There ain’t no rest for the wicked, money don’t grow on trees, and this stupid intro doesn’t do justice to the new ARPG superstar, No Rest For The Wicked. Recently entering early access, this title already shows huge potential to revolutionize its genre, and most certainly will go down as one of 2024’s most interesting releases.
The first thing I have to say about No Rest For The Wicked is how much I adore the game’s visuals.
No Rest For The Wicked is highly stylized, with a sort of oil painting-ish look that fits the dark fantasy setting phenomenally, and one never gets tired of looking at it. I sat through every cutscene with my finger on the screenshot button. I found myself taking unnecessary damage in fights to try and capture cool moments of the game’s stunning art style and fantastic animations coming together. The real impressiveness of No Rest For The Wicked’s visuals lies beyond just its well-painted models, with the real impressive work being cinematography.
Many ARPG titles, or at least those I have experience playing, use the top-down camera angle as a graphical crutch. That might sound a little mean, but there’s definitely merit in the idea that if you lock a player’s camera to one position, it is much easier to design an environment. Less viewable angles mean less total area to make pretty and presentable.
No Rest For The Wicked does the opposite and actually uses its controlled camera to create cinematic spectacles of its levels. It exploits the control of your vision to show off raging fires, daunting natural monuments, and other gorgeous moments you might not appreciate as much from a totally fixed camera angle.
While this can make a lot of the game feel like a little movie playing out in front of you, the ever-shifting camera can also make physically navigating the map difficult. With the ever-moving camera, a non-linear level design, and the ability to climb up on a lot of the terrain and shimmy along gaps, it can sometimes be hard to know exactly where you’re supposed to be going. I often found false paths opening up to me. That is, I thought I found a way forward, only to realize it was just some rocks or terrain pieces never designed to be a trail to anywhere.
In a lot of ARPG games, the design philosophy seems to revolve around putting you against huge hordes of much weaker enemies. Generally, in these types of games, you’ll fight through wave after wave of “mob” enemies, cycling through abilities and more or less holding your ground or otherwise taking a lot of damage and dishing it back out in turn, feeling far superior to the little gremlins who seek to overwhelm you with numbers. No Rest For The Wicked takes a different route.
I would say No Rest For The Wicked almost feels like a Soulslike; Enemies you run up against usually hit harder, more frequently, and have more health than you do, or at least more than your stamina bar can produce enough attacks to take down in one flurry. If you played as you would in Diablo, you’d find yourself quickly exposed and taking a hefty beating.
Instead, you have to pace yourself. Learn enemy move sets, time perfect dodges or parries, and make your stamina bar count. I mistakenly approached enemies like an invincible RPG hero at first. Still, once I noticed how much No Rest For The Wicked’s encounters felt like a Souls fight, I changed my approach and noticed a remarkable difference.
The similarities don’t end there: Bonfire-like save points, the open-ended level design, the way items are discovered, and a suspiciously flask-like eating mechanic. The game clearly wears its inspirations on its sleeve, and it is just another way in which No Rest For The Wicked is remarkably unique in its genre.
Even with all this said, No Rest For The Wicked has one glaring issue that other Soulslike don’t, which negatively affects the game balance: Enemies and health refills don’t respawn.
To clarify, when you kill an enemy, they are dead. Same thing when you gather resources in an area or use your healing items, which are food. The issue therein lies when you, like me, get stuck on a boss. If you play the fights poorly, as I do, you can find yourself respawning with no more food and no easy way to get more, which only further increases the fight’s difficulty and possibly hardsticks you to that encounter. Furthermore, having no enemies around means you can’t farm up XP, collect levels, and challenge the boss on better terms.
Now, I could be incorrect, and there might be some way to trigger the respawning of enemies and materials, but in my experience so far with the game, there isn’t, and the workaround I’ve seen players suggesting is to enter a new game using your leveled character.
In Dark Souls and other similar titles, no matter how difficult an encounter, I always feel like the hill isn’t impossible; I can always work hard to come back stronger. Find better gear. Et Cetera. However, in No Rest For The Wicked, I found myself penniless and itemless, literally stuck at the gates of a boss with no means to progress other than simply “get gud.”
Of course, being in Early Access, No Rest For The Wicked has a few bugs you may stumble into as well. I found several areas on maps where you could accidentally slip out of the world and fall to your death, as well as the language suddenly changing on a few dialogue prompts. Of course, it’s hard to hard this against the game since Early Access is designed to root out and fix these little problems.
All in all, No Rest For The Wicked is a highly promising game that can only improve during its time in Early Access. It makes exciting changes to the ARPG formula, has phenomenal art and visuals, and has fun combat. While I would like to see some changes addressed to the game’s balance (particularly in the ability for players to grind XP / levels), it has quickly become one of my new favorites.
Pros:
- Impressive changes to the ARPG formula and thrilling souls-like gameplay
- Fantastic art, cinematography, writing and characters
- Hours upon hours of content and potentially endless replayability, especially as multiplayer is fleshed out
Cons:
- An arguably oppressive XP system with little to no backtracking. Once you kill a mob, they’re dead, limiting how much experience you can gain on a single map
- Something of a resource grind / collectathon that takes away from the action RPG gameplay
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