A king is dead and an ancient plague has returned to ravage the land. Crashing ashore an island, you arrive to hopefully turn the tide before the entire place is taken over by unholy creatures.
No Rest for the Wicked is the latest game from Moon Studios, creators of Ori, and their latest is quite the departure with an isometric action RPG. You’re a Cerim, a holy warrior meant to combat the Pestilence that’s sweeping the isle of Isola Sacra. Turning people and animals alike into disgusting creatures, you’ve got to investigate how to stop this from continuing all while a fanatical church group is mucking about there too. Moon Studios have really crafted a fully lived in world here, with probably one of the densest isometric games I’ve played in a while; everything feels purposefully organized and you quickly get a good sense of the land as you spend time in it.
Now some folk might get immediate vibes of it being a soulslike, but the only thing No Rest for the Wicked shares with that genre is its difficulty. Dying doesn’t cause you to lose your currency or reset the world or anything, but the game does feature a sort of “reset” to its world. While exploring, you’ll uncover more of the map and reveal what’s under its fog; anything you do, be it killing enemies or collecting items/resources, will stay that way even after death. However, if you’ve been away from an area for too long, the fog will creep back in, refreshing the area with new enemies and items for you to discover. It’s a nifty way of making you feel like you’re making progress in your current zone while offering you a reason to return to past areas.
Getting to know the world of Sacrament is important too, because there’s a lot to explore with how densely packed the place is. Unlike most isometric games, this one features a staggering amount of verticality in its level design. You can climb up vines to reach higher areas, shimmy along walls, balance on a fallen tree to cross a gap, and more. The areas themselves are fairly small, you can cross one end to the other in maybe thirty seconds, but because of how layered the areas are you can easily spend over an hour in a single zone. The only downside is that because of how filled the world is, it can sometimes be a bit hard to make out what’s climbable and what’s not. This makes it a bit hard to tell which trees you can chop down for lumber or not sometimes too; the art style is gorgeous but that, paired with the level design can lead to some frustrating falls sometimes. The camera, in particular, is a big culprit of this too, since it’s locked, you can’t really tell if something offscreen is going to cause you danger, whether it’s an enemy about to lunge at you or a pit. Regardless, the more time you spend in an area the more you’ll know to be aware of certain “danger spots” caused by the camera.
The current early access build features the first chapter of the game, which if you’re quick can probably take you 8-10 hours, or if you’re like me then a lot longer since there’s much to uncover. The game itself plays like your standard action RPG, although (at least for now) it feels a bit stripped down compared to its contemporaries. You’ve only got a basic attack and a special “rune” maneuver you can unleash with enough energy and that’s pretty much it. The core focus is on waiting for opportunities to strike or parry your opponent instead of rushing in and swinging wildly.
This is unfortunately where it all kind of started to go a bit downhill for me, however. I really like the core loop of the game, and I’ve played a lot of similar “challenging” games, but No Rest for the Wicked felt like it was punishing me for dying in a game where you’re expected to die a lot. Dying causes all your items to lose durability, and as you can imagine that means you’re going to be making some pretty regular trips to the blacksmith if you’re in a particularly tough area. Repairs cost money however, money which might drop from an enemy, but if you’re having trouble with a group or maybe you’re in a boss fight then you’re not really recouping money fast enough to balance the repairs you keep doing.
On top of this, every piece of armor I’d find was heavy armor, and even after dumping points into my equip load, I was still only finding gear that made me over encumbered; the only alternative was wearing the literal starting rags that were severely weaker than what I was finding in the world or what shops sold. So you have this scenario where I either have to wear armor of my current level that’s making me cartoonishly slow, which puts me at a severe disadvantage in fights where enemies across the board are pretty fast, OR I wear armor that significantly under leveled allowing me to move normally at the cost of dying almost immediately if I take a hit or two. Either way, death comes quick all while the game is giving me the finger for dying.
Could I have reset my character and hopefully gotten a better pull of loot on a new character? Sure. But first impressions are critical and that first experience left such a sour taste why would I even consider trying to give it another go? There’s also a multitude of smaller quirks I could get into that hampered my experience, that, all piled together, really slowed down its pace.
There’s no current ETA on how long No Rest for the Wicked will stay in early access, and I’m eager to dive back into it when it officially launches sometime in the future. I just hope some of the quirks holding back my enjoyment are hammered out by then.
