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Library Of Ruina
Library Of Ruina makes progress part of the battle loop: guests challenge your librarians, and their books can strengthen the library, add cards, or help bring in new guests. At ≈ $22.74 from 
Kinguin, weigh that strategic collection-building against the time you want to spend learning its card-and-dice clashes.
Steam PC reviews are 94%% positive across 40,987 reviews. The available facts describe single-player play, so the tactical appeal is centered on building your library through successive guest encounters. At $29.99 on Steam, this offer saves ≈ $7.25 against the same base game there.
Loading store offersAll-time low ~ $10.19across Steam & third-party stores
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyHistorical Low~ $10.192023-08Current Low Across Stores~ $29.99Steamvs. Historical Low+194%
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
01About Library Of Ruina
Run a library where invited guests face librarians in card-and-dice battles. Read opponents’ planned cards, choose counters, and use books gained from defeated guests to develop librarians, build the library, and invite further guests. Steam reviews: 94%% positive from 40,987 reviews. Steam release date: August 10, 2021.
Credits
Composer
Studio EIM · Mili
Developer
ProjectMoon
Publisher
ProjectMoon
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$10.192023-08-28 · SteamBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | Yes | Yes | — |
| English | Yes | Yes | — |
| Japanese | Yes | Yes | — |
Show 1 more languages
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Korean | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-11
02Before you buy
Language support
Steam PC lists English, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese interfaces with subtitles, plus Japanese full audio and subtitles.
Combat and progression
Battles use cards and dice; books from defeated guests can provide materials, librarian bodies, battle cards, and invitations.
03Frequently asked questions
What story does the game follow?
It follows Angela, the Sephirot, and Roland after the events of Lobotomy Corporation, while exploring events in the City.
How do guest battles work?
You can inspect guests’ planned cards and choose cards to oppose them. Dice outcomes and effects influence the clashes.
What do guest books do?
Books can develop librarians and the library, provide battle cards, or be used to invite other guests.
8.3
Overall Score
Graphics6
Audio9
Gameplay9
Story8.5
Content8.5
“For its first ten hours it explains almost nothing, but once the speed dice and Stagger click and you claw back a fight with a Mili track swelling behind you, it pins you down. Come for deep strategy and dark storytelling.”
Our Verdict
The 2021 Release That Still Feels Niche, Because It Is
Library of Ruina is one of those 2021 games that doesn’t just “hold up” today — it still feels stubbornly specific, in a good way. This was ProjectMoon’s second big step in its City universe, and you can feel that ambition all over it. It came out of early access in August 2021, but it doesn’t behave like a clean, modern, easy-to-digest release. It’s dense, moody, and absolutely convinced that you’re willing to work for it. If you’re the kind of player who wants dark character drama tied directly to systems, this is where the game starts flexing. It doesn’t separate the story from the deckbuilding. It welds them together. You win a fight, you read someone’s life as a book, and then you turn that into power. That’s the hook, and it’s still the best thing about the game.
And honestly, that’s why the score split around it makes sense. Steam sitting at 94% positive from 38,346 reviews tells you a lot of players locked in and loved the ride. But the broader critical picture has been more uneven, especially once you get to the Switch version, where the rougher performance and lower visual quality dragged it down hard. So if you’re looking at this in 2026, the answer is simple: play the PC version. That’s the version that makes the combat, the text, and the pacing actually land the way they’re supposed to.
Brutal, Brilliant, and Not For Everybody
My blunt take? This is a great game for the right person and a miserable one for the wrong one. If you want something light, fast, and easy to bounce into, skip it. Library of Ruina throws speed dice, Stagger, Light, and Emotion Level at you early, and the first five to ten hours can feel like walking through fog while someone keeps handing you rulebooks. It’s not gentle. It’s not trying to be. The menus are fiddly, the page management can be a headache, and the game loves making you dig through dense systems before you feel fluent. That’s part of the appeal for hardcore strategy players, but it’s also the part that will make casual players bounce off hard.
