I'm about 35 hours into the game and it's been a good time. Simply put, compared to Lobotomy Corp, Ruina feels like Project Moon made an actual game this time instead of just a trial and error masochistic simulator with a neat story attached (mostly).
Looking at the alpha video, the game has definitely changed beyond just a UI overhaul so to quickly explain how it plays, it's essentially a mix of a standard card game with a heavy emphasis on turn based combat with turn orders and attack damage dependent on RNG dice rolls. Players build a deck of nine cards for a party member along with equipping a "page" which serves to give the character different stats in their health/stagger meter, resistances/vulnerabilities to the three attack times (slash, pierce, blunt), and attributes. At the start of every turn, the player and enemy team roll dice to represent turn order and the player adjusts where each attack die goes to attacking an enemy. If you have a higher value than an enemy die attacking another player, you have the opportunity to "clash" with them, meaning they'll attack you and the card that's being played instead of who the AI was targeting. Once the attack phase begins, characters begin fighting between each other based on the cards used which are also dice roll dependent for what damage number gets played. Aside from lowering an enemy's health bar for a kill, the game incentivizes doing stagger damage as completely staggering an enemy cancels their attack turn, leaves them open for free attacks next turn, and halts their AP regen and page drawing. Of course, the same can happen for a character on your side which is what clashing can prevent so one character who's has low stagger can avoid being staggered with a different character tanking it.
While I lack deck building experience to really say if the systems around cards are balanced and diverse enough to keep someone who's played the more modern rogue like card game darlings as interested, the actual turn based stuff during combat feels equally important and the most engaging part of it as even with what can be considered a good deck, the game expects the player to adapt if they're in a bad situation depending on turn order. Nothing more satisfying than breaking an enemy's stagger meter early into a round and proceed to fucking decimate them for the rest of the turn and the next. This isn't even mentioning a ton of other variables to consider during combat (status effects, defense/evade skills instead of attack skills on cards, ranged attacks, abnormality pages, emotion level which affects the rate at which books for enemies can drop, AP represented as "light" for card cost, etc.) that the game gradually presents so there's a lot to keep in mind the farther you get.
Regarding the structure of the game, it drops the roguelike elements of Lobotomy and is a fairly linear experience now with "Scenes" acting as Chapters while still having a few similar elements such as unlocking floors (which in the context of this game, gives you more parties to customize around and depending on some receptions, lets you swap between parties during combat scenarios that have multiple "acts" to them). The farther you get in the game, it begins letting you branch off to try out different fights in the order the you want, but eventually need to do them all to progress farther in the game. A common piece of criticism some have for Ruina would be the "grind" which I find ironic given most of the reviewers come from playing Lobotomy Corp and quite frankly, the grind that comes out of this game isn't even close to being as tedious and mind numbing. While there is the undeniable need to redo some fights for certain books (to "burn" them to get special cards and pages like a pack of cards and because sending out an invitation requires books from previous fights to initiate a new story battle) once you find a build that works well to defeat a certain group of enemies, just use that build again and you'll be fine unless you barley won out last time because of lucky dice rolls on attacks (and even then, it just gives the player the opportunity to better optimize their build which only helps for future fights).
Gameplay aside, the rest of the game is an overall improvement over Lobotomy despite being very different. Just like the structure, the story is more linear in nature and instead of playing as a semi-self insert character, the player views the story mostly in the perspective of a Grade 9 Fixer, Roland. Angela and the rest of the Sephirah from the prior game make a return as well. The premise of the game is to attract different people from The City via invitations and by killing them, turn them into books for information so Angela can eventually make, "the one perfect book." Just like Lobotomy Corp, the story pushes various themes of existentialism, societal corruption, human experimentation/exploitation, and so forth. It's a lot more blunt compared to even Lobotomy Corp due to getting a look into the lives of the people going into the Library before fighting them but it overall does a good job emphasizing the utter desperation and dire circumstances most of them are in to even sign their invitation to try and get what they want out of the Library.
To accompany this, the production value of Ruina is much higher than Lobotomy Corp. There's a lot more art assets during VN cutscenes (more character expressions and custom art frames for story moments) along with Korean VAs. OST is phenomenal too. There's a lot more tracks to the game compared to Lobotomy so it's nowhere near as repetitive to listen to (minus the regular menu theme) plus each floor has its own three part theme that dynamically changes depending on the emotion level of the player/enemy party. Has some vocal tracks by a group called Mili as well which are all good as they normally accompany a boss to change up the pacing and tone of fights.
The game is still technically in Early Access as of writing but it seems the ending of the game was added months ago and all they've really done since is minor QoL features (as they seemed contractually obligated to "full release" it with the Xbone/Gamepass release in August). I can definitely recommend this game a lot more than Lobotomy Corp for someone interested, though it's worth mentioning that you should go in with knowledge of the first game as it's a direct sequel narratively.
tl;dr, the game is very good and people who played Lobotomy Corp and were fascinated by its world but turned off by the extremely mundane gameplay can play this one knowing the gameplay is fairly engaging and stays fresh with a variety of different enemy encounters and new mechanics presented overtime. I'm a lot more optimistic about Project Moon's future output of games if they can keep up the incline in quality. As a reminder, their next game (Limbus Company) will be a
DRPG and comprise of an entirely new cast of characters (aka, new people don't really need the full continuity of the prior two games) so hopefully more people here would be willing to try it out because of the genre.