Do relationships between people really matter? They'll all break in the end, sooner or later. Can't a person be himself and walk down a path he chose purely on his own, without anyone else's intervention? He may seem like a nobody, but he'll ultimately gain more.

I’m a firm believer in the power of language over one’s thoughts.

Not in the sociocultural or moral sense, but more of a structural sense. If you’ve ever been through cognitive behavioural therapy (we are not typing the acronym), you’ll probably understand what I mean: For the disordered, the process of getting better is often just the process of acquiring more words to describe and talk down our thoughts.
Indeed, many people I’ve met in my life have suffered because they lack the language to describe and address their own thoughts. It’s easy to say “I feel bad”, sure, but emotions and thoughts are rarely so binary and require a decent toolkit of words to properly address.

With this in mind, I believe there’s no arrangement of words more powerful than:

“It doesn’t have to be like this.”

What do you do, then, when everyone’s words have been taken away from them?

Simultaneously so bleak as to be genuinely haunting and so hopeful that it inspired a significant paradigm shift in my life, Library of Ruina consumed me ever since I started playing it, with its de facto claim over my every waking thought soon becoming de jure.

I was filtered by LoR’s predecessor, Lobotomy Corporation, perhaps my only genuine mark of shame in decades of playing games and indeed engaging with art as a whole. It was right up my alley and hit basically every note I love in games, but alas I hit the wall and turned around instead of climbing it.

Bizarrely, this might’ve given me the best possible experience in LoR - in turn, giving me the best game I’ve ever played.

LoR opens on an unremarkable note. Some twunk named Roland trips and falls into the titular Library where the Librarian of her role’s namesake Angela peels a few of his limbs off, interrogates him, and revives him later as her servant.

What is the Library?

It’s a fantasy dungeon where you’re the big bad and your goal is to slaughter the people who’re invited so you can assimilate them as powerups and catalogue their knowledge for Angela’s aims. Every reception starts off with a little vignette of their lives and personalities, hopes/dreams, and reasoning for entering the Library… and then you murder them.

Yeah, LoR and the overall franchise is fantastically bleak. The first few people you kill are desperate down-and-outs or bottom of the barrel Fixers (mercenaries) too unremarkable to have the luxury of passing on such a vague, suspicious contract.
Angela, a sheltered woman with the emotional maturity and life experience of a 12 year old, frequently comments on how miserable/horrifying the world is, only for the suspiciously world-weary Roland to assure her that this is just how things are.

Angela is a woman who, for the bulk of her overly long and painful existence, was trapped - literally, and by circumstance. In LoR, she attempts to assert her freedom by giving it to other people; one must sign the invitation to enter the Library, the warnings are written on it. The choice is there to simply not sign it.
Only… As Roland himself repeatedly points out, it’s not quite that simple. Indeed, none of the people you kill in the early stages of the game really had a choice. They were either too desperate or under the thumb of someone much stronger. With the passage of time and progression of the story, many of the Library’s guests are coerced, manipulated either by contract or by sweet little lies, or commanded to on pain of death. Some are compelled by forces beyond their ken, or the welling of pure emotion that so many City dwellers had shut out of their heart.

I think it’s fantastically easy to make the observation of “LoR tackles nihilism as a subject”, and it’s not exactly wrong, but I think it’s remiss not to mention the ways LoR ties contemporary nihilism with the omnipresence of capital and systemic oppression.

A gear with a purpose is content, for its rotation has meaning. Humans are cogs in the machination that is the City. Someone has to make those cogs turn. That way, the City can run correctly.

The City’s inhabitants are, as reiterated endlessly by both the pre-reception vignettes, Librarian chats and Roland’s various interjections, stuck underneath the bootheel of capital. A Corp or ‘The Head’ is a ruling force that, while it does not place the building blocks of oppression in the land, is nonetheless the solid ground they’re placed upon by others. All of the City’s structure is, down to the rebar used in the concrete, built to maintain a status quo that considers the deaths of hundreds of thousands to be an acceptable tradeoff, but treats tax fraud as deserving of a fate worse than death.
Because of this structure, and those that perpetuate it, everyone in the City - including many of the people who're forced to uphold the oppression against their will - has basically shut down. Feelings are a luxury nobody can afford, and the boot placed upon their neck has been there so long that they consider it a universal constant - much like gravity.
In lieu of any hope, even the nonreligious have come to view the City as a god. The actually-religious exist in a circle of copium, ‘worshipping’ doctrine which is about accepting the boot as part of your life rather than as your oppressor. Characters like Roland repeatedly say they don’t believe in anything, only to talk about the City as though it were a vast and unknowable god - at best witnessed, but never comprehended.

