ProjectMoon Megathread - Lobotomy Corporation, Library of Ruina, Limbus Company, etc.

[SnakeEye]

ProjectMoon is a South Korean videogame company that created Lobotomy Corporation and it's sequels and spin-offs. All of their products take place in the cyperpunk-esque world of The City. They've made 3 games, 2 webcomics and a webnovel.

Lobotomy Corporation

Lobotomy Corporation is a "roguelite monster-management simulation" game where you, as a manager of L Corp, take care of monsters dubbed as Abnormalities for the purposes of energy collection, all the while making sure they, and other beings, don't destroy your facility and kill your employees.
The game introduces Angela, an AI that surveys the facility, and the 9 (technically 10) Sefirot, named after the parts of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. As the game progresses you learn more about them and their troubles, helping them come to terms with their problems by the end of the game.

Library of Ruina

Library of Ruina is the sequel to Lobotomy Corporation, and it comes with a total gameplay shift, now being a deck-building game, with more mechanics like Key Pages (the equivalent of the E.G.O.s of LC) and Abnormality pages (passives unique to a floor that are given each time the team's emotion level rises).
Angela and the Sefirot (except one) return, now as The Library's manager and the librarians with their own floors in the complex of The Library respectfully. In addition, the game introduces Roland, a Fixer fallen from grace that somehow ended up in The Library before its opening. The game also introduces and explains more aspects of The City that were glossed over in its prequel.

Limbus Company

Limbus Company is the newly released sequel to both Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina, now as a full blown gacha game, it's available on Steam, Android, and the App Store.
The release was and still is marked by numerous bugs. However, PM has begun taking steps to fix these issues and add more content.
The story follows the amnesiac Dante, a mysterious man who has a prosthetic head in the shape of a flaming clock with the power to rewind a person's state, but those people (only 12 it seems) become Sinners.
What being a Sinner means still hasn't been explained exactly, along with many other new concepts, such as Dante's Aspect, whose engravement appears to have been his main goal.
The Sinners themselves are all complicated individuals who, for reasons unknown, have E.G.O.s and are seemingly needed to the eponymous Company's purpose: collecting the vestiges of LobCorp's Singularity, the Golden Boughs.
If you're interested, I urge you to wait a few weeks before beginning to play, so they can iron out the bugs and release more content, as you can see in the roadmap below.

Here's the PV:

Other Projects

Like I wrote in the intro, ProjectMoon has made a few spin-offs of the series in other mediums. These are:
WonderLab (Completed): A webcomic following the employees of a different facility during the events of LoboCorp, some of the new Abnormalities appear in LoR.
Distortion Detective (Hiatus): A webnovel about Moses and her ( yes, she's a woman) Office, she has a ability to percieve Distortions before they become present in reality. An comic adaptation is/was being planned.
Leviathan (Completed/Untranslated): Announced the same day as Limbus Company, it follows Vergilius, the Red Gaze, and his Office's infiltration of the Ring, a criminal organization (Syndicate) obsessed with art, in search of a technology capable of becoming a future Singularity. Following him is Garnet, one of the children he helped raise in an orphanage, who also seeks to save another another of those children, Lapis. The webcomic, now webnovel, has been finished but is still untranslated.

 

[ShoFuKan]

All good stuff. LC is hard, not only not knowing what Abnormalities do what (Pain Train transcends language barriers) but then you have to make it through the Ordeals each day. Ruina I need to sit down and play but I haven't played Lovetown yet so the minute buffs you get from deck building I haven't encountered yet and am scared of.

Not gonna play any mobile game, not really into that. Overall though, something unique from Project Moon and hearing Malkuth breathing would raise the spirit of any man.

 

[Red Hood]

I thought this was a project about Dear Leader.

 

[CreamyHerman’s]

I thought this was a project about Dear Leader.

That's the spinoff game

 

[SnakeEye]

All good stuff. LC is hard, not only not knowing what Abnormalities do what (Pain Train transcends language barriers) but then you have to make it through the Ordeals each day. Ruina I need to sit down and play but I haven't played Lovetown yet so the minute buffs you get from deck building I haven't encountered yet and am scared of.

You really should continue, once you unlock the later floors and stages, you can do some crazy combos.
Also, a hint: do the general invitations.
Grab a useless book and put into the invitation box, they've added more and they contain some busted Key Pages, but I've only done the ones at Star of the City level, so maybe they're not that useful early on.

