No rest for the wicked is tedious by design. Healing items in action RPGs have a 10 second hold time after use, so you’ll die a lot. With each death, equipment loses durability and repair costs quickly add up. Bounty missions you take on to cover them pay shit, but that’s the job. Time and time again, the game destroys any confidence you’ve built over the course of your adventure by increasing the number of enemies and often introducing new, vicious enemies to shake up the familiarity. This frustration complements the themes of the story. However, considering the development of the project, it is almost justified.
Once you’ve finished creating your character, you’ll be greeted with a welcome message from developer Moon Studios, best known for Ori and the Blind Forest and its sequel. “Over the last six years, we have put our heart and soul into developing a next-level ARPG experience,” the message reads. The great effort is immediately noticeable, with a prologue set on a ship that oozes charm and an art style that mimics a painting in motion. Combat is blunt and responsive. The more I played, the more I couldn’t help but wonder how a game that leaves such an enchanting impression can still be considered a work in progress.
Released April 18th on Steam Early Access. No rest for the wicked takes a top-down approach to the ARPG genre. However, this is not Diablo, but a game that is closer to Dark Souls in its DNA. The novelty lies in the game’s structure, which uses an interconnected map that you slowly reveal and move back and forth through as you complete quests. Moon Studios also integrates crafting and gathering systems, adding a touch of the survival genre, right down to features like buying a house and building furniture for it.
You take on these tasks as Cerim, a member of an ancient sect whose sole goal was to defeat a plague that once ravaged the empire. Faced with another plague, the church decides to act first with its inquisition and preach later, while your appearance on the island of Isola Sacra will receive sideways glances at best and racist comments at worst.
There’s a welcoming, gritty tone that permeates almost every dialogue interaction, as well as the locations you enter. The people of Sacrament, the capital of Isola Sacra, were abandoned by the neighboring kingdom, where the royal family and church reside. You can chat with any fellow travelers you meet, as well as the residents of Sacramento, as the city serves as a hub. Conversations often turn to the decay of their homes or how citizens begged for food and medicine and sent soldiers instead. The Church’s intentions are quickly called into question after its main representative appears on screen for the first time. Given your unique status as a Cerim, one of the friendlier comments you hear is a sailor saying in your presence, “They eat, they shit, they die, just like the rest of us.”
At the moment, the Early Access build only contains the first narrative chapter of the story, which essentially includes a few main quests and bosses, side quests, and an endgame gauntlet where you must face off against powerful enemies for equally powerful rewards. There are a few interesting turns here and there, but it’s more of a setup than anything else.
You spend most of your time playing No rest for the wicked is spent on hitting and dodging attacks. There are no classes to choose from – you can equip and use anything as long as you have the required stats (you get a few points to spend each time you level up). Weapons determine the special attacks you have access to, which can include magic, and they all feel quite different when performing them. My favorite was a hammer that I could set on fire and throw past an enemy before it swung back at me like a boomerang, almost always causing a brief stagger when it hit both times.
With strong combat and exploration fundamentals, Moon Studios delivers a game similar to this Lies from P offered, and what Lords of the Fallen Compromises made. But the barrage of hardships these systems bring don’t always hit Soulslike’s sweet spot. I defeated the game’s first main boss in one attempt. An hour later, I got stuck trying to get back to the starting area because a single spear hit from what I thought was a weak enemy would wipe out about 80% of my health. Purchasing decent new equipment requires time and effort or a lot of money that you probably don’t want to spend as you always need to have some savings to repair your current equipment.
When these obstacles started occurring more often than I could bear, I took a step back to prioritize. My healing options and equipment became the focus I needed to stop relying on the hope that I would figure things out in the wild and just make them myself. However, I had to collect both recipes and blueprints, which were expensive. This led to the fun part of No rest for the wicked
The entire food preparation is reminiscent of the alchemical mechanics of something similar The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, how different recipes give you unique buffs that can help you survive certain illnesses or gain an advantage in battle. Fishing is included in every role-playing game and doesn’t drag on No rest for the wicked, especially since it naturally fits into the synergy with food recipes. In the wild, when you have to search for certain animals in search of meat or hiding places, it becomes annoying. Or when you sit and wait for an eight-second animation where your character chops down a tree, digs into the ground, and collects mining ores with a pickaxe.
The biggest culprit at the core is the storage space. No rest for the wicked allows you to upgrade it with a rare currency that you mainly get from defeating bosses, so you won’t be doing this often. Once you have it, you have to choose between eight Various categories, including both the standard inventory space and the slots you have for your character in case you want to equip multiple pieces of equipment and switch between them on the fly.
So it’s common to run out of space, resulting in either throwing away items or making dozens of round-trip trips around the city. The long-term solution, of course, involves even greater involvement in survival systems. Owning and decorating a home makes sense when you can stock up and organize all your loot. That is, if you are prepared or motivated at all.
The release of Dragon’s Dogma 2 Earlier this year sparked a discussion about friction and what happens when a game is designed so that it cannot be easily conquered by the player. No rest for the wicked fulfills the expectations of the Soulslike genre – you know you’ll die a lot and get into unfair situations to test your power – but its unique impulse essentially requires an extra effort in everything you do. You conquer nothing; you only win small victories.
Considering the circumstances around Sacrament, where there is a mechanic who rebuilds many of their facilities alongside your own home, the extra effort is understandable. After all, this is a community that is slowly getting back on its feet, which may have been well received by the developers. In 2022 there was an outcry Work culture at Moonand although there was no action internally, the development of the game was very bumpy. No rest for the wicked arrives in Steam Early Access after six years of development – and a series of immediate hotfixes. According to the RoadmapThe next two major updates will add multiplayer and The Breach, which continues the story. There is no clear indication of how long the game will be available in Early Access Steam page Either just a list of future features.
For all my trouble with No rest for the wicked, I can see the promise. The presentation of an ARPG of this type has not fascinated me so much since fable or Torchlight, games with diverse characters and art styles in worlds worth fully exploring. But I can’t help but think about the sustainability of it all, especially coming from a studio that has two critically acclaimed games on the market. If Moon spends six years working on a project, then immediately starts working on patches on launch weekend while an early access phase begins with no end in sight, what does sustainability look like for a small studio? “Our next project will be a defining moment for Moon,” CEO Thomas Mahler wrote on X, formerly Twitter, in 2023. After about 20 hours of play, there seems to be a lot at stake.
The largest encapsulation of No rest for the wicked lies on the top of a mountain in the Nameless Pass. After spending a good portion of my evening slowly knocking down enemy after enemy and getting blown to pieces more times than I can count, I made it to the summit. I excitedly rushed to the cliff, hoping to find a chest. The reward was a mine I have no room for, on the edge of a beautiful view of the sunrise illuminating a lake. Perhaps sharing frustrations is an act of solidarity. I just hope Moon’s eventual victory is bigger.
No rest for the wicked was released in Early Access for Windows PCs on April 18th. The game was reviewed on PC using a pre-download code provided by Moon Studios. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These have no influence on the editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find More information about Polygon’s ethics policy can be found here.