Rubinite Review

A boss rush that trusts you to get good, not to get everything.

Cup Dog Games didn't come out of nowhere with this one. Back in 2024, the studio put out a demo that already had people talking, a tight little slice of a game that hooked players fast and built real anticipation for whatever came next.

That project eventually grew into the full release you now know as Rubinite, and it's easy to see why the demo worked so well once you spend real time with the finished game. There's no long franchise history here, no five entries deep into a series.

This is Cup Dog Games carving out its own space inside the boss rush genre, a genre that gets written off more often than it deserves. People tend to look at a boss rush title, count up how many fights it contains, and decide that's the whole story.

Rubinite doesn't have some sprawling open world to wander or an enormous skill tree bursting with a hundred options, and it doesn't pretend to. It's a game built almost entirely around killing bosses, told with enough craft that the simplicity never turns into boredom.

The dark fantasy world also draws from the rough, bloody spin on the classic Little Red Riding Hood story that adds a little fairytale veneer to an otherwise dark and creature-filled world. This story has been used as part of the storybook appeal of Rubinite in order to make its violent scenes seem all the more harsh.

You play as Ruby, a young princess on the run from the Scarlet Kingdom after a witch and her forces tear through it.

This witch needed blood, and she got it by taking the eyes of Ruby's people and forging them into Pureblood Crystals, then using those crystals to twist ordinary folk into towering monsters that some call blood recipients and others call the Bloodstained.

Ruby barely escapes with her life, and she's found and taken in by a hunter named Roy and a lizardfolk companion named Wowi, who train her and give her the special sight she'll need to hunt these creatures down. In one version of the opening, this same protector first appears wearing an owl mask before revealing himself as the hunter who trains her.

Between boss fights, you return to a monastery hub, and this is where the actual story plays out - short scenes with Roy and Wowi, campfire conversations, and quieter moments that flesh out who Ruby is beyond just her anger. The hub itself slowly opens up new rooms as you clear more bosses.

Each one hides a bit of backstory about the witch and what really happened to the kingdom, and occasionally a small puzzle, like a mirror room, breaks up the usual rhythm of fight-then-return.  It's not a deep or original plot on paper, but the way Rubinite doles it out, piece by piece, after you've earned it through a hard fight, makes you want to keep pushing forward anyway.

A few of the flashback scenes lean on silent character models instead of real dialogue.

Those moments land a little softer than the rest of the writing, but the core relationships still carry the story well. What stands out most is that a story this grim manages to stay fairly warm at its center, since the banter and small conflicts between Ruby, Roy, and Wowi give the whole thing a sense of found family rather than just a straight revenge tale.

The loop is simple once you settle into it. You pick a boss from the map, fight them, head back to the monastery, sit through whatever story beat has opened up, and then move on to the next fight. Exploring the hub matters too, since chests hidden around it hold broken talismans that Wowi can repair for you, giving you more gear to try out as you go.

There's no filler combat in Rubinite, no random enemies scattered between bosses - you're kept almost entirely inside these one-on-one duels, which is either exactly what you want from the genre or something you'll wish had a bit more padding around it depending on your taste.

Combat runs on a system called focus, and it's the thing that makes Rubinite feel different from every other pixel art Soulslike out there. Ruby's basic knife slashes barely scratch these monsters, so real damage comes from targeting the Pureblood Crystal buried inside each one.

To do that, you hold focus on the enemy, and a gauge climbs up through three levels the longer you stare them down.

The closer you stand to the boss, the faster that gauge fills, which means the game is constantly pulling you toward the danger instead of away from it. You can't move while focusing, only dodge, and landing a perfect dodge while focused instantly bumps the gauge up a level for free.

Take a hit, though, and the whole thing resets, so you're back to square one. Once you unlock more of Ruby's kit, a couple of counters come into play too. Certain bosses throw unblockable aerial attacks you have to knock out of the sky with a thrown dart, which stuns them and hands you a free mark toward your next critical hit.

Others go for grab attacks you counter with a slash timed just right, sometimes called a sunder strike, which does the same thing - a stun plus a free point of damage banked. Letting all that focus go unleashes a heavy thrust straight into the crystal, and deciding when to cash it in versus when to keep pushing for a higher level becomes the whole rhythm of every fight.

People who have spent time with a game like Blasphemous will still find these fights rough, since most bosses carry somewhere around five or six distinct attacks you need to memorize before a fight starts feeling fair rather than overwhelming. You've also got a potion early on that restores roughly a third of your health, though it's one of the few tools in the game you'll rarely feel the need to lean on once you're playing well.

What Rubinite gets right with this system is the tension baked into it.

