Week 5: May You Find Your Book in This Place.

Progress This Week

This week, I spent my time completing research on Library of Ruina. It was quite a bit more troublesome than OMORI’s… I’ll discuss that in a bit, though.

Ruina is set in a hypercapitalist hellscape known as the City, where morality has been thrown out the window, violence is the norm, and many struggle to survive another day. Most of the game focuses on a location known as “the Library,” run by its AI director, Angela, with help from her freshly kidnapped servant, Roland. Invitations are sent out from the Library to Guests, who may enter the Library and attempt to defeat the Librarians present in order to retrieve books containing whatever knowledge they seek. However, if the Librarians defeat the Guests, the Guests become books instead. Angela’s goal is to collect more books to find the ultimate book that will allow her to become a human, and finally free her of her eternal suffering. So as a player, your goal is to control the Librarians to defeat all Guests that come your way.

The different endings present in Ruina only deviate near the very end of the game. Endings depend on a series of two choices made back to back. One choice selection results in either the first bad ending or the second choice, while the second choice selection results in either the second bad ending or the true ending route. In addition, choice selections will cause a warning to appear that says the choice will impact the story ending. However, certain choices will be unavailable unless the player completes several fights required for ending unlocks.

Once again, I have been collecting reviews of this game that mention any sort of impact the presence of different endings had. However, this week I collected far less reviews than I did for OMORI. This is mostly due to several main differences. First off, the choices in Ruina have far less gameplay impact than OMORI’s did. Besides the usual choice near the end of the game that impacts the ending, OMORI also has a whole separate hikikomori route, which meant that there were more choice-related aspects to talk about. In addition, Ruina is a less popular game, with about 23k Steam reviews compared to OMORI’s 60k. On top of that, OMORI’s main appeal is its storyline, and not exactly its gameplay, as many people have complained that the gameplay often becomes a drag. Ruina is essentially the opposite: it is known for its difficult and rage-inducing gameplay, being especially notorious for its “vertical” difficulty spike, which just so happens to be accompanied by an interesting and well-written narrative. As such, there were much more gameplay-centered reviews, and less story-centered ones. All of these factors made my research for this segment a lot harder.

Now that the explaining is out of the way, I will be listing off statistics from my research this week.

– Including my own opinion, I gathered five different reviews. Quite a big drop from last week’s count.

– Due to the limited number of reviews actually discussing the endings, I was unable to recreate the ratio of positive to negative reviews. The overall percentage of positive reviews is 93%, while the percentage of positive reviews I gathered was just 100%.

– Out of all reviews, two of them scored a 3 / 3. They discussed how getting multiple endings isn’t much of a struggle, and only really needs the redo of one major fight if you fulfilled all the other requirements beforehand.

– Two reviews scored a 2 / 3. One review once again citing an attachment to the characters and not wanting to see them in a bad ending. This was a factor that I had not assumed would be prevalent before starting my senior project, so seeing it appear twice already is rather interesting.

– The second review scoring 2 / 3 talked about how all endings could be unlocked by unlocking the true ending via a cutscene replay function, and thus there would be no point in going back and completing the endings in actual gameplay.

– One review scored a 1 / 3, stating that the bad endings basically just threw away all character development that had happened to Angela and Roland throughout the course of the game.

– The average score of all reviews is a 2.2 / 3. This means that on average, people believe that the different endings in Ruina did not impact their experience with the game much.

Although OMORI’s results generally showed that the endings and routes present did help improve gameplay experience, Ruina’s results were more neutral, although it does slightly lean towards helping. These findings do make some sense considering that Ruina’s endings did offer less changes than OMORI’s different endings and routes did. So far, my research seems to show that having more parts of gameplay altered by player choices do lead to more engagement from the player, which does still sort of match my initial hypothesis.

Other than that, I did a bit more work with saving and loading, though there are still errors I haven’t fixed yet. This will largely be put on hold starting next week in order to prioritize actual gameplay mechanics, though.

Up Next Week

Next week, I’ll probably start doing research on To The Moon. I will also be working on coding systems more involved in the actual gameplay mechanics themselves, such as object interactions. I’ll explain how they are meant to tie into gameplay as I work on them throughout the following weeks.