So you’re maidenless? That’s okay, champ. Listen to this. A Scottish legend tells of a Harvest Maiden who can satisfy desires… desires that can’t be met by simple earthly means. You have lofty desires, right? Well, what a terrible time to have them because, as luck would have it, your local Harvest Maiden is out of commission. She’s been corrupted, her power fractured by wardens and beasts roaming her crumbling ruins. You’d need to make your way through the ruins to harvest wardens and beasts to restore her power to grant your desire. But maybe then, finally, you’d not be maidenless…

So… how could you do all that? Easy! By playing Ant Workshop’s Into the Restless Ruins, a melting pot of different ideas all wrapped up in Scottish folklore that comes together in this one addictive game that I couldn’t put down. It combines your standard deckbuilding fare with Vampire Survivors style combat and the challenge of fitting rooms together as if you were playing a game of Tetris… on top of the stress of navigating without maps on your phone. It’s a good feeling, in this case. Trust me.

An Into the Restless Ruins run begins with choosing which of the ruins you want to delve into. There are six in total, each offering a unique layout that calls for a different approach to how you play. Each ruin also gives you a different starting deck, enemy difficulty, warden and, most importantly, a different number of seals.

Seals are these large, circular constructs that act as magical barriers protecting the warden. They’re hidden in small rooms scattered throughout the map, obscured by fog. Each area is segmented, and these seals are the key to moving forward. To progress, you’ll need to locate and claim seals, with each claim breaking a new barrier of the level and allowing you to move into the next section of the map to find the next seal, or to confront the final warden. You won’t know if a room contains a seal until you enter and clear the fog, which is part of the challenge.

The heart of Into the Restless Ruins is cycling through the build and harvest phases. At the start of each night, you draw from your deck of cards and use a limited number of build points to place them onto your grid. Each card represents a specific room, and I was genuinely impressed by the variety available to play. Some rooms are small and take up just a single tile, while others sprawl across multiple tiles. The location of the exits of each room also varies from card to card, which forces you to plan carefully. Poor placement can easily block off key paths and limit your future building prospects.

On top of all this, certain rooms offer passive bonuses, like increased time, health, or damage, while others must be activated during the harvest phase to be effective. There’s a lot of strategy that gets thrown at a player, and during my runs, I really felt like I had to genuinely think carefully about my next set of moves to ensure I could keep my run going. From choosing the right rooms, placing resource rooms strategically, and building in a way that sets you up for success in the harvest phases, there’s a lot going on!

Once you’ve built what you can, you enter the harvest phase. This is when you explore the ruins you’ve constructed, venturing into fog-covered rooms in search of seals and making it back to where you started to exit. Time management becomes key here, as your handy torch lighting your path burns down quickly. As it dims, your visibility drops. If it burns out completely, you’re left stumbling in the dark while taking a steady tick of damage. The balancing act is addicting, requiring constant consideration of your remaining time to run about the ruins exploring, uncovering fog rooms and doing room interactions. Some rooms offer valuable rewards, but claiming them requires standing still to channel, which in turn wastes precious light. Sometimes you’ll need to make some detours, too, and sometimes the path will just be long. Thankfully, if you’re smart, you’ll have placed campfire rooms to refill your torch bar and beacon fire rooms to slow its burn. You’ll be able to roam about, lit nicely by your torch, with plenty of time to do your room interactions.

Previously on Lost

Of course, there’s a delightfully devilish catch. You don’t have a map during the harvest phase, so good luck remembering the layout of your ruins. I’m no architect, so during my build phases I managed to cook up some truly awful, winding passageways where even a map probably wouldn’t save you. On paper, this probably sounds like a quick and easy recipe for frustration, but it’s actually part of the fun. You built the ruins, so surely you can figure out how to navigate them, right? It adds an interesting layer to the strategy of ensuring your run survives, where you have to really pay attention to where you placed rooms and landmarks.

It becomes essential to make a careful note of where you want to go before you enter the harvest mode, and an even more careful note of where your key campfire rooms are to replenish your torch. Everything that comes from the side effect of having no map simply works to reinforce the key idea of building wisely. Navigating definitely has a bit of a learning curve to it, and it most certainly won’t be something everyone will enjoy, but stick with it. Each harvest phase, you wander about your ruins, reinforcing your mental map of the layout and by the end, you’re navigating your sprawling maze of twists and turns like a pro.

The only thing stopping your run is a curse bar, which ticks up each night and then ticks up an extra chunk when you die. If it reaches 100%, the run is over. It’s something to watch, especially when it bites back at you. At specific thresholds, you’re handed a cursed card, which brings a penalty along with it. You get a choice each night: use the cursed card and take a penalty for the night, be it healing becoming disabled or your torch burning faster, or hold onto it to use a different night, increasing the baseline curse bar tick until it gets used. With this in mind, you might feel tempted to rush through your run to get to the warden’s room as fast as possible, but the game gives you plenty of time and plenty of ways to push the curse meter back. I never felt short on time, unless my run was going poorly and, at that point, the pressure was deserved.

Whether you succeed or succumb to the ruins, though, you’re always rewarded. Each run nets you experience alongside your score that feeds into an overall persistent level system. Levelling up unlocks new cards and also new cantrips, modifiers you can equip at the start of a run that grant buffs or debuffs. These cantrips affect your dread multiplier, impacting your final score. If you want higher scores, you can equip more difficult cantrips that increase your dread multiplier. If you want an easier time, you can equip helpful cantrips, decreasing your dread multiplier but helping your run.  It’s a smart system that makes each run feel meaningful, even if you fail horribly, as even your worst runs will give you precious experience. It’s this loop that makes Into the Restless Ruins deeply replayable. Whether you’re chasing a new high score or experimenting with new cantrip combos to make your life easier or to maximise your dread multiplier, there’s always a reason to jump back in.

Vampire surviving

Of course, your journey through the ruins is anything but peaceful. They’re teeming with creatures eager to end your excursion. From itty bitty rats and bats to banshees, hags, redcaps, kelpies, and more, combat lurks around every corner. Defeated enemies drop glimour, a valuable resource that, once collected in sufficient amounts, allows you to unlock new room cards from the Harvest Maiden. Your character attacks automatically, like in Vampire Survivors. You start with only a basic sword, but you can acquire new primary and secondary weapons to slightly diversify your combat style. 

Perhaps another weak point, personally, is the art style. Whilst the art is charming, especially the NPCs like Shellycoat and Wulver that show up to help buff your run, the one little nitpick would be the unmissable mixels that are scattered about. In a game that takes care with its aesthetic, with varied environments and a tight colour palette, the inconsistent pixel scaling just stands out more than it should. It’s not game-breaking, of course, and won’t ruin your run, but it’s something that, once you notice it, you can’t unsee. It doesn’t help that the most noticeable culprit is the persistent torch glow, which has been drawn with pixels so much chunkier than the surrounding art and immediately feels visually off.