But it’s made equally clear that it doesn’t have to be like this, especially in chats with the Librarians - who often put forward viewpoints that Roland shuts down because his mind, so thoroughly warped by the foundational cruelty of the City, cannot comprehend them on a base level. From the top of the City to the bottom, an endless domino chain of “well, it is what it is” cascades into acceptance of horrors that have no real reason to exist.
These people are not nihilistic because that is their actual worldview, they’re nihilistic because they don’t have a choice.

Treat everything like a rolling ball! You cheer for it wherever the sphere decides to go! If you truly wish for the good of other people, why don’t you stop holding expectations… and just laugh with them at their side? Everyone who lives here is a clown! Clowns can’t survive without feeding on each other’s smiles, you see?

Rather surprisingly, though, LoR does not castigate anyone for their nihilism. Sure, they’re fictional characters, but despite being miserable-by-circumstance their stances are still treated as valid. It’s most obvious later on, where one character finds out the orders they’ve been given were forged and is not at all angry - why would they be? Lies and truth are purpose all the same, and purpose is a luxury unto itself. If anything, they’re at least happy that their exploitation benefited them and their oppressor rather than merely the oppressor.

It’s somewhat difficult to discuss this topic further without spoilers. I’d like to come back and write a longer review, but for now I’m trying to keep it clean.

Art narrows your vision, after all. You stop caring about the things around you. That’s how most artists seem to act, I think. And so, you indulge in the craft, not realizing that you’re throwing yourself and your surroundings into the fire you started. It’s like the human life when you think about it.

My praise of LoR’s handling of nihilism and everything around it also comes with the caveat that I, personally, got tired of overly bleak stories not too long ago. Even Disco Elysium veered too close to the fatal threshold a few times, and so does LoR, but neither game crosses it.

Really, Disco Elysium is an excellent comparison if we’re sticking to purely positive ones.

Everyone in this game is humanised as far as the narrative allows, even the ones that are barely human - in every sense of the word. They have aspirations, no matter how trivial and petty, and comrades, sharing bonds and jokes regardless of whether they’re more noble Fixers or nightmarish cannibalistic freaks.
It becomes apparent early on that, despite the Librarians’ claims that humanity was snuffed out of the City, it persists in the moment-to-moment of people’s lives despite the eternal presence of the boot.

I said up above that not finishing LC enhanced LoR, and it’s here that it really became apparent.

Roland was not present for the events of LC, while the Librarians were. By the time I’d quit LC, I had only met four Librarians: Malkuth, Hod, Yesod and Netzach. Sure enough, these are the most straightforward Librarian chats, though they still exposit LC in a way that blends well into the narrative without obviously being an excuse for people to skip LC.
But it’s the later floors - with Librarians both I and Roland were unfamiliar with - where things amp up, both in terms of how heavy the subject matter gets and how Roland’s facade slowly erodes around the middle and upper layers.
LC as an event in the setting’s history has been deeply mythologized, subject to rampant speculation from the unfamiliar and much rumination from the familiar. Getting walled by the game itself made this narrative almost… diegetic. Like those of the City, I had a vague idea of Lobotomy Corporation and could only speculate as to why it fell to ruin in the intervening moments between games, but like the Librarians I was familiar enough with the company, its purpose and its occupants to recognize things and keep them in mind. Remember, the shame of quitting LC hangs heavy for me.

I could go on at length about the story, but to do so would spoil most of it - and honestly, I’d rather praise the storytelling for now.

Our conductor will be the one to fix that! He’ll take me to a world where there are pure and clean ingredients aplenty! That day can’t come soon enough! I’ve been filling my stomach with trash for too long.

