Regions of Ruin: Runegate Preview – Only you can save Dwarvenkind

Reigns of Ruin: Runegate answers the question “What if it was Stargate, but it’s dwarves, and fighting against goblins instead of humans with worms living in their tummies?” This game tasks you with stepping through the titular portal in an effort to re-establish a sanctuary for dwarven civilisation.

What that looks like is a side-scrolling hack and slash RPG where you travel to micro levels, battle baddies and gradually build up your home base to further your adventuring options.

It starts, though, with fleeing from the goblins that threaten the last vestiges of the stronghold that you canonically built in the original Regions of Ruin. At the last possible moment, you run through the portal opened in the Runegate and arrive at what will be your new home, an abandoned, crumbling underground city that will be your task to restore and repopulate.

And so it’s time to step through the Runegate time and again, venturing to other planes to gather resources, convince other dwarves to join your cause, and battling the forces of evil that you might encounter along the way.

Though certainly still in keeping with the original game, there’s a good step forward for the visual style of Runegate. It’s still got a low-resolution pixel art style, there’s still this flattened parallax tone, but there’s also just a lot more finesse to the character designs, the scenery you’re running through, everything. It’s much more in keeping with better examples of this art style, such as its Raw Fury stablemate Kingdom Two Crowns.

Exploring each realm has a pleasing feel to it, as you’re presented with a world map that you need to fill in. From the revealed land around the Runegate, you can reveal another path of land and reveal points of interest to visit, so long as you have enough food supplies to meet the one-time cost that it takes to get there. You could immediately travel to the farthest flung reaches of the map, if you had enough food, but really the game’s intention is that you’ll start local and branch out from there, following narrative and mission threads as you go.

Happening on a dwarven settlement in a dank-looking cave and talking to its people, they initially seem reticent to come and join your small group on the other side of the Runegate. But if you prove yourself by, for example, clearing out a bunch of goblins, battling packs of wild wolves, reuniting lost brothers, then they’ll consider it more seriously. That then means heading back to the world map, maybe paying the fee to explore a nearby patch of darkness and reveal new locations to venture to. You’ll rarely know exactly what to expect, but odds are there will be someone or something to fight.

This is where we come to the meat and potatoes of an action RPG. As a side-scrolling game, there’s only so many ways that combat can really unfold. You can attack with your equipped weapon (whether it’s one or two handed), block if you have a shield, wind up to fire a crossbow or throw a javelin, and dodge. You can boost your abilities by levelling up stats in Combat, Defence, Ranged and Rogueish attributes, and you might gravitate toward a particular style and type of weapon – I quite liked the standard axe and shield, after sending an opening crossbow bolt at any enemies.

Avoiding damage is rather tricky when attacks from onrushing melee assailants and more distant archers come quick and fast, but the pace of combat means you can clobber your way through. It also helps that you can have allies alongside to take some of the aggression.

Once any battle is done and dusted, then comes the time to smash everything in sight to pieces and gather up the resources they provide. You’ll need things like wood or stone for when you travel back through the Runegate to your home base and get to fixing up the joint. There’s crumbled bridges to repair, there’s marketplaces to rebuild, people to talk to for more missions, and more.

There’s a potentially rather moreish gameplay loop to discover here, the snackable combat going hand-in-hand with exploration and base building. What’s especially nice is how little stories and ideas can unfold, like finding a captive and releasing them before you’ve been asked to, just because you stumbled across the goblins first, or thinking it a good idea to release a caged wolf… who seems to blame you for their captivity. Thankfully not all wolves are immediately hostile. In fact, we stumbled across one rather eerie area with just a large pack of wolves seemingly standing guard, and one of them with whom we could engage, giving food until they let us pet them and actually recruit them as a battle companion.

Also, when you drink a stein of beer, you raise your other weapon-holding hand while necking it, and then smash the glass on the floor. Classic dwarves.