Ruiner is set in 2091, in a city called Rengkok. In this rendition of the future, the lower class of the city are addicted to virtual worlds instead of drugs. You play as a man in search of his brother, guided by a mysterious hacker who serves as the voice in your ear. The game handles sort of like a sci-fi take on the brutal action game Hotline Miami; in fact, that was the original concept. From there it grew. The environments became bigger, shifting away from the closed rooms of its inspiration, and new gadgets and weapons kept being added. The feel of the game really came into place when the developers introduced a dash ability that lets you zip around the levels like a superhero.

Pretty much everyone on Ruiner’s small team has experience working on big games. Styliński and Tomkowicz previously worked at CD Projekt Red and Techland, for instance, where they helped create big-budget games, like The Witcher and Dead Island. They came up with the initial concept for Ruiner in May 2014, and that December they formed the studio, Reikon, in Poland. At the beginning of 2015 they started working on Ruiner full-time and the game is expected to launch on PC later this year. If it looks impressive for an independently developed game, that’s due in part to the team’s background.

"That’s something we learned at CD Projekt Red," says Styliński. "They have this way of, instead of cutting very important stuff, they just work more. It’s kind of crazy, and we always hated that way of approaching working on a game, but now when we started working on our game we did not want to let go." For instance, in order to make the game stand out from the competition, they decided to create detailed, 3D graphics instead of a simpler style that would’ve been faster and cheaper. (It also helped that art director Benedykt Szneider isn’t a fan of pixel art.) "Whenever we have a difficult problem, an ambitious problem, we solve it with an even more ambitious solution," adds Tomkowicz.

Though its influences are clear, in the beginning the team at Reikon was reticent about using the word "cyberpunk" to describe Ruiner. "We didn’t actually want to make a cyberpunk game, and for a long time we wanted to not use the word cyberpunk, to show that this wasn’t a thing where you had to expect rainy streets and neon signs," says Tomkowicz. "For a long time we thought ‘Let’s not use the word cyberpunk. Let’s just make the game and let the people read the themes that are there by themselves.’" Eventually they relented, realizing that the people who would be most interested in the game are probably already into the theme.

The initial concern was that the term would place limitations on the game. Even now, the team has heard feedback about certain elements, after showing Ruiner off at events like PAX. The dashing mechanic, for instance, was deemed more sci-fi than cyberpunk by some. The team’s solution for this is to simply design whatever gameplay features work best, and then figure out how they fit into the universe afterward. In Ruiner’s fiction the dash ability exists because of the character’s augmented legs, for instance, and his ability to heal on the spot is because of helpful swarms of flying nanobots (delivered by drones, of course).