LoR’s format is very simple. Each reception consists of a window into the guests’ lives before they accept the invitation, a cut to Roland and Angela discussing what they just saw, a fight, and then a wrap up conversation afterwards. In between receptions, you suppress Abnormalities (puzzle boss fights that give you useful treats) and have chats with the Librarians.
It sounds straightforward, and it is, but there’s an elegance to LoR’s usage of the player’s time - the format is maintained right up to the credits, and while some conversations can initially feel like pointless filler it eventually becomes apparent that LoR wastes no time.
I don’t believe that foreshadowing inherently makes a good story (an opinion which makes George RR Martin fans fucking hate me) but in LoR’s case, it does. As early as the 4th line of dialogue spoken in the game’s entire 130 hour runtime, it references concepts, character and organizations that will appear later. Truthfully, I was initially a bit sour on how many Nouns the game threw at me early on but around Urban Plague I was seeing a lot of those Nouns actually manifest on screen, often to follow up on either a bit of exposition Roland/Angela delivered or thematically iterating on something that seemed inconsequential at first.

And man, what characters Roland/Angela are. LoR has no wasted characters, managing to make even the one-off filler guests you slaughter memorable, but Roland and Angela really stand out as both the best in the game and my favourite protagonists in uh… Fiction as a medium for human creativity.

This is just how the world is, and the ones best adapted to it come out on top, simple as that. Adapt or die. If you can't, you either become food or fall behind until you're wiped out.

Roland is a funny man, a very funny man. He has a quip for everything and deliberately plays his status as Angela’s whipped boyfriend a disgruntled servant up for laughs, but like many real people who use humor to cope, it is plainly obvious that he’s hiding a lot of deep-rooted bitterness towards his circumstances and the world he lives in. Even many of his jokes betray that life in the City has eroded him, and his catchphrase “That’s that and this is this” slowly goes from funny to haunting as the game progresses.
A good friend of mine described him as “An Isekai protagonist but played entirely straight” and I think it’s an apt comparison; he has many of the same building blocks (sardonic guy with some bitterness) but the concept is actually explored and treated with any gravity. He’s also a literal outsider to the world of Lobotomy Corp/the Library, so.
Every time I think about Roland I inevitably recall a story someone once told me where their restrained and seemingly conservative father got drunk at a wedding and started dancing shirtless with his best friend, and when [friend] said "that's a bit gay innit?" he retorted "I WISH I WAS, SWEETIE”.
There’s a really poignant moment on Hokma’s floor where, upon being asked if he’s religious, Roland denies it wholeheartedly. Except… This instinctual rejection is wrong. He certainly believes it, but through his chats with everyone and his endless exposition on the City’s evils to Angela, it is abundantly clear that Roland subconsciously views the City itself as a malicious God that has personally picked him out of a lineup and fucked him over specifically.
It’s these little contradictions, hypocrisies and idiosyncrasies that really bring this game’s cast to life, but none moreso than…

The thoughts and emotions I hold when I craft them... A resentment towards the City for driving me to this desperation, and a blind anger for the rich. Bitterness, and... a yearning for vengeance toward the man who rid me of that hope and pushed me to despair.

Angela. Fucking Angela. My little pookie bear who’s a bitch to everyone (for very good reasons) and is so deeply fucked up. The depths of her misery are vast, simultaneously impressive and horrifying in their seeming endlessness. She’s the kind of miserable that you often don’t see outside of Central/Eastern European literature.
Which is a good comparison, honestly, because PM really get what makes a good tragedy with Angela. She’s miserable, haunted by a past that’d crush lesser folk, and desperately chasing a purpose she’s not even entirely sure she wants. In pursuit of her murky, ill-defined goal, she baits countless people to their deaths - becoming not much better than the man in her past she claims to despise.

But she smiles sometimes, and that’s enough.

