No Rest For The Wicked – Early Access Review: So Far It’s A Wicked Good Time!

Reviewed On: PC
Price: $39.99 USD
Developer: Moon Studios
Publisher: Private Division
Release Date: April 18th, 2024

Please Note: A review code was provided by Private Division but does not influence the opinions in this review.

This review will be structured a bit different than my other reviews that I have written because the game is in Early Access. I will be reviewing this title in 4 sections: The Great, The Good, The Ok, and The Bad. Moon Studios is a team that is known for the wonderful Ori games that were originally exclusive to Xbox and PC but were eventually brought over to the Nintendo Switch. Since I didn’t have an Xbox at the time, that is where I played those games and they were so well crafted that I knew I was excited for their next project. Well, their next project was revealed and it was such a different game compared to what they made before, I was a tad apprehensive if I would like it. I am pleased to say after 23 hours in the first wave of content for the Early Access that is currently out there, I was pretty surprised.

THE GREATNESS IN THE GAME

In this game, there are so many things that are great and I absolutely cannot give enough praise to. One of those things is the beautiful art direction. The sewers, the nameless path, the glades, Sacrament, and everything else all have so much beauty and uniqueness that it just makes the world feel alive. The art of the character and enemy designs are also all terrific, very diverse, and very beautiful. The music and audio design in the game are absolutely stunning as well. Sometimes I would just stop and listen to the ambiance and music that was in the world. There are moments that are extremely intense, some moments that are calming, and the rest of the moments are somewhere in-between. The voice acting in the game is also very well done with all of the characters acting and sounding like those during the time of when the game is taking place.

The next thing that I would consider to be great is game the meat and bones of an ARPG, and that is the combat. The combat in this game is tough as nails at the beginning and will slowly get easier as you learn the patterns throughout your playthrough, but will definitely still be punishing. The game has multiple weapon types, multiple enchantments or detriments that will effect your stats and gameplay, skills that will alter what weapon to use when, and more to change your playstyle to fit your desires. I think that is terrific if you want to experiment with what you want, but there are other problems with wanting to experiment in the game; however, I will talk about that later.

You will want to master the parry system pretty quickly for this game as it is crucial. The parry window timing takes some getting used to for sure, but once you do, it feels satisfying. The bosses that are in the game are terrific and seriously will test your skills, which is great. I will warn people again about the difficulty as a whole; it is souls-like combat in many ways with no pause button and stamina being a crucial aspects to playing the game. I do wish there was a way to actually pause the game, but there are safe enough areas where enemies won’t be located, especially since enemies won’t respawn if you die or use a whisper. They do come back eventually, but just overtime.

The last thing that I consider to be great already is the story that they are beginning to tell. There are only a couple of different story missions that are available as of now, but they are so well crafted and designed in such a way that just screams “I need to know what happens next”. I am excited for more single player content when it drops, and I hope it isn’t too long of a wait. Besides the main missions, there are side missions and more opportunities to learn about the world, who you are as the Cerim, complete daily and weekly bounties and challenges, and more. There are so many characters, but the story is fairly simple to comprehend. You are Cerim and appear to be the last of your kind. The church just had the death of the king, the king’s son took over, changes are taking place in multiple ways, there are traitors amongst some individuals, and more to experience that I don’t want to spoil.

THE GOOD BUT NOT GREAT

Many aspects are great in the game, but then there are even more things that are just good and they need more polish or fine tuning before I would consider them great. Skill points are very critical to a good RPG, but there are issues with the skill points in my book for this game. There are restrictions on weapons for having certain stat levels that are required before you are even able to use them, so if you want to try out a weapon, you have to put all of the points towards that part of your character. I wouldn’t recommending doing this unfortunately as it would unbalance everything else like your equip load, your stamina, your health, and more. There is also no way to change the allocation of points once you place them on your character, and I feel like that should be an option… even if it would require you to pay a very small fee to do it. This is because it basically, in its current state, prevents people from experimenting with their character and the loadouts that they have unless they make a whole new character and start the game again from scratch. Every level up, you get 3 points, so if they don’t want to allow for points to be changed around, another option is provide more than 3 points to use per level up.

