Edwin Crump
When it was first revealed at The Game Awards last December, No Rest for the Wicked quickly shot up to the top of my most anticipated games list.
Created by Moon Studios, the same developers who brought us the excellent Ori games, this attempt at a souls-inspired isometric action RPG seemed like an exciting evolution and challenge for the studio.
Given early impressions and the official trailers for the game, when it was released in early access on Steam for PC I thought I knew what to expect from the game. But the more I played, the more systems I encountered, I think I better understood what Moon Studios is attempting with the it.
The ambition on display is immense, yet I wasn’t able to shake an apprehension that it was not quite a cohesive package, at least not yet. And after a labour of six years on the title before just this initial release, what is the long-term future for the game and how might it change throughout the early access period?
After a short character creation, No Rest for the Wicked starts with you, a special warrior called a Cerim, arriving at the island of Sacra, which is experiencing a plague that needs to be halted and reversed. Amidst the death of its ruler, game of thrones-style politics and conflict between the heirs, nobles and the religious rulers plays out in gorgeous cutscenes.
Really, the whole of No Rest for the Wicked is absolutely stunning, and is what I imagine has drawn many people to the game in the first place. It uses a fully 3D environment that comes as close as anything has to looking like a moving, dark oil painting. The art style absolutely sings on an OLED panel with a strong emphasis on contrast between warm oranges of lit areas and the blackness of those in shadow. There’s a subtle, Animal Crossing style bending of the world, which helps the Isometric view feel more dynamic and alive.
The core of the game however is undoubtedly the combat.
The real-time action sword and shield combat is heavy and weighty, with a fair amount of inspiration from the Souls series. All enemies can take out serious chunks of your health so timely dodging, parrying and interrupting attacks is essential in making progress. So far, No Rest for the Wicked is not an easy game, and I died more times than I expected. You do have a pretty good variety of weapons in this early access release, including a magic staff, a massive two handed claymore, a hammer and a standard sword (I’m sure there are more that I missed). Weapons have their own skills that are activated through a limited focus metre, and there was a nice flow of battle in using normal attacks and blocks until I got to use my special moves for extra damage.
What has held back some of my fun with the combat is the unexpected influence of the game’s nascent survival mechanics. Taking unfortunate inspiration from the worst part of Demon’s Souls, you have to craft each and every health restoration item according to various recipes and ingredients you find in the environment. This makes attempting each new area or boss a frustrating experience, as you may need to run around searching for some mushroom patch that isn’t depleted before you can have another go at the part of the game you actually care about.
Item durability also plays a frustratingly large role, with your equipped items suffering rapid deterioration each time you die. To repair them, you can use a limited amount of repair kits or pay a blacksmith to repair them. Combined with having to craft health restoration items, it resulted in sometimes annoying long gaps between making actual progress and farming enemies to get back to the state you were before. The best games carefully balance difficulty with friction, but in its current state No Rest for the Wicked doesn’t seem to have found the right set of trade offs. Both Ori games smartly balanced sometimes tricky platforming against fast loading, quick restarts with an innovative save system that let you set checkpoints wherever you wanted. Perhaps Moon Studios could revisit these titles to see what worked and how, perhaps, they could influence their latest title.
In terms of performance – on PC this initial release can easily reach 30FPS but achieving a locked 60FPS is surprisingly difficult.
At least for now, there are few graphical options to play with, and the usual lifesavers features to claw back some performance such as DLSS super resolution temporal upscaling is listed as ‘coming soon’ (no word on Intel’s XeSS or AMD’s FSR2 or 3, unfortunately). The developer has noted more fine-grained options are coming, but for now you can try a few different basic general image quality settings and there is a basic resolution slider to turn down if performance is unstable.
And this is a game that truly benefits from higher frame rates. On my Steam Deck playing at 30FPS the whole experience felt sluggish and unresponsive. Only at 60FPS and above (where possible) using my gaming PC’s NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti GPU did the game feel responsive and fluid enough for me to feel confident when tackling the game’s dispiriting combat.
In this initial early access state, No Rest for the Wicked includes a decent chunk of gameplay. Included is the first chapter, a main town, some side quests and a replayable dungeon. There’s no clear roadmap from early access to a full release but developer Moon Studios has promised up to four-player co-op, PvP, new regions and even farming.
For what is still a small studio this is a wild scope of features on top of what is already there – the combat, home decoration, crafting and survival systems – and I worry that the ambition for the game is larger than what they can reasonably deliver to a decent quality level. Will it take another six years for the full release?
Will the early access release be able to maintain interest over that whole period? These are the risks of buying into the project at this point in time. It also makes me question if Moon Studios truly has a lid on what the game should be; scope creep is real and can be debilitating long-term if not addressed. I’d love to be proven wrong, but it is hard to shake some apprehension about what is trying to be achieved.
No Rest for the Wicked’s early access launch is out now on PC, and the full release is expected on Xbox Series consoles and Playstation 5.
Released: April 2024
Rating: PG
Platforms reviewed: PC (Windows)
Genre: RPG
Developer: Moon Studios
Publisher: Private Division