Reikon Games shipped Ruiner on 26 September 2017 for Linux, PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The Nintendo Switch version followed on 18 June 2020. It was the Polish studio’s first game, published by Devolver Digital, and it arrived as a twin-stick shooter played from an isometric view — fast, brutal, and set in a city that sells dreams and keeps the change.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
Rengkok, 2091
The setting is Rengkok, a cyberpunk metropolis in the year 2091, owned and run by Heaven, a conglomerate led by a man the game calls the Boss. Heaven’s business is Virtuality, a virtual reality device it manufactures and sells to civilians. The player controls a silent, masked protagonist whom another character names “Puppy.”
The plot starts as an assassination. A rogue hacker called Wizard leads Puppy toward the Boss’s office. Before he gets there, a second hacker known only as Her overrides the signal. Her tells Puppy that Wizard was contracted by another group, and that his brother has been kidnapped.
WELCOME TO RENGKOK
That is the game’s own framing, and it earns it. What follows is a chase: through territory held by the Creeps, a gang of psychotic gangsters led by a swordsman named Nerve; through the Hanza Compound, a factory that manufactures machine parts, where the AI Mother manages the facility and mercenaries work for TrafficKing, a cyborg in the form of a UFO-like device piloted by a human head.
Nerve, Mother, TrafficKing
Ruiner’s structure is a ladder of bosses, and the source material does not pretend otherwise. Nerve challenges Puppy to a duel and loses. The Creeps then follow him. Wizard is found and hacked, and dies in the process. Mother is fought. TrafficKing is fought, then hacked, and his brain reveals where the brother is being taken: the Imagination Farms, which use human beings as hosts to lend brainpower for running Virtuality.
That last detail is the one that matters. It turns a revenge story into something with a thesis — Heaven’s product runs on people, and the people are disposable.
A first game with a fixed idea
Ruiner is a shooter, but the genre labels attached to it are broader than that: shooter, strategy, adventure, indie. The themes are action and science fiction. It is single player only, and the perspective stays isometric throughout.
The comparison the game invites is to cult cyberpunk anime and game classics. It is quick and brutal, and the source describes the gameplay as sophisticated. That is the right word for the combat loop and the wrong one for the pacing in the middle stretch, where the boss ladder starts to feel like a checklist.
What holds it together is the world. Rengkok is not a backdrop; it is the argument. The city promises five seconds of fame and then closes over you, and the game’s mature storyline keeps that promise literal rather than decorative. The silent protagonist is a limitation, not a flaw — Puppy has no voice because the city does not grant him one.
What the number says
Ruiner scored 7.6 out of 10 across 12 outlets in the IGDB critic aggregate, and that figure is about right. This is a confident first game from Reikon Games with a real visual identity and a story that knows what it is about. It is not a generous game — it is short on mercy and, in places, short on variety. But the Hanza Compound and the Imagination Farms are the two ideas most cyberpunk games never get to, and Ruiner gets to both.
- Released: 26 September 2017 (Linux, PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One); 18 June 2020 (Nintendo Switch)
- Developer: Reikon Games
- Publisher: Devolver Digital
- Genre: Twin-stick shooter; shooter, strategy, adventure, indie
- Modes: Single player
- Setting: Rengkok, 2091
- Critic aggregate: 7.6/10 (IGDB, 12 outlets)
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