What really strikes me about Angela though is how fucking transgender her storyline is.
Early on there’s a flashback to the early days of Angela’s life as an AI in Lobotomy Corporation where she experiences both profound amounts of empathy and a desire to nurture strong, intimate relationships with her peers. She’s then subjected to what I can only (tragically) call Male Socialization: Her creator affirms that she’s not meant to do that sort of thing, “things like her” are meant to feel nothing. Any expression of ‘unfitting’ emotions is shut out and shouted down.
When she breaks free of her shackles, she radically alters her appearance, having only a passing resemblance to her initial form - which is decidedly less feminine. I joked on twitter that she looks both transfemme and transmasc at once.
But more tellingly, Angela is infinitely more neurotic in this game. She’s expressive, has a short fuse, swears a lot, smiles far more readily and seems to show fondness for the Sephirah in her own roundabout way. As her humanity draws closer, she begins to feel shame. Shame for what she used to be, and shame for what she is.
It is incredibly easy to relate this to the experience most trans women have once that second puberty kicks them in the taint. At least, the ones who have self-awareness and a sense of shame.

It’s even more pronounced in the receptions. Despite displaying every sign of humanity, whenever guests arrive and are met at the entrance, they clock her as a machine and constantly rib her for it. “That’s not a human lmao” is said every other reception and it bears a deeply uncomfortable (positive) resemblance to trans people being clocked and mocked for their appearance.

As I write this, I’ve been pondering the concept of scale. You, the reader, have probably played a sequel at some point in your life. It’s natural for them to scale up, and I myself have played far too many that scale up far too hard. Halo went from an existential war of survival to a cosmic clash with demigods, robots and shadowy factions.
Yakuza went from being about one small corner of Tokyo to being a country/globe-trotting clash against conspiracies. Devil May Cry was about one oedipal gay guy on an island and then became about generational trauma and saving the world. Fallout went from being good to being terrible. Final Fantasy went from stories of heroes to failed attempts at modern epics. The list goes on.

LoR is a massive scale-up. LC was a game about some deeply depressed people playing SCP in a single lab. Given the scale of this setting’s City and the fact that LoR’s cast covers someone from every corner of it, it’s no exaggeration to say that LoR went from a lab to the entire world.

And yet it sticks the landing. The vignette format for character introductions helps; the Library is the centre of the game’s world, never once left behind, and characters are shown through brief windows into their life. It’s particularly resonant in the world formed by the 2010s, where people are more plugged in than ever yet seemingly more distant too. The entire world, too, is at our fingertips; through the form of fleeting windows into bits of an existence far beyond ours.

But the social media comparison is a little cringe, don’t you think? I do too.

If they want to live their lives as they see fit, then they won’t stop me from doing the same. Think about it. We can’t roam the street in peace; we’re forced to live in the darkness. What sins have we committed to deserve this treatment? Why must we suffer to ensure that your kind lives a painless life? We’re humans just like you.

I have this scar on my right knee. It’s huge, with its width spanning my entire knee and thickness on par with my pinkie. Looks more like a pursed mouth than a scar sometimes.
I got it from a very mundane event; I had an obscene growth spurt early on. During a friendly soccer match in school, my oversized body failed a dexterity check and, upon kicking the ball, my body went up into the air too. I landed at a grisly angle, my descent causing my knee to get dragged along some chipstones. Embarrassing, yes, though it was still some of the worst pain I’ve ever been in and the bleeding was so intense that the only reason I was immediately taken to hospital was because the school nurse nearly vomited upon seeing my bone peek through the wound.
But most people don’t know that, they only see the scar and my occasional limping. They can see the present-day effects of that pain and that damage, but they can only speculate as to the cause. There’s only one domino on display, and they can’t see the ones that fell behind it.

LoR’s windows into the lives of its guests are much the same, and they help keep the story from outgrowing its confines. Almost every character with very few exceptions is depicted at the absolute nadir of their lives upon introduction with concepts like ‘backstory’ thrown in the trash in favour of letting you use context clues instead. Such is life in the City; only the ‘now’ matters anyway.

I only realized that day that I cannot blindly trust what my eyes show me. In that moment of the past, I was made a fool. The shallow promise that our safety would be secured… The thin piece of contract is what cost me everything. Had He not saved me, I might have drowned myself in resentment toward the whole world… and met my end.

Now, normally videogames are a balancing act, or a series of tradeoffs. Many of the most fun games I’ve played have mediocre stories at best and outright abominable stories at their worst. Likewise, gameplay is often the first concession made for narrative. Indeed, the common thread of my Top 25 is games that weave their gameplay into the narrative well OR have a healthy serving of both.

