Gosh, can you believe it? It’s already the 35th anniversary of Ruin! It came out before I was born, but even I’m feeling the passage of time with this one. With such a momentous occasion upon us, a special 35th anniversary edition of the legendary RPG has been released by its developer Official Electric, split across just four floppy disks… except, well, you’ve definitely already clocked that Ruin isn’t quite real. At least not in the way it’s been presented.
The actual game in question here is Ruin: Chapter 0, an interactive fiction game in the stylings of something you might have seen on the ZX Spectrum, albeit with a lot more flair. And, perhaps, a lot more glitches – a big flashing imagery warning is needed for this one. Playable within your browser, it’s kind of hard to describe what you do, or even what you’re doing, in Ruin. From what I can gather, you are a knight, the hero of rune, tasked by the king to retrieve a sword and defeat evil forever. But no matter what, I just keep getting my ass kicked by this evil, and every time I die it just says “get owned” at me! Rude!
Watch on YouTube
And then the game becomes something else… a sci-fi romper across different planets, one where you run through the woods clicking on apples at just the right time as they approach you, and where you take pitstops to take a smoke break. Those moments where you take the devil sticks out of their luxurious boxes requires you to actually do so, dragging it out, flicking your lighter to set it off, pulling it towards your lips. It is such a strangely involved game in some ways, and hands-off in others.
It flicks between your more typical RPG kind of screen, to a first-person point-and-click adventure game, to, quite honestly, an animated movie of sorts. There is an impenetrable quality to it that makes me want to break it down, to uncover its secrets, to do a deep dive on Wikipedia followed by watching several “Ruin EXPLAINED” videos on YouTube. And yet I won’t find those, because Ruin is not the legendary IP celebrating its 35th anniversary it claims to be. But it does a good job of making you believe in it.
You can check out Ruin: Chapter 0 on itch.io.
