Regions of Ruin: Runegate Review: A Cozy Story of Resilience

Regions of Ruin: Runegate is an adventure game that often has the feeling of Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria, but in 2D form with a sharper focus on what it wants to accomplish as a game that leaves it feeling cleaner. It's easy to get started in the game, and I was emotionally invested early on, since you learn about the situation and its stakes right away.

In Regions of Ruin: Runegate, you play as a dwarf who regroups with a few other dwarves after their home has been essentially destroyed. Unfortunately, there are only a handful of you left to regroup, and the goblins are still coming after you.

In a moment of desperation, your group makes the decision to go through an unknown portal called a runegate to a location that was once a town, but is now abandoned and left in a state of ruin. From here, your task is to rebuild the town, find other dwarves, and explore the worlds that the runegate connects to.

A Short Campaign, but a Lot of Creative Potential

The main campaign doesn't take too long to get through, especially if you aren't spending your time exploring beyond what you need to. However, Regions of Ruin: Runegate has a feature that lets you create your own custom campaigns. I'd love to see the game get the style of community-created content that we saw with games like Amnesia, where players could create and share custom stories. It gives the game more life, and it offers a playground that you can get creative in before sharing your worlds with others.

Setting that aside for now to look at the included campaign, I liked that it didn't try to get convoluted. Some games feel like they have to try too hard to set their stories or mechanics apart. The result is usually a worse experience compared to a game that knows what elements it wants to use, and then polishes and executes them well, and that's the category that Regions of Ruin falls into.

The main campaign is kept simple, which lets the mystery and system of the runegate shine. You found a magical gate. You found an abandoned town that's suitable for rebuilding into a new home for your people. You're connected to resource-rich worlds that have dwarves you might encounter, and are then able to help and recruit for your budding civilization.

It works, and it's not throwing too much at you. Instead, the gameplay and exploration do the heavy-lifting of integrating you into this fictional 2D world in a way that leaves you invested in helping the dwarves finally recover from their hardships.

In some ways, the story feels too short. While I'm glad that the game doesn't try to drag out the story in order to make it longer, without adding substance in doing so, I'm also sad that the adventure ends so soon. I'd love to see a community hub opened that lets players share custom campaigns with each other, which basically adds unlimited replayability to the game and keeps it fresh.

Intuitive Mechanics and Gameplay

If you play 2D games often, then the controls are going to feel familiar. I personally don't play a lot of 2D games, but I still had no issues picking up the controls and figuring out how the game works.

As far as control schemes go, it's possible to play with a keyboard and mouse, but using a controller offers a much smoother experience. This is especially true for combat. You can get away with a keyboard and mouse easily enough while exploring and gathering resources, but for combat, you need to flip direction, and that's not as quick when done with a mouse versus a keyboard.

Outside of combat, you'll be exploring, helping dwarves you come across and those in your town, as well as gathering resources that let you travel farther for exploration and allow you to repair the broken-down ruins that are becoming a new dwarven hometown. These mechanics feel more like the core of the game, and the combat is more of a secondary feature that is part of exploring and getting gear and resources, leaving the focus on the adventuring and town building.

Despite that, the combat is surprisingly smooth, and it isn't as punishing as 2D platformers tend to be, which makes Regions of Ruin: Runegate more approachable for casual and cozy players. I would love to have a feature added that highlights the enemies in my range when I'm already in combat, which would give me a better idea of how much range my current weapon has and how many enemies I can hit at once with it. It's not a huge deal that there currently isn't such a feature, but it would be a quality-of-life improvement for me.

As far as the mechanics of building go, Regions of Ruin makes it easy to understand how you'll repair the ruins your group has discovered. There are small signs that you can interact with at locations where something can be built, and interacting with the signs tells you what's needed to build or repair what the sign marks. Then, when you have the materials, you interact with the sign again to build. As a quality-of-life improvement, I'd have liked for the material counter to show when I'm near signs that I've already interacted with, because I constantly forget which sign needs what.

To help with building, you can get workers for your town. You tell the workers what material you want them to gather, and that saves you some time and effort since you no longer have to get everything yourself. It also makes the town building feel like a collaborative effort, which is fitting for a group of survivors trying to form a new home. Overall, this mechanic complements the story and atmosphere, so you feel like you belong with the group of dwarves and like you're all in this together.

A Surprisingly Cozy Open World

Despite the story being tragic at the start, as the dwarves have to deal with surviving without anything, the atmosphere and visuals are incredibly cozy. I definitely had the feeling that I was playing a cozy game. The ruins of the town you build shape into a home, and you get to be part of building it, which makes it feel that much more personal.

The visuals and sound design help with these cozy vibes. Even being 2D, the settings are detailed. Plus, you can see physics at work as you move. I chose a hairstyle that's longer, and my dwarf's hair billows behind me when I run. It's very majestic, but also clean in design. I didn't feel like the environments were cluttered, but they also didn't feel empty, so the balance of details was well done.

Part of the environment is the open world. I was surprised at how open the maps feel for a game that's 2D, which I tend to feel more restricted by. However, you get to use a map to decide which section you explore next, and that makes areas feel expansive in a way I wasn't expecting. At the same time, the way that travel works shows that Regions of Ruin: Runegate respects your time. It doesn't make you spend time getting from one area to the next, and you can instead fast-travel as long as you have enough food. Then, if you don't have the food required, you can just go gather some in order to fast travel.

The NPCs also show how the game respects your time. They don't have long-winded conversations, but you can ask more questions that aren't required for the story if you want more details. Additionally, the workers you can send out for materials make gathering items easier for you, which again respects your time. Then, you can save and exit any time you need to and pop back into the game when you can.

Regions of Ruin: Runegate is what I wanted from Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria. However, it also has refreshing features that set it apart from a number of games I'm used to playing. The story is easy to jump into and doesn't get unnecessarily complicated, and the gameplay is well-explained and straightforward. This is the kind of game that I would recommend even to people who don't go for 2D games normally, because it still has the feeling that you get from exploring in 3D games, thanks to its design. Overall, Regions of Ruin: Runegate is an adventure that you can play at your own pace, as it respects your time.