You're rewarded for standing closer to danger, not further away from it, and that risk-reward pull never really lets up. Perfect dodges chaining into counters chaining into a fully charged strike feels genuinely great once the timing clicks, and no two bosses ask you to use the toolkit in quite the same way.

One has you splitting attention between it and a second creature it summons partway through, another breaks apart into pieces as you whittle it down, and another can hop between the corpses of fallen soldiers and puppet them around the arena.

Where the combat stumbles a little is the hitboxes. More than once you can be clearly outside a boss's visible attack animation and still take the hit, and that stings a lot more once the game strips your health bar away entirely for its true ending run, where any hit at all means instant death.

That harder, second pass through the campaign has you refighting every boss, plus a handful of new ones, entirely no-hit, and it turns the whole experience into something faster and far more intense than your first playthrough. Some of you might find the core routine - stand close, dodge clean, strike - to feel repetitive if you're after bigger combos or more movement freedom.

Since Rubinite sticks so tightly to being a pure boss rush, there's genuinely nothing to break up the pace if you need a breather between fights.

On the default difficulty, though, Rubinite is a bit more forgiving than its reputation suggests, since learnable skills and equippable gear eventually let Ruby soak up an extra hit or two and shrug off hazards like poison, so the whole experience never tips into feeling unfair even on a rough night.

Beating a boss, or even just knocking it down to half health, drops crystals you can spend in a couple of places. Regular crystals feed a skill tree that boosts your damage, unlocks new tools like the throwing darts and sunder counter, and can improve how much your potion heals.

Pure blood crystals, the rarer drop you only get from a full kill, go toward either extra talisman slots or an extra potion charge, and most people end up favoring the talisman route since potions become pretty replaceable once your dodging is solid.

You don't lose any of this progress if Ruby dies mid-fight either, so grinding a tough boss to slowly unlock upgrades while you learn its patterns is a completely valid way to play Rubinite rather than a punishment for losing. Alongside the skill tree, there's a shop where a merchant trades crystals for talismans. These cover a wide range of effects.

From extra speed at the cost of taking more damage, to leaving a trail of fire behind your strikes, to more passive options like a floating item that attacks nearby enemies on its own. 

A handful of these talismans feel weak or overly situational, and some of the stronger ones don't even show up in the shop until you've cleared several bosses and unlocked the rooms that reveal them, but mixing and matching the good ones lets you shape a real build, whether you're leaning into survivability, faster focus generation, or straight-up damage.

Visually, Rubinite is one of those pixel art games where every frame feels intentional. The animations are smooth enough that you can actually read a boss's tell before it lands, which matters a lot given how punishing a single mistake becomes later on.

The hub area has a calm, almost storybook look to it that plays nicely against the much darker, bloodier tone of the arenas, and that contrast makes the shift into each fight land harder. Ruby's design carries little touches like her bunny-eared hood, and Roy's coat is covered in feathers that fit his whole hunter look.

The bosses themselves are the real showcase, though - twisted, oversized, and genuinely unsettling to look at, with arenas built around their theme so the space tells you something about what you're fighting before the fight even starts. Small details like a title card before each boss and a gruesome finishing animation on the killing blow give every encounter a real sense of weight.

The audio side matches that mood without stealing focus from the visuals.

The soundtrack leans into dark, almost symphonic tones with a chaotic edge running underneath, blending somber, gothic instrumentation with faster, heavier tracks once a fight kicks into gear. Wandering the hub gets a quieter, more melancholic score, while boss fights ramp things up into something closer to a heartbeat.

The hit feedback lands well too - a clean dodge has a satisfying little snap to it, and landing a fully charged strike into a boss's crystal comes with a heavy, almost bone-crunching thud that makes the payoff feel earned every single time. Rubinite knows exactly what kind of game it wants to be, and it doesn't water that down to please people looking for something bigger or busier.

The first stretch of the campaign can feel like little more than a tutorial for the real thing, and that shows in how thin the pacing feels early on, but once it opens up and starts demanding that you actually master its systems, it turns into something special.

A handful of hitbox inconsistencies and the total absence of anything outside of boss encounters will bother some of you, and if you're someone who wants combo variety or room to explore, this probably isn't the game that changes your mind about the genre.

If you're the kind of player who leans into difficulty, Rubinite rewards you.

It delivers one of the more focused and rewarding boss rush experiences to come along in a while, backed by a cast, a soundtrack, and a visual style that all pull their weight. At well under twenty dollars, it's an easy one to recommend to anyone who already knows they enjoy getting knocked down by a boss a dozen times before finally taking it apart on the thirteenth try.