No Rest For The Wicked Early Access Review — A Suave Soulslike

Soulslike ARPGs, while not as vast, have a reputation for being a solid experience through and through thanks to their intricate and addictive gameplay. With No Rest For The Wicked, I was definitely going in with high expectations while craving for something new.

And now, after fully completing the game, I’m happy to report that, despite some roughness around the edges, it’s a fresh entry into the Soulslike genre with unique mechanics that make it a standout title.

Story And Setting

Set in the 9th Century, you are part of the Cerim, a group of highly skilled and respected individuals tasked to deal with Pestilence, a disease that’s plagued the island of Sacra. After an unexpected attack on your ship, you’re stranded ashore and must make your way to the Holy City of Sacrament.

Once you’re in the city, the political drama begins to unravel, and you begin to see how the plot thickens beyond the human-mutating disease. After the death of the old king, his successor, Magnus, orders Madrigal Seline to help Sacra recover from the Pestilence. Seline is one of the leading members of the Church, and, like most zealots, her way to cleanse it is questionable.

Captivating The Audience With Fantasy And Conflict

If you’re a fan of discourse-heavy media like Game of Thrones, a narrative like this should be right up your alley. The voice-acting is crisp, the writing and dialogue are rich and intricate, and the characters come with personality, emotion, and a genuine motive. With several hints of the supernatural scattered across the story, it builds up that unexpected and creative aspect.

The voice-acting is crisp, the writing and dialogue are rich and intricate, and the characters come with personality, emotion, and a genuine motive.

The setting perfectly captures that medieval vibe, and Sacrament itself looks absolutely gorgeous and lively. You can easily see the Pestilence disease’s corruption alongside Sacra’s good-natured force fighting back. I personally had a great time whenever I was in the city, meeting different NPCs who shared small but interesting monologues. 

Gameplay

Besides some worldly changes, No Rest For The Wicked’s core gameplay loop stays fairly similar to other soulslikes—challenging, nonlinear, and satisfying after overcoming an obstacle. The game features rich combat and exploration that resembles some of the topmost titles in the genre while taking several approaches that are either welcome or cold.

Your main objective is to kill, loot, level up, and progress. As with soulslikes, you have a Stamina meter alongside your HP, which depletes when you attack, dodge, block, and roll. You start the game as a barebones character and gradually increase different aspects like your HP, Stamina, Strength, Faith, and other attributes, developing a build that fits your playstyle.

Besides some worldly changes, No Rest For The Wicked’s core gameplay loop stays fairly similar to other soulslikes—challenging, nonlinear, and satisfying after overcoming an obstacle.

When you kill an enemy, it increases your XP, and upon leveling up after hitting a threshold, you gain 3 Attribute Points, which you can dump into your preferred attributes. Of course, these enemies also drop items like consumables, weapons, armor, and more, which you can equip and use from your inventory. Fans of the genre should be familiar with these mechanics already, and, if you’re wondering, they’re just as fun as you’d imagine.

The level and world design are absolutely fantastic, rewarding your exploration and sense of curiosity with impressive interconnectivity and heaps of chests that give you valuable loot. Ever since the starting area, I always made sure to visit every nook and cranny of a location because, in most cases, there were passages that led to totally unique biomes and dungeons.

Bold Moves That Distinguish Any Claims Of Genericism

Some of the biggest changes you’ll notice in No Rest For The Wicked are its death and enemy system, which I highly encourage other games in this genre to adapt to. Instead of losing your XP or currency, you only use your equipped items’ durability points when you die, which you can easily replenish at the Blacksmith in Sacrament.

Some of the biggest changes you’ll notice in No Rest For The Wicked are its death and enemy system, which I highly encourage other games in this genre to adapt to.

The items do become unusable when their durability drops to zero, but since it’s not permanent, I think everyone can agree death in this game is considerably less punishing. While some may argue this system takes away from the thrill of every life-and-death situation, there’s no denying that it encourages more exploration since there’s no looming fear of losing everything you collected from the past few hours.

Unlike traditional soulslike games, enemies die permanently when you kill them… sort of. Once you clear an area, it’s completely empty when you revisit it for a certain period. However, when you don’t visit that area for some time, it disappears from your map and respawns the enemies and loot. I personally really liked this change because it helped reduce repetitiveness and made runbacks significantly less tedious.

Unfortunately, some of the decisions Moon Studios took with No Rest For The Wicked weren’t as bright as the others. Firstly, the inventory system is way too annoying and intrusive. There’s tons of loot scattered across the world, but you often have to leave it behind because of your limited inventory slots. Besides that, healing is a limited commodity, which is arguably the worst way to implement it in a soulslike game.

These are some of the minor gripes I have from a gameplay perspective, but as a whole, I appreciate the new changes the developers added since they made the experience much smoother. Combined with the already fantastic combat and progression, this game is among the most fun experiences I’ve had this year.

Visuals And Performance

No Rest For The Wicked is simply stunning in terms of its looks, introducing a comic-like art style packed with vibrance, flair, and detail. Every environment is unique and perfectly displays its grim or joyous aura. As I mentioned earlier, with Sacrament, the rest of the world immerses you with its lighting, ambiance, and general art direction.

Unfortunately, a game that looks even this good doesn’t justify the performance issues it has. Even while running this title on an RTX 3070 and an Intel Core i5-12400F, I was struggling to keep 60 FPS in graphic-heavy areas. When there were tons of enemies on the screen, my framerate would dip down into the low 20s, which is simply unacceptable.

No Rest For The Wicked is simply stunning in terms of its looks, introducing a comic-like art style packed with vibrance, flair, and detail.

There weren’t any visual bugs or glitches per se, but the stability and long loading times suggest there’s definitely room for better optimization. There aren’t too many graphical options to toggle, and even dropping the Graphics Preset from Best Quality to Performance didn’t give me anything too noticeable. As such, if you’re planning to run No Rest For The Wicked on low or mid-end hardware, I suggest waiting for a few patches.

Verdict

No Rest For The Wicked seems like the next big thing in the soulslike genre if it gets the fixes it promptly needs. It incorporates a bunch of new mechanics, good and bad, from other games in such a way that, at the end of the day, you get a worthwhile experience that’ll often get you addicted.

Performance is undoubtedly the game’s biggest drawback, and it’s a shame because there’s a hidden gem beneath those technical issues. Hopefully, when they do get patched, you can expect a great title that delivers impactful gameplay, visuals, and even an interesting plot.

This has been my No Rest For The Wicked review. While you’re here, consider checking out some of our other articles. 

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