The real audience here is obvious: people who don’t mind reading a ton, people who want dark character-driven storytelling, and people who like their strategy games to fight back. Compared with Slay the Spire, this isn’t about the simple rush of random card draws. It’s slower, heavier, and much more tied to narrative payoff. The Burn system is the killer idea: beat guests, turn their lives into books, and then use those pages as part of your own build. That’s the game’s identity in one sentence. If that sounds cool, you’re in for something special. If it sounds exhausting, trust that instinct.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
nobody gonna see my comment anyways so ill just say i want to get smashed by Angela's titanium BussyShow moreShow less
369 hours at review340 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Library of Ruina is fantastic. It has unique gameplay, deep and engaging storyline, music made of pure feels, and that visual style! Just look at it! So why am I not recommending it? There are many reasons, but the main one would be: It has absolutely no respect for your time. If you've played Lobotomy Corporation, then rest assured that it's nowhere near as bad here - but the general hubris of the design is still there, as much as I hate to say it. In fact, a lot of bad design tropes from LCorp have made their way into the Library; everything is a lot (and I do mean A LOT) more refined, but when you take a closer look, you'll start noticing familiar patterns. The Difficulty Curve is Vertical Many reviews mention this, so let me start here. Yes, the game starts out very easy and gets quite hard very quickly, and for one, I don't have a problem with that. I have a problem with what makes it so hard. 1. The fights get exponentially longer as you progress. The first reception can be easily completed in 5 minutes tops, but as you reach mid-game, you'll find that some boss fights can take up to an hour. One reception can have two, three or even more acts, which are their own separate groups of bad guys to fight. After that, certain story fights have you fight a boss that has 5 separate phases with their own sets of mechanics... and of course, if you die in those, you have start right at the start. And then it gets even worse. 2. Power creep. Simply put, latter cards are flat-out better than earlier ones (in case you didn't know, Ruina is a deckbulider). Around mid-game you'll get some cards that will probably be viable until the very end, but for the most part you'll be constantly replacing your decks. I've had multiple situations in which I steamrolled reception X, only to be defeated by the next one - and had to rebuild the decks based on cards I managed to get from the enemies I killed in that failed reception. 3. Rebuilding decks is unwieldy. Not only the UI is clunky, it also involves a lot of searching, equipping, unequipping. The card effect search, while it's nice to have it, feels like it's missing features. On top of that, there's a lot of depth to this game and there are many, many, MANY effects. Too many, perhaps. And for each floor (which you'll end up having 10, after the Sephirot) you'll have 5 librarians - so that's 50 decks in total - each made out of 9 cards + one key card (which also has sub-cards connected for passive abilities)... admittedly, you'll be mostly rebuilding one floor at a time, but that's still 5 decks. And they have to synergise and be adapted to the fight at hand. Out of my 90 hours played, it's safe to say that at least 30 were spent building decks - but I didn't use a guide or watch anyone play, as I fail to see the point of that. 4. Gacha, and the punishment for failure. No, there are no microtransactions. The only way to get new cards is to burn books which are left by killing enemies and winning receptions. You don't know which cards you'll get, and of course you'll want the more rare ones, key cards in particular. So often you'll end up burning all books you've gotten from a grueling, hour-long reception just to get that key card... only to find that you actually needed that book to progress in the story! So here we go again. And if you'll lose a reception, you'll also lose the book that you needed to start it... in other words, there is a very big chance you'll have to redo fights which were already crazy long to begin with. Unforgettable Melodies I'll stop complaining about the difficulty and bring up the music. I mentioned that it's made of pure feels, and yes, I stand by these words. Many pieces are made by Mili, chances are you're familiar with them. Momocashew's voice is sweet and ominous at the same time, which is a perfect fit - and the songs add lots of emotions to the already powerful scenes. But that's not why I called them unforgettable. I did so because of just how much I had to listen to the same songs over and over and over, because they're the background music to a boss fight that lasts for an hour. Example: there's this boss, let's call him C. He starts out as bunch of small enemies which eventually fuse. You fight his fused form, and then he breaks up, and you have to do that again. Repeat 3 times, do a small last phase, and you're done. Now, C's battle theme is a song that lasts 3 minutes. A very pretty song, which feels like a tasteful homage to Simon and Garfunkel's Scarborough Fair... but if you have to hear it repeat 15+ times? You'll go mad. And that's just one time you have to fight him... There are more cases like this, but my general point is: the music, while fantastic, repeats far, far too much. Keep Your Eyes Buttered Let's talk about the writing. This is perhaps the most schizophrenic of all my points, because it's both genius and embarrassing at the same time. The embarrassing part is the level of grimdark. Let's be honest, our world is a pretty cruel place, but for the most part cruelty is a byproduct of ambition or apathy - rarely a goal in itself. And here there are so many impossibly cruel acts done for seemingly no reason, Coldsteel the Edgehog is getting a Nobel Prize in physics for using this game's edge to split subatomic particles. I will cut out your brain and rewire your guts while you're still conscious and let you drown in your own blood upside down in 1000x slowed down time so that the meat I'll get from killing you will be tastier, allegedly. That's how grimdark we're