Moon Studios is a company that you may know for both Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps, two incredible indie platformers. The company’s next and most recent game is No Rest for the Wicked, a dramatic departure from their previous two games. Where the company’s previous games surround cute little spirits and wild animals adventuring through magical forests, No Rest is a strange, fantastical, and at times terrifying story. The plot surrounds the player, a mythical holy warrior called a Cerim travelling to the island of Isola Sacra to fight back the monsters created by a curse called the Pestilence. The creatures created by the Pestilence are often Lovecraftian abominations, messes of tentacles and eyes and teeth and worms. It’s certainly not a game for everyone, but for the right crowd it is a thoroughly enjoyable experience. At a glance, it’s some solid fun! Now, let’s delve into the details of this game. 

And as a note, this game is in early access on Steam, so what is available right now is merely a taste of what is to come.

What makes this game even more of a departure from Moon Studio’s previous games is that this game uses an isometric top-down camera angle; we observe our player from above as they travel through the vistas of Isola Sacra. From this vantage point, we get a very purposeful look at the game’s art direction. Many of the places in the game are visually distinct, boasting a dark and oppressive atmosphere in the isle’s most dangerous corners, and giving the player a sense of fragile safety in the high-walled cities and sanctuaries scattered throughout. Even in the beautiful and imposing halls we see in the game’s trailers, everything still manages to feel impressively old and decayed. It tells us that there are things larger than us in this world, that we don’t really belong here. 

The style is certainly unique especially when it comes to the heavily stylized characters that populate the isle. The character models are certainly built to be seen from that top-down perspective, but even then many of them are quite exaggerated in a fun way that seems highly reminiscent of Ori’s signature art style. The animations are all carefully done and almost cartoonish in a way that is somehow goofy but also does not betray that isle’s dismal tone. When your character swings a big axe you can see their body stretch and bend– only to follow with a terrifying smash into your enemy that feels weighty and real.

And this brings us to the game’s combat system. The phrase ‘souls-like’ is relatively overdone and has been watered down to mean ‘difficult,’ but No Rest’s combat system is genuinely similar to Dark Souls on a mechanical level. Instead of pressing as many buttons as possible or mindlessly spamming the attack button, No Rest insists that you wait and strategize. Most of your attacks have some real weight to them only because your character spends a frankly ludicrous amount of time winding them up: the heaviest great hammers can really take upwards of a second or more from pressing the attack button to the hit actually landing– if it even connects, that is.

The game demands that you listen and focus. Each enemy has preset attack patterns which they telegraph obviously enough for you to learn them with some effort. After which, instead of getting steamrolled, you are gracefully sidestepping all of their attacks and making your own attacks in concert. This is how Dark Souls makes their combat system so exacting and infuriating at times, but it is used beautifully in No Rest for the Wicked to make each fight no matter how big or small seem real, and just as deadly as its beautifully terrifying designs suggest.

And speaking of Dark Souls, the game’s progression system is also very reminiscent of Dark Souls. That is to say, it’s basically the same– you have a series of stats that govern your basic attributes: health, weapon damage, et cetera– and you get to increase these stats by a little each time you level up. It’s certainly tried and true, and allows each player to play the game according to their own desires. If you want to swing around your big sword, you increase your strength, but if you want to cast spells then you should increase your intelligence, and so forth. This is a more in depth look at Dark Souls’ brutal combat system.

But, of course not everything about this game is so beautiful and fun. The crafting system, for example, is just plain boring. Many of the items that you can craft have real life waiting times associated with them, which may be an interesting mechanic if this were Clash of Clans. Here, it’s an unnecessary time drain that simply leaves you either waiting on your phone for five minutes or forgetting about it for the next thirty. What’s more, a lot of the crafting materials are well hidden in the environment and only reappear after a set of real life time, again making you wait to even try to upgrade your gear.

And while exploring the game’s beautiful locales is fun the first time or two, every time you need to go back (because collecting these resources is practically mandatory for progression) it gets a little less special. It’s also pretty unclear when exactly enemies respawn after you kill them, so after you clear an area you’re mostly just running around looking for bad guys to stomp.

Speaking of the exploration, it uses a lot of interesting ideas but because of the camera angle, some things are just unreasonably hidden or difficult to get a hang of because you’re not sure what direction you’re actually looking in. There is one jumping puzzle near the end of the early access which had me stuck for a good while just because it was easy to miss and the walk back was pretty grueling after a while.

Of course, this being an early access title, there is plenty missing from the game that leaves it feeling pretty shallow once you complete all the available content. Not even mentioning the bugs that prove to be a plague (haha) in your experience. By locking you out of progression or accidentally deleting your whole save file. The early access certainly has a lot to do, but once you do it, well, you’re left just waiting for the rest of the game to appear. And the devs have not exactly been forthcoming with details, so there has not been much to wait for.

But, not all hope is lost. At the time of writing this, Moon Studios has teased the release of their next upcoming update to the game, called the Breach in a frankly awesome teaser trailer which should prove to breathe some life into the game again while everyone waits for it to worm its way out of early access. So if you’ve got an extra $40 to drop on a hot new game, you can play the early access right now on Steam!

If you’re looking for more game reviews like this, you can find plenty of them over at Esteemed Steam Games. If you wanna read more about Souls-like games like this, then check out the linked article about the different endings in FromSoftware’s Elden Ring.