 

[UtadaWasabi2]

Only thing I have heard about wonderlab is from 4chan /vst/ screeching about tranny. It not that bad right? Or is it?
Looking forward to Limbus company tho. Gacha or not I don't care anymore.

 

[Penne Dreadful]

Only thing I have heard about wonderlab is from 4chan /vst/ screeching about tranny. It not that bad right? Or is it?

It's not terrible, but it's not particularly good either and the art style is very off-putting.
The artist had an autistic meltdown at one point, but that's neither here nor there.

 

[SnakeEye]

Only thing I have heard about wonderlab is from 4chan /vst/ screeching about tranny. It not that bad right? Or is it?
Looking forward to Limbus company tho. Gacha or not I don't care anymore.

The only thing I remember that could be considered a gender special in any way is a main character who is a man but is very feminine.

It's not terrible, but it's not particularly good either and the art style is very off-putting.
The artist had an autistic meltdown at one point, but that's neither here nor there.

It may be unrelated, but I'm really curious, what happened?

 

[Screw Danlon]

Library of Ruina

Library of Ruina is the sequel to Lobotomy Corporation, and it comes with a total gameplay shift, now being a deck-building game, with more mechanics like Key Pages (the equivalent of the E.G.O.s of LC) and Abnormality pages (passives unique to a floor that are given each time the team's emotion level rises).
Angela and the Sefirot (except one) return, now as The Library's manager and the librarians with their own floors in the complex of The Library respectfully. In addition, the game introduces Roland, a Fixer fallen from grace that somehow ended up in The Library before its opening. The game also introduces and explains more aspects of The City that were glossed over in its prequel

This was free with Xbox Game Pass, the store page has basically no info. I played for almost an hour and it seemed like a visual novel that I had no context for so I gave up on it. This is the most information I’ve actually seen about this game, so thanks,

If I don’t like SCP related stuff, is it worth playing?

 

[Penne Dreadful]

It may be unrelated, but I'm really curious, what happened?

The whole affair was discussed in the /vst/ thread at the time and precipitated by one of the posters in it, so you can read through that for a fuller experience.

For more of an executive summary, some anon drew lewd pictures of Servant of Wrath and the Wonderlab artist didn't take it well.

First came an exhortation to take that off the god damn Internet, as well as to cut your tinymini dick and die. As you might guess, that didn't exactly dissuade anyone.

The artist quickly realised that it wouldn't help. As I recall it (and from what I can tell taking a look now), it culminated with this:

Tweet Archive

This was free with Xbox Game Pass, the store page has basically no info. I played for almost an hour and it seemed like a visual novel that I had no context for so I gave up on it. This is the most information I’ve actually seen about this game, so thanks,

If I don’t like SCP related stuff, is it worth playing?

Ruina has fairly little SCP-like about it. It explores the broader dystopian setting, and is probably worth a play if you enjoy the worldbuilding or the card game aspects, which get a lot more involved after the fairly slow start.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I tried to play LB but it was too much micro managing autism for me, I did burn a lot of time reading the wiki. Have Library on Steam and I'll play it eventually. Shame on having a phone sequel. Fucking phone games destroyed gaming.

 

[SnakeEye]

If I don’t like SCP related stuff, is it worth playing?

I tried to play LB but it was too much micro managing autism for me, I did burn a lot of time reading the wiki. Have Library on Steam and I'll play it eventually. Shame on having a phone sequel. Fucking phone games destroyed gaming.

Library of Ruina is the best deck-building game I've played. It starts slow, since you have only one floor at the start, but as it goes on, not only does the possible number of strategies open up, it becomes increasingly difficult in the most cathartic way possible. I'll say this though, some of the receptions (battles, basically) can become ridiculously long, going over 2 hours in some cases.
Plus, there is a somewhat unsavory part of the game, and it's the rewards you get from the receptions. Basically, you get a number of books depending on the emotion level (that rises with the number of clashes between characters), but, you need to burn them to obtain cards and Key Pages, which is done through a gacha mechanic. So, depending on your luck you'll have to do the same reception twice to get not only everything you need, but also unburned books to unlock the next one.
Personally, while I think it's not as bad as it could have been, it could be somewhat annoying, but I think you should see for yourself in that regard.

