Dragon Ruins Steam Charts & Stats

Good game. Distills dungeon crawlers down to the essentials and cuts out any excess. Takes about two hours to beat, but there is a new game+. Honestly though, I don't really see myself playing though new game+ as it doesn't really add anything except a very slight difficulty increase. I still think it's worth the price even for the short playtime. I plan on getting the sequel which is supposed to be more fleshed out.

I wish I could recommend Dragon Ruins, but this DRPG auto-battler is minimalist to a fault. The art is incredible and it's fun enough for one playthrough, but there's simply no reason to keep playing once you've had one successful run (~90 minutes). The sequel looks like it layers on a bit more complexity and I think it'll be all the better for it. Maybe skip this and go straight for Dragon Ruins 2.

This game is short, simple, unvaried and almost wholly self-playing. There really isn't much here. It's mostly an exercise in game ideas for this subgenre (which seems to be what this developer mostly dabbles with, to be fair). It has something though. A vibe. The art style and atmosphere are all kinds of rad. The responsive, simple, yet oddly satisfying gameplay has potential. It's a classic dungeon crawler in some sense, but almost plays like an idle game to some extent. Combat encounters are completely automatic. You just literally walk around until you need to retreat to heal in town, upgrade your monster murderers with the gold you got, and go back out there to murder again. That's it. It's very meditative. Less is more could very well be a thing here. It just needs something more to be fully realized. A few more variables. A bit more variation. And length. Still, the vibe is enough for me to recommend it to the right person.

Debating a return. Even took a break to clear my head to consider if I was missing something, but came back, and it's...just not there. Quit again after 10 min. I'd watched a review of Dragon Ruins 2 and I think misled myself into thinking there was a bit more in this first game than there is. The concept is appealing, but in practice it's just missing a spark for me. What I like: -The idea of mapping while combat auto-resolves is a good concept for a dungeon crawler. What it's missing: -Something, like equipment drops to mix it up, or talent/attribute points at level. -Any real sense of flavor between the classes - if there's any difference at all between various comps/characters I'm just not seeing it What I don't like: -Gold is the bottleneck for pretty much everything the game actually has (level, gear upgrades, rez pots and teleport scrolls) -XP stops accruing when you hit level until you buy the upgrade (albeit this is probably fine since for a long time you will be bottlenecked on gold anyway) -As a result, it quickly reached a point where there was no point fighting enemies that didn't drop gold (wolves, etc.) and only fighting humanoids that did. The XP itself, as theoretically one of the game's two primary resources, was largely useless. -The map design is possibly the worst dungeon layout I've ever seen. I think the last point is the dealbreaker for me - I could forgive the other shortcomings if it were fun toodling around or exploring, but navigating this dungeon layout just feels bad. It's haphazard at best, and at worst just intentionally obtuse to pad game time.