No Rest for the Wicked
Review
Promisingly Imperfect
by Jordan Helsley
reviewed on PC
Promisingly Imperfect
I love when a developer breaks out of their box. For Moon Studios that box may only be two-sided, but their newest release leaves so much of the Ori series behind that it feels like the product of a different studio. No Rest For The Wicked similarly looks uniquely gorgeous, distills its inspirations down to a few core parts, and has plenty of surprises in store. No Rest For The Wicked is a bit hard to describe reductively. It's easy to call it "Dark Souls meets Diablo," but doing so would reduce it to an imitation of either series, when rather the developers are attempting to reinvent. At the core, we have a precise action RPG, from an isometric perspective, with very intentional movement and combat.
Beautiful and Grimy
When you first enter this world, you're greeted with a character creator that highlights both the surreal nature of the art, represented by your near-nightmarish limb proportions, and the painterly style that permeates the world. It will surely conjure feelings similar to Dishonored, but it's distinct enough to stand beside it, rather than behind. You'll soon find yourself on a ship at sea, with rain storming down and fires blazing, a stellar introduction to just how beautiful this game can be as it lays the groundwork for the story. You're referred to as a Cerim, a holy warrior with mighty powers used for the sole purpose of defeating the Pestilence. There's an air of mistrust and nervousness among the crew, showcasing your dormant abilities before you have the opportunity to unleash them. Outside in the kingdom, a young king is newly in place, and the specter of chaos seems to imbue the world. While the developers pay lip service to your ability to "shape the kingdom's fate," that promise cannot be realized at this time: early access provides the story up to roughly the end of the first chapter.
The bits of the story we're given might feel like heavily traversed ground, but it's presented in a serious-enough way to leave me hopeful. It also seems focused, presenting you with largely the political goings-on of the opening island you find yourself on, rather than a realm-spanning tale which could easily extend beyond the reasonable bounds of the game here. Outside of the mysterious Pestilence you must defeat, your role in this larger narrative remains ambiguous enough to be intriguing as the early access period continues.
Making Your Way
When it comes to traversing this world, it's largely a joy. Changes in topography and setting constantly drive you to explore new areas, and they continually use the positioning of the camera to draw your eyes to foreground elements, inviting you to test your access to spaces you can only get a glimpse of. There are moments, though, where paths are unclear. Sometimes you have to rely on the camera to turn a piece of terrain invisible (the ceiling of a cave, for instance) at just the right angle to see certain areas, and a lot of the path finding likewise relies on you smashing your face into something that looks like it might be somewhere you can go. To make matters worse, the game makes an effort to teach you how to put your back to the wall and sidle to traverse narrow ledges. Knowing when and where to use this in the larger world is its own challenge. Sometimes trial and error is the name of the game, which might lead to your character plummeting, potentially to their death.
As you make your macro moves through the world, it's much more clear and enjoyable, allowing you to take in each scene. This will, at some point, feel familiar in a way that betrays what No Rest For The Wicked is actually doing. There's checkpoints to discover and interact with, when you ultimately die you will respawn there, combat focuses more on the admittedly-beautiful animations than responsiveness. In many ways it paints a picture of comparison that only reveals its true nature as you succumb to the game's challenge. Respawning comes at minimal to no cost, enemies don't respawn when your checkpoints pop, and thus you'll find yourself doing much less grinding if you have to make a "corpse run" to simply get back to the place of your defeat. Instead, a fog of war will creep over the areas of the map you've explored, which will in turn respawn enemies on a timer.
Fighting For Your Life
Dealing with those enemies is as challenging as you'd expect. Dialing in your animations with different weapons, dodging (or blocking, if you have a shield) enemy attacks, and the timing of the near-instant parry are all well-worn elements of engaging with your foes. Things diverge a little bit when it comes to which weapons you're wielding, and what type of armour you've got. Armour, unlike a more predictable encumbrance, is what determines your light, medium or heavy actions. As your defensive capability increases, your speed conversely decreases. One of my favorite additions to this mechanic is the "shoulder charge" you only get with heavy armour: an imbalancing push you can use to stagger enemies at the cost of "fat rolling" otherwise. This tiny incentive made playing as a powerhouse much more desirable. The way that different weapons and equipment unlocks unique abilities is a nice touch as well. You can only block with a shield, only cast spells with a staff, and mixing and matching to find the playstyle that suits you is key. I enjoyed the effectiveness of smacking enemies with my staff after a shoulder charge, before rolling away to hit them with a fireball, but the options seem so great as to make the challenging combat a satisfying optional puzzle. Because there isn't a way to quickly and easily grind fodder enemies you're more incentivized to utilize the tools at hand.
I'm not sure if it's the camera perspective or the overall art and darkness of the early game, but I found the attacks hard to judge. They're a mostly straight-foward windup then swing, but they still caught me off guard a lot in the beginning. It took quite a bit of trial and error with the equipment the game gave me to advance enough to see the true depth of its offering. One particular miniboss (that I was too stubborn to walk away from) had me rolling into a gap in the bridge in the fight space repeatedly to avoid his devastating attacks. The other part, that takes more getting used to, is your stamina is a circle in the center of your screen, rather than a bar in the corner by your health. I continually exhausted myself as I forgot what that circle was telling me. Other annoyances like crossbow guys shooting you from afar and repeatedly as you close the distance are also present from plenty of other games of this ilk, which feels cheap in an otherwise fair challenge.
Rounding Out The Action
As if the game wouldn't be complete without it, No Rest For The Wicked also includes a certain level of homesteading mechanics. You'll get tools with which to fish, mine, dig, etc, to scrounge up some resources for crafting. A safe town also provides the opportunity for property ownership and decoration, should you need a break from the action. At this stage I don't think this mechanic can be fully fleshed out, but given that you can cook meals for healing, craft potions and buffs, and interact with tradesmen, it could have a larger role to play, outside of flexing on your friends in co-op.
Throughout my playtime these last couple weeks, I have noticed a marked and rapid improvement in the performance of this game, even on modest hardware. Outside of some really unfortunate graphical glitches (invisible ladders really made progressing difficult) the game was smooth sailing past probably the 3rd day in early access. That type of improvement, and so rapidly, makes the prospect of this early access endeavor tantalizing. While No Rest For The Wicked still has some mechanics to refine and tune, and a story to finish, its current form is enjoyable and its future prospects are bright. If you can get through the first dozen combat encounters, and improve along the way, you’ll be rewarded with a game that distills elements of many popular games and selectively throws some of their "worst" elements away (weapon durability being the exception), making a more accessible but equally enjoyable extremely challenging action RPG.
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8.0
fun score
Pros
Beautiful art, smooth combat, and customizable combat experience.
Cons
Micro-level path finding can be difficult, the story is unfinished in its early access state, and you must break some habits formed from similar action RPG games.
