"Chic roguelike Into The Restless Ruins draws inspiration from the iconic dungeon-delving of Warhammer Quest."

My lunch yesterday consisted of air fried lumps of failed pizza dough from a disastrous first batch. One of my new year’s resolutions was to learn how to make flawless pizza. This might be against the spirit of asceticism these goals usually incorporate, but such puritan edicts have no place here. The platonically perfect slice, like hailstones battering the word ‘bum’ into soft cement, is a natural marvel impervious to notions of morality both spiritual and profane.

Would the dough have turned out better if I’d sought the help of Into The Restless Ruins’s harvest maiden, who grants the desires of those who petition her? Oh. Oh. The ‘harvest’ refers to slaughter, not grain. Should have guessed really.

Into The Restless Ruins is a roguelite dungeon crawler deckbuilder. A yawnsome genre prospect on paper, until I noticed that the dungeon you crawl is one you build yourself from your deck. Hang on! That’s a bit like the original Warhammer Quest, my beloved! Only where the tabletop game used a randomised dungeon tile deck to create a sense of mystery, this one inverts the idea by having you build and plan your route before each run.

To a backdrop of chunky 80’s synthpop, you’ll begin each night by drawing a hand of five tile cards. Some of them are plain corridors or junction points, some are rooms with special effects. A damage-buffing armoury, say, or a place to heal. You get three build points, which normally means you can place three tiles. Your goal here is to go from entrance to exit by unlocking progressively deeper sections of the dungeon through locked seals, which require collectibles. But you also need to return to the entrance at the end of each run before your health runs out, either through combat or because you’ve let your torch die. You can place bonfire rooms which replenish your torch, but they might end up making your overall layout a little awkward, and it’s possible to get completely blocked out of progression.

Your character swings their weapon automatically, but you can finesse combat through movement and positioning. Slain enemies drop glimour, and the harvest maiden will grant you new room cards when you collect enough. You can keep runs short and safe but there’s an ominous counter that fills up each night at the top of the screen. I’m certain something bad happens if it fills but I always blocked myself off and had to restart before it got to that point.

This is all wrapped up in Scottish folklore, which is where the harvest maiden comes from, although that version of her was all about the grain. Storytelling is svelte during the actual runs, but room tiles do have snatches of detail. A training room where blood seeps from the dummies. A campfire you can’t feel the warmth from. But I think my favourite thing here is – as far as I could tell – you can’t pull the map up during the actual runs, which means you have to navigate from plans and memory, perhaps building yourself entire mazes of health and bonfire buffs off to one side to let you harvest glimour. I could have just pressed every key on my keyboard and seen if any of them brought the map up, but I’m choosing to believe this is deliberate because I like the implications. I did press, like, four of them.

If I had to describe it in a single word, I’d say “addicting”. And then I’d beat myself up because the correct word is “addictive”. And then I’d beat myself up some more because that’s a horribly nefarious and cold word to describe something as lovingly made as a nice videogame. Ahem: I had to tear myself away and I want to play more of it. On the wishlist it goes.

You can find Into The Restless Ruins’ demo on Steam here. It’s due out this April from Wales Interactive and Ant Workshop Ltd, whose previous forays into ill-lit catacombs include Dungeon Golf.