RUIN's Invented 35th Anniversary Hits Steam Next Fest

Official Electric has put a free demo of RUIN: 35th Anniversary - Definitive Edition into Steam Next Fest, which runs through Monday, Oct. 26 at 10 a.m. PT. The studio debuted a new trailer for the game at The Mix Online Showcase on Oct. 16. The anniversary is a fiction. There was no original RUIN 35 years ago: Official Electric made the game now and packaged it as the remaster of a lost classic.

The Steam page keeps the act going. It calls RUIN "the legendary Official Electric intellectual property," bills the studio as a "pioneer of the Point and Click adventure genre," and promises the re-release of "this generational masterpiece." On itch.io, where a free browser version called RUIN: Chapter 0 has been playable since late 2025, Official Electric describes itself as a "ubiquitous Super-Corp."

The game is drawn in a hard, shifting EGA-style palette. A king sends a knight to recover a prophesied sword and "Destroy Evil - Forever," and from there the demo cuts between a fantasy quest, planet-hopping science fiction, first-person scenes styled after early CD-ROM adventures and stretches that play like animated shorts. In its review of Chapter 0, EGW News noted that fights usually end with the player on the ground under a blunt "get owned" message.

The demo covers Chapter 0, with later chapters in progress and no release date for the full game. Characters and symbols from RUIN recur across Official Electric's other small games, and players on the itch.io page have been mapping the links between them.

Invented game histories have a long run at Killscreen, from John Walsh's hardcover of 21 fake games to a podcast episode on games people remember that never existed.

For more reading see Official Electric's RUIN page, God is a Geek on the October 2026 Next Fest, and Killscreen's John Walsh bound 21 fake games into one huge hardcover.