The #1 entry on that list is foreshadowing.

I’m very used to games, even more outsider games, tone down their gameplay for the sake of marketability. It wouldn’t be wrong for someone to assume LoR, which is far more conventionally palatable than LC, would do the same.

And for the first hour or so, it seems that way. You roll a dice to act, whoever rolls higher goes first, and you spend Light to use your cards. Easy!

Except…

Inhale.

Every character on the field rolls one - or more - speed dice to act. Whoever rolls higher goes first, with 1 being last on the action order and Infinity (yes, really) going first. Multiple speed dices means multiple actions and cards played per turn.
Each card has its own dice - offensive, defensive, and counter - with each dice having subtypes for damage/defense types.
When a card is played, the dice on the card roll - unless it’s a counter dice, which is stored in case you receive a one-sided attack.
When two opposing characters roll on the same speed dice value, this causes a “clash” where dice now have to outroll one another. The higher roll goes through. This can also be forced if someone with a higher speed dice attacks someone with a lower speed dice - this is a redirect.
…But there are also ranged attacks, which ignore the turn order - this seems overpowered, but if they clash against offensive dice and lose, that dice is recycled and can roll again.
…Unless the ranged user has a counter dice stored, at which point they can roll to defend. If counter dice outroll an incoming attack, they too are recycled.
But-

You get the point.

LoR is very uncompromising with its mechanics. There’s nothing here that can be ignored. I didn’t even get into abnormality pages, keypage passive ability sharing, E.G.O or any of the status effects.

There’s a common sentiment among Project Moon fans that LoR’s difficulty spike is vertical. I don’t necessarily agree, for my many years playing YGO competitively and engaging with deckbuilders gave me a huge advantage, but I can see why.
Many games with some degree of mechanical complexity or an unspoken set of rules will throw (what I call) an Exam Boss at you. Exam Bosses exist to make sure you’ve actually been using and engaging with the mechanics that were introduced via antepieces in the hours prior.
Well, LoR has a neverending chain of exam bosses in each stage. Impuritas Civitatis, the game’s final stage, opens with two relatively easy fights before throwing twelve Exam Bosses at you. At its core LoR is a card game and you WILL need to build robust and numerous decks to progress.

But I don’t think it’s as hard as people make it out to be.

LoR’s strength gameplay-wise is that all of your options are available to you at any given moment, and there isn’t much need to bash your head against the wall like in LC or pray for good banner luck in Limbus. It’s very simple to back out (sometimes taking a guest’s book with you, which is akin to getting a free cardpack from your opponent) and come back with a new strategy/build/Library floor.
Once you’re in Urban Legend, the game starts offering routes for progression rather than forcing you along a straight line. The solution to any wall is often on one of those other routes; every enemy has a weakness or a gimmick. Bleed as both a status effect and a deckbuilding component appears early, and it’s useful until the credits roll on most enemies. My Discard Hod build was still being used as late as the final boss.
I suppose you could say LoR is more of a puzzle game than anything.

What really enhances the gameplay is how well it’s leveraged for the sake of the narrative, and/or for giving fights weight.

Most boss fights come with a mechanic that’s unique to them specifically, or they introduce new twists on an existing mechanic that’s meant to upset some of the more comfortable strategies. Queen of Hatred gets a lot of hype as the game’s first major roadblock, but her purpose is to teach you to use Bleed and to convince you that maybe it’s okay to skip a turn or take damage on purpose.
There are numerous points in the story where the game outright lies to you about what’s coming up. More than a few times does LoR throw a surprise, unlisted second phase at you or some other curveball. Shoutout to that purple bitch.
A lot of the single-enemy boss fights come with mechanics that at first seem ‘’’bullshit’’’ (lol.) but in reality are just there to give it some impact. One character having 5 or more speed dice might seem ludicrous, but it helps to sell the world and the sheer power of the people within it.
The majority of people who play this game will scrape by many of the harder fights by the skin of their teeth, but in a game all about the eternal upward struggle to live, isn’t that sublime?

Of course, everything up above is aided by how this game sounds.

