No Rest For The Wicked Is Brutal And Ambitious, But A Little Confused

With Ori and the Blind Forest and its sequel, developer Moon Studios deconstructed the fundamentals of metroidvania design and honed in on its most alluring aspects. Combined with some of the tightest platforming in the business and an entrancing visual design, the studio’s debut IP was a standout hit, leading to heightened anticipation for its next project. Yet, No Rest for the Wicked could not be more different from the enchanting veneer of Ori and the Blind Forest, trading in precise platforming for punishing combat, bright colors for a dark and foreboding medieval world, and tight gameplay for systems that struggle to reign everything in.

No Rest for the Wicked puts you in control of a member of the Cerim, a group of warriors charged with protecting the realm from a plague that turns folks into horrific, almost eldritch creatures. While sailing towards the island of Sacra, your ship is attacked by rebels from the land known as the Risen, leaving you stranded on the gloomy shores and at the doorstep of Sacra’s main town, Sanctuary. Many of No Rest for the Wicked’s main narrative pieces are moved into view within the first hour of play, setting up a tense scenario where humanity is fighting against a returning plague while an overzealous religious cult is using the ensuing chaos to carve a place for themselves in the future of the kingdom.

It’s nothing particularly unique, and you can certainly tell who is presumably going to eventually end up being an antagonist (and who will end up becoming an ally) pretty quickly. But it is easy to forget this when conversing with the many characters you’ll come across, especially in Sanctuary. There’s a lot of personality in every conversation you have, punctuated by the eye-catching character designs that exaggerate facial and physical features in ways that give No Rest for the Wicked a rather unique look.

This extends to the isle of Sacra, which is divided up into visually diverse sections that house a variety of eye-catching flora and decrepit architecture. Traversing dangerous woods filled with enemies is punctuated by a lack of light, bathing the wilderness in a foreboding darkness that heightens the fear of being attacked out of nowhere. By contrast, the warm and soothing sunlight in Sanctuary accentuates how safe this small reprieve from the outside danger is, even if its streets don’t house the most pleasant citizens. Moon Studios’ has been revered for its iconic style and attention to visual detail, and No Rest for the Wicked is just another feather in its cap.

Reducing No Rest for the Wicked down to another action role-playing game not only does it a disservice, but also fails to capture other genres it’s attempting to blend into this familiar mold. Yes, you’re still presented with an isometric camera view, but instead of clicking to move around you have direct control of your character as you make your way around Sacra. The world itself is also more ripe for inventive exploration, with a surprising focus on verticality when it comes to some light platforming. You’ll automatically leap from ledges when sprinting, and treasures are enticingly placed on tricky to reach ledges that will have you moving around a small area in an attempt to figure out how to reach them. This does have some drawbacks, particularly given that you can’t directly control the camera. The density of environmental detail can often make it challenging to determine what is a traversable path, especially when it comes to having to hug a wall to progress forward. Additionally it’s frustrating to fall from ledges or slim beams when moving across them can feel so awkward thanks to the angled view. It’s difficult to gauge your character’s balance correctly when you have to account for the skewed angle you’re viewing them from, making many treasures at the end of these challenges not worth seeking out.

No Rest for the Wicked also drastically changes what you might expect from a combat system in an ARPG. Games like Diablo and Path of Exile revel in larger scale battles where you’re able to vaporize groups of enemies with a single spell. No Rest for the Wicked instead takes inspiration from the Souls-like genre, giving combat a much slower, purposeful feel that works well with its demanding level of challenge. Every enemy is a threat that can easily put you down if you aren’t careful, while groups will quickly overwhelm you if you don’t strategically pick each one off in a careful order. Attacks, dodges, and rolls all consume stamina, while enemy attacks will build up poise damage that can leave you open to attack, challenging you to manage both with care. As such, learning enemy attack patterns, equipping weapons with varying levels of attack speeds and poise damage, and perfecting the art of parrying are all vital. Thankfully, these all coalesce into a satisfying combat system that engages you as it teaches, creating a satisfying sense of control as you pirouette around enemies you’ve figured out.

The user-interface can get in the way of this, however. Both stamina and poise are represented with individual bars around your character, and not on the main HUD placed in the top-left of the screen. As you’re dodging and moving around in a skirmish, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine how much stamina you have left, which can mean the difference between a victory-assuring attack and a deadly overreach. This placement could be an experiment while the game is still in early access to see if keeping this vital information at the center of the battle as opposed to on the periphery is an improvement, but I would much rather see a toggle to let players choose one or the other as development progresses.