Fast travel in games are musts for RPGs in my opinion and I think the “fast travel” is good since it definitely is super helpful, but it needs to be expanded. Every time you perish in the game, you go back to the last Cerim Whisper that you interacted with. You can then interact with the whisper and travel back to Sacrament to load up on items, repair armor, and more (once you unlock Sacrament that is). Then if you touch the whisper in Sacrament, you can head back to the last whisper you touched before coming into Sacrament. This basically means the fast travel is there, but it is a very limited fast travel since you will still have to manually travel to other locations. I feel like this method makes it so if you want to grind in certain areas, it might be a tad bit of a slog to do. At the same time, I get the point of wanting the player to explore and collect items, fight enemies, and do more in the world. Wish there was some way of getting a middle ground between these elements of the system.

I absolutely love games like Hades, Returnal, Moonlighter, and other rouge-lite titles. To my surprise, there is actually a rouge-like section in the game called the Cerim Crucible that you unlock in the ending of the story content that is out there now. The Crucible allows you to use the items and weapons that are already on your character at the start of the run, so its not a true rouge-lite, but since it will change the enemies and the locations order, it is. Hopefully, they make it a little more unique as that kind of thing would be cool by providing a different challenge. The area should be explored as it provides players even more powerful items than you may find in the main areas of the game. I played a bit of it, but because I am don’t have the best equipment, I need to grind some more before I can complete a full run.

THE JUST OK

Sometimes, I like when games don’t hold your hand whatsoever and just let you figure things out on your own. Other times, I absolutely believe that systems need to be explained to you for you to understand what is happening in the game. Maybe it is because I am more of a novice when it comes to games like this one, but there are a few systems that I either believe are redundant and shouldn’t be in the game, or systems that make sense to be part of the gameplay, but not explained to you and you have to figure it out while you are playing the game.

One of the systems that actually made me almost quit this game on day one after 3-4 hours, was the durability of your weapons and gear. Every time you die, you lose durability on your weapons and your armor. It use to be almost an insane amount of damage, which meant after only a couple of deaths, you equipment was useless to you. They reduced it immensely in the first hotfix, which made the game much better to play. Once they do break, you are required to spend coin to repair the items. They used to cost way too much to repair the item but thankfully they reduced the cost intensely in the first hotfix as well, so I was very happy to see that. I still don’t love the durability aspect as I don’t see it as anything other than a punishment for players who aren’t as good at these kinds of games; however, I am ecstatic that they are listening to the fans that were complaining about this issue.

One of the things that they don’t explain very much is the currency in the game. There are gold coins, silver coins, and bronze coins (that’s what I am calling it, not sure if that is really what they are). I thought I lost a bunch of coin early in the game, but I realized once you hit 100 bronze coins, it will transition to 1 silver coin, and I don’t remember the game ever saying that happens. Basically, if an item in a store costs 2 silver and 23 bronze, you are basically spending 223 bronze coins and coins are very hard to get at the beginning of the game (at least they were for me) so you have to be diligent about what you spend the money on in the first part of the game.

Eventually, the money is something that becomes much, much easier to obtain. The cost of most things are pretty reasonable, while there are other things that have a higher of a cost than they should. Also, eventually you will gain access to purchase a house in Sacrament, but the cost is pretty high and they don’t explain the benefits of having a house besides decorating it. You also just have to guess what the different houses are like inside as you cant explore them before purchasing, and I wish they would allow for that to see the differences. More explanation on that might be a good idea as 30 silver is a lot for a house if it just involves decorations, versus a different house at 20 silver. I have enough for any house in Sacrament at this point, but I am unsure what the point of it would be or which is the best.

