Have you played this game?You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in. |
ruin is a game about reading and writing poetry. it is a game about cities, oceans, maps, bookstores, malls, gardens. it is a game about being lost.
CW: allusions to death, colonialism, incarceration
cover image adapted from a screenshot of Kentucky Route Zero, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
bibliography and ludography:
"Kubla Khan" - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Sailing to Byzantium" - William Butler Yeats
The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed - Racter
A House of Dust - Alison Knowles
Stochastic Texts - Theo Lutz
Colossal Cave Adventure - Will Crowther & Don Woods
Kentucky Route Zero - Cardboard Computer
"Two Gallants" - James Joyce
"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" - Jorge Luis Borges
The Books of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin
"Death of a Naturalist" - Seamus Heaney
NORCO - Geography of Robots
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Curses - Graham Nelson
Saltsea Chronicles - Die Gute Fabrik
Mutazione - Die Gute Fabrik
"Ozymandias" - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Diving into the Wreck" - Adrienne Rich
Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
[made in ~60 hours for inkJam 2023. ~8k words.]
19th Place - inkJam 2023
This game rest heavily on vibes and poetic prose, with loosely connected spaces, rather than a more traditional story with a clear start and end. Through it all, you explore imagined places in some sort of dream-like state, where poetry take a centre stage, both in the theme, the writing, and the choices.
Because of the style and themes, this will affect some readers more than others. I tend to have a harder time connecting with poetic prose.