talking. As for the genius part? A lot of stuff is good, but what is transcendental is the theming. Now, I've tortured myself with playing Lobotomy Corp for 130 hours, so I have a pretty good understanding of the characters and the abnormalities. And here the stories of the characters and the symbolism of the abnormalities come together in an impossibly perfect way. I won't spoil anything here, but this part is so incredibly good that it makes suffering through both of those games worth it. Sort of. Oh, and for the record, you don't need to play Lobotomy Corp to play this - the game does an excellent job at telling you not only what happened, but also what sort of effects it had on the characters. Admittedly, the only way to truly understand those ordeals is to go through them yourself, but... I don't recommend that. The One Perfect Book I really wanted this game to be better than LCorp. And it is. It's so, so much better. But after 90 hours I simply can't go on anymore. The way I see it, the best way to experience this game is to have had participated in Early Access, watching slowly as the story was unfolding, having plenty of time to reconsider strategies, participate in the community eagerly awaiting the next patch. It feels like the game's difficulty was designed with those people in mind - that's why it's so strange to us newcomers. I still had plenty of fun with this game. I'm glad about the huge step up in quality of all elements of the game from LCorp - the writing in particular. But I think this is where me and the Project Moon part ways. Maybe you're the kind of person who enjoys time-consuming game design; in which case there's a lot to love about this game. I'm not recommending it because to a person with a similar sensibilities as me, this game is ultimately a road to Gehenna. And you'd probably want to go elsewhere. Curator PageShow moreShow less
88.8 hours at review555 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
You either die a quitter after 3 hours of lobotomy corp or you live long enough to see yourself become a ProjectMoon shillShow moreShow less
112.4 hours at review296 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Can't sex ArgaliaShow moreShow less
11.7 hours at review293 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
!Topical Note as of 4/16/2021!: For some reason or another the Chinese fanbase is review bombing the game for inaccurate/falsely claimed reasons, do not be concerned by it. It seems like a plausible mixture of bots and people dissatisfied by the ending. Having played it start all the way to what seems to be the true ending, I absolutely loved this game. The music is exceptional to the point I enjoyed listening to it outside of the game, the challenge level/difficulty curve of the game progression was reasonable if very intimidating to start. I will warn you that the game *does* require a reasonably decent hardware to run at full fps, but as long as you meet the store page specs you'll be fine. Absolutely DO NOT skip any of the cutscenes in game, the story is what makes this game as wonderful as it is and it would be a tragedy to miss out on it! If you were waiting to buy this game, I would say its absolutely worth full price.Show moreShow less
138.6 hours at review275 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
Not recommendedSteam player
Can't sex rolandShow moreShow less
6.8 hours at review232 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
a robot who can't figure out the difference between coercion and consent kidnaps a widower and goes on a journey with him to write wikipediaShow moreShow less
97.4 hours at review268 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I like the aesthetic of this game but I'm struggling to recommend it. Its got good art, music, snappy sound effects, and the lore can hit hard at times. But I just find it really hard to enjoy playing this game. The rules are really complicated and annoying. About every other fight you get introduced to a new card that that has 3 minors but still notable game play changes. There's so many small thing the game is expecting you to remember its just overly cumbersome and a relatively simple idea. The story tends to drag a little. Scenes are very dialog heavy followed by characters talking about their own point of view on scenes that just happened. It kind of fits the tone but it adds a lot to the fatigue I get from playing. And the Difficulty curve is all out of whack too. You'll spend the first ten hours playing against parties the same size as yours using cards of equal power, and no strong gimmicks. Then it just flips and you're out numbered by enemies that just have strictly better cards, and absurd gimmicks that purely benefit the enemies. The game does so little to prepare for this difficulty spike, and leaves no indication on what it expects you to do to counter these absurd compositions. Edit: I'm twice as far in as I originally was when I wrote this review. The story and aesthetic of the game just keeps getting better, but my problems with the game also keep getting worse. It seems like the payoff is there, but the effort it takes to get there is worse than I thought. Nearly 70 hours in and I'm not at the end yet. If you think you would like this game, have a hundred hours to kill, and strong determination go for it. Otherwise I have a hard time recommending it. Edit 2: Nothing like losing 2 hours in to a boss fight on the bosses 9th phase for the 3rd time. You then get decide was it bad luck and just waste another 2 hours. Maybe watch someone else fight for 2 hours see what they did then waste another 2 hours fighting it. Final Edit: 130 hours in I beat the game. I still don't recommend doing a normal play through, but this game is something special.Show moreShow less
22.2 hours at review162 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
The difficulty spike is vertical.Show moreShow less
192.8 hours at review227 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
THIS GAME IS UNPLAYABLE!!! Every time I try to play this game and Argalia appears on my screen something in me just snaps so I give in and I whip it out and ferociously beat it! 0/10, Would not buy again unless Project Moon makes an exclusive Argalia body pillow merch!!!Show moreShow less
21.4 hours at review159 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.