, it is a jumble of excellent ideas thrown to the wind, but which at least is a feast for the eyes.