 

[UtadaWasabi2]

Tfw nobody will ever experience the pain of first week Liu Association section invitation or Yesod realization ever again

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Library of Ruina is the best deck-building game I've played. It starts slow, since you have only one floor at the start, but as it goes on, not only does the possible number of strategies open up, it becomes increasingly difficult in the most cathartic way possible. I'll say this though, some of the receptions (battles, basically) can become ridiculously long, going over 2 hours in some cases.
Plus, there is a somewhat unsavory part of the game, and it's the rewards you get from the receptions. Basically, you get a number of books depending on the emotion level (that rises with the number of clashes between characters), but, you need to burn them to obtain cards and Key Pages, which is done through a gacha mechanic. So, depending on your luck you'll have to do the same reception twice to get not only everything you need, but also unburned books to unlock the next one.
Personally, while I think it's not as bad as it could have been, it could be somewhat annoying, but I think you should see for yourself in that regard.

Did no one mod it out?

 

[Penne Dreadful]

Did no one mod it out?

There are mods for infinite books, but I don't know if any of them are up-to-date; the grind has been minimised quite a lot; the aforementioned burning books for cards will only give you up to a set number of duplicates before giving you anything else, so you're pretty much guaranteed to get all the cards that you need within two fights of almost any given encounter. I'm also in the camp that doesn't find it too bad in the current state, for what it's worth.
You can also force-close the game to avoid losing your books on a lost fight, which has developer approval.

 

[evrae]

Did no one mod it out?

There are mods and scripts for it actually, there's NoGrind which I think just gives you 9999 of every book and card, and the max number of character pages. There's also a CE script that stop book loss when burning them.

Speaking of general receptions, it's actually Urban Nightmare that gets you generally one of the most overpowered characters in the game, Kim. While his stats are a little on the low side, he makes up for it with +2 Slash Power, +2 Power on 1-dice pages, Unrelenting, and +1 HP and SP damage on slash attacks. It's easily one of the most absurd pages in the game to the point I've seen it consistently used in the very last fights.

The game in general I never found too difficult, I think the only fights I took actual losses on were certain abno fights, Chesed Realization (because I was slamming my face into the wall that was the release version, which was absurdly buggy), Liu, and a couple of the final gauntlet fights. With them all generally being done on release.
Sadly a lot of players seem to suffer from a terminal inability to read or count simple numbers and this has resulted in a number of unnecessary nerfs. I miss the days of shit like release Love Town or Yesod Realization.

Speaking of the community, it's split into languages and then split further based on origin in some languages, from my experience RU, KR and JP are all fine. But for EN you're much better off sticking to certain places (/vst/ or places that generally gatekeep like hardtype mod communities or places adjacent to the above foreign communities). Otherwise you'll stumble into the Reddit or Twitter communities and you can probably guess how much of a shitshow those are.

 

[SnakeEye]

Speaking of general receptions, it's actually Urban Nightmare that gets you generally one of the most overpowered characters in the game, Kim. While his stats are a little on the low side, he makes up for it with +2 Slash Power, +2 Power on 1-dice pages, Unrelenting, and +1 HP and SP damage on slash attacks. It's easily one of the most absurd pages in the game to the point I've seen it consistently used in the very last fights.

Damn, that would have helped a lot on the Crying Children, which I personally consider harder than Love Town. Though, my favorite general reception Key Page is Banard's (I think that was the name), there's nothing as fun as removing a dude's entire stagger bar in one single attack.
It's a little sad that they nerfed some of the fights, that cathartic feeling when you finally beat something that seemed impossibly hard is surprisingly rare in games nowadays, particularly in non-action games like RPGs.

 

[evrae]

Damn, that would have helped a lot on the Crying Children, which I personally consider harder than Love Town. Though, my favorite general reception Key Page is Banard's (I think that was the name), there's nothing as fun as removing a dude's entire stagger bar in one single attack.
It's a little sad that they nerfed some of the fights, that cathartic feeling when you finally beat something that seemed impossibly hard is surprisingly rare in games nowadays, particularly in non-action games like RPGs.

Love Town was considerably harder on release since you had no Passive Transfer, and only had Dawn Office, Full Stop and Gaze available up to that point. I just found CC to be ridiculously long, by that point I had Yujin, Salvador, Olga, Sayo and I think Emma? There's a bunch of stupid combos you can do that breaks the difficulty in two. Sadly a bunch of fights got nerfed (early game in general!, CC, all of the Liu techline, R Corp, Yan, the final gauntlet in general, a bunch of abno fights and realizations, etc) because retards (Redditors and Steam Forum users) can't read or think in general.
I remember barely beating Yesod Realization on release, coming down to a single roll going my way and just jumping out of my chair, it's a good feeling to actually overcome a major challenge and I don't think a lot of people understand that feeling nowadays.

