finished Library of Ruina last night after mainlining it for a full month, and Boy Do I Have Thoughts (no spoilers, btw!)
Both Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina (LobCorp and Ruina hereafter) are games that, had you asked me a year ago, I would have sworn off as "not my genre" or "too difficult/complex for my tastes". But having finished both (entirely in Ruina's case, watched what I didn't see in LobCorp's) I think ProjectMoon broke me out of my comfort zone in a Lot of ways?
Both games are incredibly difficult but despite having to use some modification to have a chance at making progress, I never felt things were Entirely Unfair? They rely on the player's capacity for learning (and exploiting in some cases) the complex mechanics to break through challenges. LobCorp's roguelite progression and Ruina's varied mechanics on a per-fight basis emphasize experimentation, which can cause a lot of people to bounce off of it, but it made the game really click with me.
The writing and worldbuilding in these games is also: Really Really Fucking Good. Ruina especially does a lot of heavy lifting with an incredibly large cast of characters, expansive story scope (like, jesus christ the credits took me 130 hrs to hit), with art that really makes each scene and encounter pop, especially the CGs that are oftentimes used as loading screens.
Music in Ruina, especially the vocal insert songs from Japanese indie group Mili is especially impactful, from shorter ambient noise tracks to jazzy lounge music as you're preparing for a fight. LobCorp's soundtrack is much shorter (and a lot of it is stock music) but the original tracks are fucking sick.
...Okay well I've been writing without an endpoint in mind so here's one: I think both of ProjectMoon's major releases are worth playing, and if you fall off of the gameplay, I think the story is definitely worth looking into via a longplay or cutscene compilation. It's a very grim setting but its one of the few grimdark settings in recent memory that I think stay compelling for their entire runtime, if I'm honest?
And if the vanilla game doesn't click with you, I highly recommend modding the absolute FUCK out of these games for some well-needed QoL improvements (LobCorp probably needs it more, regardless, but the NoGrind mod for Ruina is invaluable).
Though Limbus Company is a gacha (which is its own can of worms), I am very curious about the writing and gameplay in that game as well, so I will at least give it a cursory glance once I get in the mood for ProjectMoon's esoteric game design.
Game's good, y'all!