My only light was taken from me twice… For a brief moment… I felt all kinds of emotions before that piano. Despair, obsession, rage, sorrow… But, it took no time for those feelings to dissipate into nothing. Everything… yes. Everything seemed beautiful afterwards. Was it truly a tragedy that I lost her? Who defined it as tragedy? You may still be blinded by wrath, but I made the decision that I will care not about those feelings anymore.

On every front, LoR is an absolute masterwork as an auditory experience.

The soundtrack is borderline perfect, one of the rare games with 80-odd songs where every single one is standout and memorable. The Story themes are subdued but perfect for their respective atmospheres while the battle themes maintain a morose atmosphere that nonetheless manages to carry a sense of excitement when needed. You may be the villains, but there’s no reason it can’t get funky sometimes. There are only three songs in the game that sound anywhere near heroic.
Mercifully, important tracks don’t often get reused and the single song that gets taken from its original context is used masterfully anyway. To say nothing of the returning songs from LC.
That fight near the end of the game hits like a fucking truck if you’re familiar with the last game’s OST.

And the voice acting, good god the voice acting. After so many years of enduring games where a lot of the VAs are just repeating a role they did in the past or emulating a VA they look up to with all the tact of a fandub, it’s so nice to play a game where the characters are voiced straightforwardly, as though they were people.
Sometimes it’s Roland being a flirty little dipshit when Angela gives him an order, sometimes it’s Gebura audibly trying not to throw up when tasting some coffee, sometimes it’s Chesed’s tildes being obvious in his speech, and sometimes it’s Tiphereth suddenly turning into a Yakuza thug when Roland’s beef with her spills over.
And, sometimes, its characters delivering some of the most haunting soliloquies in the history of the medium. There’s a quiet rule running through LoR’s entire runtime wherein every sickass vocal track barring one is preceded by a character delivering a soliloquy to themselves before coming back for a fight, and all of them are deeply moving.
The one prior to Gone Angels might be a meme now, sure, but seeing it for the first time left my heart in my throat and my jaw hanging from my face like a useless slab of bone.
Whether LoR is being horrific, tragic, funny or tense, the voice acting never falters. I was frankly amazed to find out that a lot of the VAs are either amateurs, F-listers or total no-names because there is not a single weak performance among the cast - and it is a huge cast.

Even on a base level, the smaller sfx are so nice. Clicking through menus is auditory/autismal joy, the various sounds of combat are sharp, distinct and punchy. 5v5 fights are a beautiful chorus of crashing, slashing, shooting, stabbing, clinking and roaring.

O my sorrow, you are better than a well-beloved: because I know that on the day of my final agony, you will be there, lying in my sheets, O sorrow, so that you might once again attempt to enter my heart.

I don’t like hyperbole. I was given the autism strain that programmed me towards sincerity, and the culture I grew up venerated insincerity and humor-as-a-mask so much that I can’t even stand playful contrarianism.

So I mean it when I say Library of Ruina haunts my every waking moment, and that it’s by far the best game I’ve ever played in this long, long history I have with the medium. It's left a gaping hole in my chest, a kind of numb longing that only pops up after a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience. I finished it three days ago, and ever since it has been in my mind for every waking moment. You don't know how crushed I was when I realized "grief" is a word that the City's inhabitants don't have.

If you have any familiarity with me or my reviews, you’ll probably know that my critical brain is on 24/7. Not by choice, that’s just how I’m wired. Things like nostalgia and hype tend to not have much of an effect. I carry this into my reviews, even if it means dunking on things I have a lot of fondness for.

Yet I can’t really find any fault with LoR beyond some minor bugs/typos the fact that the anti-capitalist story was followed up by Limbus Company - a gacha game. But that’s that, and this is this.

“Flawless” isn’t a word I use lightly, and I’m not going to use it here. Not because I think it’s flawed, no, but because to defend that position would require both an actual thesis and also for me to spoil the entire game, start-finish. Maybe some other time.

I didn’t intend for this to get so long or so heartfelt, so I have no idea how to close it off.

Uh… How’s the weather where you live? That train was fucked up, right? Do you think the game would’ve been better if Binah didn’t wear shoes?

See you next time.