Bayard has a funny interaction with Grit if I remember right (unless they patched it) in which it reduces the SP damage he takes from Breakthrough by one, leaving him with one SP left. SOTC also has Allen who has +2 Pierce power for -2 Slash and Blunt power, this isn't that bad when you consider that a lot of the more ridiculous pages available are almost entirely Pierce-only. Unfortunately he has to compete with genuinely broken pages (Xiao, PT, Nikolai, Prowess Gebura, Kim, etc) and just gets effectively pushed out of actual play because the best strategy is to just dump everything you have into one floor and nuke everything, since snowballing via EGO lets you clear extra acts within a couple of turns.

A problem I have with the game is there's very spotty support for certain builds and even now still feels really incomplete, Unity pages are a good example of this, but it takes until the end of the game for Smoke (Ever-Spinning) and Discard (Brace Up) to get good support, whereas Highlander gets multiple insanely powerful setups and is just universally strong. Having a Draw 3 in a game with a decksize of 9 is ridiculous. In general it feels like the game ends up rushing to the end and gives little in the way of anything extra or something other than very cookie-cutter builds. There's just not enough to really push how far you can take the game.

There's a few mods out that I've played and enjoyed, though there are others with actually retarded balance that makes searching through mods feel like sifting through shit at times. Doesn't help that the Official Mod Tool update broke Basemod (you need to use the old build and an old save, a save that has used Official Tool mods will refuse to work on the old build) and the official tool honestly sucks dick in comparison. I've seen some bonkers shit done in Basemod, active Speed roll manipulation (Like using a card will give +4 speed value to the dice it's on, and works), breaking the 5-a-side limit and so on, Basemod lets you do a lot of crazy shit if you know C# and a little bit of insight into using Basemod.

 

[SnakeEye]

Bayard has a funny interaction with Grit if I remember right (unless they patched it) in which it reduces the SP damage he takes from Breakthrough by one, leaving him with one SP left. SOTC also has Allen who has +2 Pierce power for -2 Slash and Blunt power, this isn't that bad when you consider that a lot of the more ridiculous pages available are almost entirely Pierce-only. Unfortunately he has to compete with genuinely broken pages (Xiao, PT, Nikolai, Prowess Gebura, Kim, etc) and just gets effectively pushed out of actual play because the best strategy is to just dump everything you have into one floor and nuke everything, since snowballing via EGO lets you clear extra acts within a couple of turns.

Allen and his gangs passive is really good, half of my floors have someone with it, because I'm not that good at the game honestly. And I completely understand your problem with builds, with one exeption: Smoke. It is stupidly good by itself, even if it could use better support.
Hopefully, ProjectMoon will learn how to make more versitale build support in their new game.

 

[evrae]

Allen and his gangs passive is really good, half of my floors have someone with it, because I'm not that good at the game honestly. And I completely understand your problem with builds, with one exeption: Smoke. It is stupidly good by itself, even if it could use better support.
Hopefully, ProjectMoon will learn how to make more versitale build support in their new game.

Ah right that is a good point actually, you can get away with slapping in something like Deep Drag into a random deck and just slam people with a bunch of Smoke for free, a free damage boost on a target is always nice. I've used it to great effect for a few mod fights where I actually followed their intended balance (Mods are either balance with or without passive transfer in mind, and often are based on a certain gear techline for balance too).
I just found it couldn't fit into Prowess which is just raw power and speed, or I just have some dumb hidden bias against Smoke.

There's a bit more support with Yae, and midway through the last gauntlet you get someone who just gets +1 Power to any card with the Smoke archetype attached, and they also give Ever-Spinning (4 Cost, retardedly strong rolls, gives both you and the target something like 7 Smoke). This leads to things like Hidden Blade and Smoke Smash having insanely high rolls for their cost

It's kinda sad that they give you a bunch of shit at the end of the game (Unity, a fair few great cards and a shitload of Key Pages) and nothing really to use them on, you'd think they'd throw in a couple extra for-fun superbosses or something but I guess they expect the modding community to fix that problem, but then they split it into two with the Modding Tool update, whoops.