Learning enemy attack patterns, equipping weapons with varying levels of attack speeds and poise damage, and perfecting the art of parrying are all vital … Thankfully, these all coalesce into a satisfying combat system that engages you as it teaches, creating a satisfying sense of control as you pirouette around enemies you’ve figured out

No Rest for the Wicked does make some fundamental changes to some of the systems you might have assumed would be brought over from its many inspirations. When you die, you respawn at the last resting site you activated, but you don’t lose any experience. Instead, your gear will lose some durability, which only starts feeling punishing once they’re near useless. Perhaps the biggest diversion is with regards to healing items. Unlike Dark Souls, healing items are a consumable you’ll need to routinely farm. Cooked meals are the most effective way to heal in battle, but they require knowledge of a recipe and then specific ingredients to cook. Though this seems straightforward enough initially, it’s soon revealed that enemies and resources do not respawn after you die. Instead, you have to wait for portions of the map to fog over again, randomizing enemy and resource placements so that you can farm in that area once more.

There’s a tangible tug-of-war between the principles of the Souls inspirations and No Rest for the Wicked’s deviations from them. Farming ingredients for healing is problematic when facing a challenging boss that requires multiple attempts to best, and naturally there are quite a few. This means you’ll regularly have to explore new parts of the map simply to restock on healing supplies, putting yourself in danger that might ultimately require use of the same healing resources you’re trying to stockpile. Coupled with the element of randomization, this process quickly becomes frustrating, and generates friction between No Rest for the Wicked’s attempts at melding together disparate ideas from two genres.

Where No Rest for the Wicked sticks strongly to traditional ARPG tropes is in its loot. There is a significant amount of loot to pick up as you explore Sacra, with weapons, gear, resounces, and more dropped by enemies, found tucked away in chests, and otherwise randomly placed throughout the world. It doesn’t take long for your inventory to be bulging at the seams, leading to numerous trips back to Sanctuary just to unload before continuing exploration. Unfortunately, this process can become tedious quite quickly, and is even more of an issue during aforementioned runs for healing where you’ll have to choose between carrying upgrade resources or meal ingredients. It’s a cumbersome bit of resource management that adds nothing more than tedium to the loop of exploration.

However, finding new gear in the form of weapons and armor is as stimulating as most other ARPGs, and enables you to quickly change the way you play the game or approach previously challenging foes. Weapons are particularly interesting in No Rest for the Wicked, as they eschew traditional rarity tropes for a more risk-reward based system. Standard weapons have four rune slots and a gem slot on them, with the former allowing you to equip special attacks on them to vary your offensive repertoire and the latter offering the ability to boost a particular stat. You can enchant weapons via a vendor, but at a cost. Blue-tier weapons remove all but one rune slot, but augment your weapon with three stat bonuses. A purple-tier boosts these stat bonuses even further, but also introduces a negative stat that you’ll need to consider before using the weapon. A weapon I found early in my quest illustrated this well by delivering far more poise damage to enemies than before, but reducing my overall health by 25%. A sacrifice I was willing to make, and a system I am eager to see explored more with later-game weaponry.

Unfortunately, the steady stream of gear and the ways in which it allows you to change up your gameplay style also ends up contradicting the core character progression system in No Rest for the Wicked. Each time you level up, you’re given three points to spend on attributes such as health, dexterity, strength, and stamina. There is currently no way for you to change how you’ve distributed these points once spent, meaning you’re forced to direct your character progression without knowing if your build will be viable with the random loot you will encounter. There were large portions of my playtime where I was not changing weapons simply because they were less effective with the way I was prioritizing strength and stamina, soft-locking me out of numerous weapons that would otherwise eased some of the increasingly challenging areas I was being thrown into. Games like Diablo IV offer the flexibility to change your character build at any time to match the loot you’re consistently grabbing, while Dark Souls and other games in the genre carefully place gear strategically to make a variety of builds viable. No Rest for the Wicked feels stuck between these two ideals and ends up worse than both as a result. Moon Studios’ has confirmed that it is looking to add a character respec option in the near future, so there’s hope that this can be alleviated somewhat.

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Another aspect that is currently missing from No Rest for the Wicked is multiplayer. Moon Studios has stressed that single-player will remain a viable method of play and never require an internet connection, but it’s clear that the direction of the game is headed towards a continual live-service offering like most others in the genre. There’s a character in Sanctuary that offers daily and weekly quests (which, frustratingly, can only be checked out one at a time), enticing you to continually log back in and complete objectives for better loot. This repetitive gameplay loop will most likely be best with some friends in tow, much like Destiny 2’s seasonal content. It’ll be especially interesting to see how the game scales difficulty and enemy density as more players are present in skirmishes, and just how well the combat copes with the additional chaos that will likely ensue.

No Rest for the Wicked is relatively rich in terms of content for an early access title, offering over 10 hours of story content and additional late game activities to stretch your playtime well beyond that. But it’s evident that Moon Studios is looking for critical feedback, and even more so that the current state of several design decisions and gameplay systems require it. The ambition on show here is noteworthy, and some of the elements from multiple genres blended together do ultimately work to create captivating results. But there’s also a lot of friction between those that don’t fit as neatly with each other, and those that will likely occupy a lot of your time as you brush up against the game’s numerous challenges. There’s work to be done on No Rest for the Wicked right now, but it’s saying something that I want to come back for more once it’s taken place.