I don’t have any complaints when it comes to RUINER’s presentation, and that starts with the visuals. It’s not terribly novel, a strikingly ugly, crowded vision of the future that heavily relies on a single hue. There’s a lot of red in RUINER, and I’m not just talking about that stuff you splatter all over the floors and walls that constitute the game’s levels. All of this red exudes a pall of suffocating hostility; even when things are calm, you get the definite sense that Rengkok is a bad place in which to live and an even worse one in which to die. Most character design is restricted to static cels used in dialogue boxes, and they get the job done. It straddles the line between western and eastern animation, which is clearly the point. My personal favorite visual quirks tie into the fact that very little of the protagonist’s body is organic. That’s all I’ll say on that.
RUINER’s sound design is almost perfect. Its soundtrack actually is perfect. Comprised mainly of dance and electronica tracks from an eclectic group of artists ranging from Sidewalks & Skeletons and Zamilska to Antigone & Francois X, RUINER always has the right note for whatever’s transpiring on the screen. I claimed that RUINER’s sound design is almost perfect. What hurts here is the fact that the one thing that keeps it from being perfect goes a long way in rendering the game’s combat far less exciting than it should be. Audio feedback during combat sounds like it’s heavily diffused throughout everything else, and as a result, the sense of impact is severely lessened.