I finally figured out how to get a dev environment working on a VirtualBox VM on Windows. This can help folks who are developing a game and want to debug code on their home PCs. You can find instructions here:
https://aresmush.com/tutorials/code/dev-tools/
Ares doesn’t run on Windows natively due to a limitation of the database driver. (Also, Ruby is pretty clunky on Windows in general. The whole ecosystem is very 'nix-driven.)