The last thing that I would consider to be okay, but not good is the town building aspect of rebuilding Sacrament. I like the concept about it and I think it is great to have games do this kind of thing, but it isn’t perfect as of right now. The grinding for raw materials in the world with the dig sites, trees, and ore locations is somewhat annoying and tedious as the rates for some of the rarer items are not great and are randomized for what you obtain. They are boosting rates for certain things (like clay being a pain to find), but I still wasn’t getting super lucky, so I gave up after a while trying to find things like iron ore and the clay. Then, once you have enough items, you have to spend hours, (and real world hours, not in game hours) waiting for the things to complete. The reason you want to build Sacrament is you gain access to better items, more features like the anvil, the saw for crafting planks, fabric, alchemy, and more. You can access those things after completing the town projects connected to the specific tool you are looking for. I built all the locations and upgraded them to level 2, and am slowing grinding for items for the next level up; but right now it feels like a chore.

THE NEEDS A LOT MORE WORK… AKA “BAD”

There are a few things that I consider to be very cumbersome and less attractive in games and unfortunately, there are only couple of things in No Rest for the Wicked at this point. One of these things is the inventory annoyances that exist in the game. The amount of items you can hold on your character’s inventory is pretty small overall. The way you can gain more slots to hold more items is by getting the Plague Ichor from bosses in the game. Problem is, there are only a couple of these in the current amount of story content that is in the game. So the only way that you can get more, is to create more realms and replay through the stuff that is in the game currently. Realms are basically new playthroughs you can start on the main menu screen. Its not terribly time consuming as I did the first boss and one of the weekly challenges in about 20 minutes, about 5 times in a row, and got more Ichor for my character’s slots. Not sure if they will patch that method of farming them out or if that’s what they were hoping for you to do, but there is no other way of getting enough right now.

There is only so much you can get unlocked for your inventory, so it will help, but definitely still is problematic overall to be honest. I don’t love the grinding for it and thankfully it isn’t a terrible grind, just wish it wasn’t needed to be done. If you need more space in your inventory, there is a community chest available to you where you can store stuff into in the Rookery Tower. Problem is, that also has a limit of items and to get to it takes a bit to travel to, so going back to it frequently is cumbersome. This means, you may have to keep selling or discarding items frequently and it distracts you from the true aspects of the game that make it fun.

Honestly, there were a bunch of things that I would consider bad about this game… when it first came out and before the four (4) hotfixes that they have released. We are, as of the time of this writing, only 6 days in and a lot has already been fixed that made the game, in my opinion, not fun to play. The only other bad thing that I consider besides the inventory issue, is the overall performance of the game. I get that it is Early Access and the decision to prioritize more features was somewhat of a smart one, but still performance shouldn’t be overlooked. It has gotten much better since launch, but I still am seeing massive frame rate drops, even when just walking around. I am using a i7-12650, 3050ti, 32GB of ram, and have the settings in the graphic menu set at balanced, with a max frame-rate of 60fps, and it still is not a great performance as a whole. Not sure if there is anything else I can do to adjust the frames. Overtime, this will most likely be patched and will become more stable, but right now when frames dip when you are attacking and you end up dying, it’s not fun. The game is definitely playable, and I have played games with worse frame rate issues; however, you may occasionally fall to enemies you might not normally die to if a dip occurs at the wrong time; and this is why I would consider it “bad” and not “just ok”.

Obviously, the game is still in early access but honestly with the amount of content that is available in the game at this point, I definitely recommend jumping in if you have a PC that is fairly powerful. Everything that is actually here in the game, the many systems and how they intertwine with another, and everything that the team has already done to help the game feel better in just days after it launched is very impressive and shows their commitment to really build this game up with their fans. I will say I am excited to be on this ride and can’t wait for more single player content to come. The Steam scores actually started out pretty rocky (like in the low 50s), and now as of 10pm on 4/24/2024, it is sitting at a 72% positive score. I am very excited for the future of this game and I hope that more content will come in at a reasonable pace and not take forever; but at the rate of all of these hotfixes, I don’t have concerns about that right now. As of now, I definitely think there needs to be more work put in to fix the issues around the game, but it is well on its way to be a great title that I look forward to playing and updating my thoughts throughout 2024. I think this game will definitely set the bar higher for games in this genre.

Review Score (as of April 24) : 8.5/10