Library of Ruina is an indie game from Project moon.
Being a sequel to the notoriously hard Lobotomy Corporation, Library of Ruina changes up its gameplay to be a card collecting, deck building RPG while still containing an amazing narrative and world building.

Gameplay loop
While you may think it is a card game similar to StS, you cannot mindlessly play your cards and expect to win, even with meticulous deck setups.
The overall gameplay loop can be quite satisfying as it boils down to beating new fights, then being able to use the cards and passives of the fight you just did to upgrade your own decks (small praise to the boss fights letting you use most of the same passives and cards they have when you fight them, making them feel like actual bosses when on your side). The game inserts a wide range of unique and thematic archetypes in both the fights you can do and the decks you can build. I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of unique archetypes and the ways they were slowly built upon throughout progressing through the game.
This game has a staggering amount of content, with an average play through taking an estimated 150 hours.

The difficulty is vertical
While the game maintains a smooth difficulty curve at the start to ease you in, it quickly inserts many difficulty spikes along the way as it culminates in a true test of your deck building and game knowledge near the end.
While the spikes in difficulty can pose a challenge and frustration, it is quite similar to the try and fail cycle of a souls-like game. You will need to refine your deck building and your strategy every time in order to be successful. The main difference that causes more frustration in this game is that your suffering and losses are extended to many, many turns before you lose instead of being over in 2 hits.
While the game can be difficult at times, the game also gives you a variety of very overpowered decks and builds if you are able to discover them as you level up your deck-building skills. If overpowered builds are not enough for some fights, there may also exist some method of clearing a fights in an unconventional method. The game definitely gives you the options and freedom in order to clear some of the harder fights this way if you are able to use the game knowledge to your advantage.


Story
While this game is technically a sequel to Lobotomy corporation, it is able to stand on its own if you have not experienced the first game, however as it is a continuation of the first game, the narrative experience would only be heavily enhanced if you have played lobotomy corporation(I just watched a quick summary video to get caught up).

The main method of story exposition that the game uses is with some good old visual novel style vignettes. These play out usually between fights to add lore and world building to both the guests (enemies) you will face and for the librarians (allies) that you will use to fight.
In addition to the visual novel exposition, the game further builds on its world and narrative through some optional readings and imagery that can be found on character key pages, combat pages and passives. These are just some extra bits of lore that are sprinkled in if you really care about some characters and story lines.

There are many literary (and operatic even) references that are littered throughout the game in the story, characters and songs.
The overall writing style gives such a refreshing and unique narrative that avoids chasing common tropes and trendy story lines that can be mindlessly regurgitated today. The game takes a theme and explores it over the course of its narrative, showing us how the characters can represent their own interpretation of the main theme and what happens when they clash with opposing ideals. Even without the full literary context of the references that the story draws from, the overall narrative is a breath of fresh air and really makes you care about its characters and the struggles they face in this dystopian cyberpunk world.
The story is also fully voiced in korean and the voice acting is quite good even if I don't understand a word.
Even if it is a korean game, the translation is solid and impressively does not take you away from the story with noticeable grammatical or word errors(In fact, I learned a couple of new words from this game).

Music
The first thing you are treated to when the game begins is an amazing opening song sung by Mili. This is also not the last time you will hear Mili as they will appear again with fully voiced original boss themes created for the game. Each song is a treat and heavily relates to the boss in which the song is composed for. The songs were created with many motifs and symbols from the game, but can still be enjoyed by those who have not play the game at all.
Even with some amazing songs by Mili, the OST songs for the game, composed by Studio EIM are also no less amazing. Ranging from orchestral, jazz, city pop, EDM, and rock, the soundtrack does a superb job at conveying its representative character themes when tied to the games emotional flux system.

Graphics
While the game borrows a bit of the artstyle from the previous game, it is a bit more refined in Library of ruina as the bigger sprites have more strokes and shading, giving the game an unique artstyle that blends well with the combat.
The combat graphics itself is similar to darkest dungeons and their 1 key frame attacks which work well within the game thanks to the sound design and feedback of hits and clashes.
The backgrounds of the game are quite unique and give off that oil painting feel with rich colors and use of layering.

Cons
While the game is amazing, no game is without flaws. Here are just a couple that bothered me throughout my play through.
- The deck-building interface is a little lacking for how much time you need to spend in there, there should be more options that help you search through cards and passives in an easier way than just searching card names or filters.
- During combat, the interface can sometimes get in the way of viewing dice info or aiming your combat pages (for example when zoomed in or when you need to pan the camera or hide the passives page to click on a specific speed die. Additionally, the UI makes the game seem a lot more complex than it really is, and to a random viewer who has never played the game, you really cannot tell what is going on.
- The game can get grindy at later points thanks to its gacha system for cards(highly recommended the No-grind mod if you hate grinding at all).
- The tutorial lacks a lot of info, it is basically a huge text dump at the start of the game. While I am happy how the concepts of ranged and mass atk pages are introduced later on once you are a bit more accustomed to game, there is still a lot of information the game omits from you. Whether that is intentionally for the player to discover or just a lack of info on the games side, I cant help but think that the earlier fights should have had more of an emphasis on teaching the player some of the nuanced mechanics through a combination of gameplay and text as opposed to just dumping it all at once.

I would highly recommend this game for anyone looking for a challenging indie strategy game with a great narrative and music.
As a new fan of Project moon, I have high hopes for their future endeavours and hope they can continue to break the cycle both in games and outside of them.