No Rest For The Wicked - Early Access Review

In what can seem like an odd pairing of genres, No Rest For The Wicked is attempting to combine Dark Souls, Diablo, The Long Dark and Animal Crossing. Which is a whole smorgasbord of genres and ideas. But let’s not act like we’re not living in a time when everyone is trying to twist, create and give their take to some of the most popular genres because they are. And as redundant as it can be to say game-x is like game-y, this is a case where it seems appropriate to point out just how much of an oddity No Rest For The Wicked is, especially coming from Moon Studios, a studio that had just done the Ori games and played in one genre, for the most part.

There’s a lot to like about No Rest For The Wicked, but it took me about ten or more hours to finally say I somewhat understood what a gameplay loop could be. As it stands, and thankfully, it’s in early access, a lot of this can be worked on, but its first few hours are very tough and will rub you all the wrong ways with frustrating deaths, confusing mechanics and a confusing sense of misdirection.

You play as a ‘Cerim,’ some Holy Warrior who has been beckoned to the island of Isola Sacra to investigate and help stop a plague that is turning people into creatures that attack sight. There’s also some political unrest happening in the background between different factions, but I don’t have much of an idea what was going on. At the moment, I was watching these cutscenes, but it all feels very base-level to set up and explain where and why you are where you are in the game. Other characters don’t seem to love you because you’re Cerim. I don’t understand why, but it seems equivalent to why people don’t like Witchers in The Witcher series.

We’re here for the gameplay, though, and this is where things start to get interesting. By combining the methodical combat of a Souls-like game with an ARPG like Diablo and adding some survival elements, it becomes a bit messy in its pursuit of originality with intriguing ideas.

Starting the game like the most basic-ass character of all time, you’re running around in your underwear with a cheap sword to your name before you begin to pick up new gear. Combat is fairly uncomplicated with an attack button, a charge attack, a counter/shield button and the ability to dodge roll out of the way of incoming attacks. In an isometric view, this all works pretty well, although technical issues with frame rate stutters can cause the time-based combat of No Rest For The Wicked to feel frustrating. There’s also limited opportunity to use it, but you can sneak up behind enemies to either kill them in one attack or, at least, inflict a decent amount of damage upon them.

Where combat feels good, and it has the basics down, it’s the other two main genres that come into the mix here that make things feel confusing. In a standard souls-like, gear is sort of given at an equal placement no matter what playthrough you’re on, with bosses constantly dropping the same stuff. Here the random nature of the gear does mean someone could get very lucky very early into their journey, while others grind away with the crappiest weapon for at least the first couple of hours with the game. It feels at odds with the more balanced and unsurprising way a Soulslikes’ gear system is usually built.

In a somewhat similar fashion, the survival-esq systems in the game see your health never refilling, even at safe points and checkpoints, but instead requiring you to either use/eat/drink health items or die entirely so you can respawn with a fresh health bar. What is more frustrating- especially in the first few hours with No Rest For The Wicked– is how you craft and cook food for consumption. There are limited resources to be found, even if they do seem to refresh after some time, but you’ll need them to create soups and other food items to heal both in and out of a boss fight. This is this odd brick wall layer of stopping the game from falling too deep into being soul-like, in the genre in which your characters will refill their health at any camp, and your health potions restore to their max amount at any camp as well.

The first boss fight I encountered in the game quickly made me want to stop attempting to complete it and wander off in a different direction for some time because I had begun to run low on cooking supplies and health-restoring items. It feels like the easiest fix for this would be introducing a basic health item that restores when you rest or die—and having the cooked ones be more powerful.

Once I was able to get past that first boss and entered The Sanctuary, the game opened up a bit more, and the bigger picture revealed itself. I could now fast-travel between this hub town and my most recent camp, meaning that while exploring a particular area, I could easily hop back to this town and shop for supplies if needed. I could also buy a house in this town and invest in furniture and ornaments to make it feel like my own. A system that feels like it’s in place so you have a home to show off to friends when the 1-4 player co-op is added into the game in an upcoming update.

Play

In the same town, you’ll also be able to get daily bounties to help you explore areas and level up and gather gear if you hit a dead-end while searching out towards something on the game’s main quest, a welcome addition to a game that spends its first few hours almost viciously making you bash your head against its.

Weapon degradation in a soul-inspired game and one that happens to your weapons upon death will also have players banging their heads against the developer’s idea of fun. It’s not something I love at all, and thankfully, at the moment, the team has decided to just straight up turn it off by allowing free repairs on weapons in the game. But we’ll have to see what they do in the long term.

It’s tough to say for sure who No Rest For The Wicked is for at the moment. It’s an odd mix of genres with an uneven balance. But if you have an idea of ARPG with a souls-inspired base, it might be worth jumping into Early Access so you can help shape the game. For others, I’d wait a few months until some of the core mechanics are ironed out into something less frustrating.