No Rest for the Wicked has the Bones of a Great Game

My thoughts and feelings for No Rest for the Wicked are complicated, and I'm most certainly conflicted by it all. By all means, this is a game made for me: Dark fantasy? Check. Soulslike? Check. Absolutely amazing art and sound design? It's all there. At the same time, No Rest for the Wicked has a long way to go before it realizes its incredible potential.

No Rest for the Wicked's Wild World

To say that No Rest for the Wicked is a departure from Moon Studios' other two games -- Ori and the Blind Forest along with its sequel -- well, that's an understatement. No Rest for the Wicked is oppressively dark and sinister, a contrast to the (usually) hopeful and often cute themes of Ori.

Like Ori, No Rest for the Wicked is incredibly stylized, with its human characters sporting comically long arms and exaggerated facial features. There's a look as though the characters and world were touched with a paintbrush, which is no doubt extremely difficult to pull off: Moon Studios nails it in artistic design.

The world is richly detailed and densely packed with all manner of decor, but the ambiance and lighting Moon achieves with No Rest for the Wicked is remarkable. It complements the brooding atmosphere of No Rest for the Wicked's dour world perfectly, and the thing I look forward to most is how they can continue to develop this world.

Later updates will no doubt have their own spectacle even more grand than what we see at launch, but I do worry about the overall performance of No Rest for the Wicked. This is a game world packed with a dense amount of foliage and other objects and makes heavy use of weather effects and lighting to pull off such an incredible-looking game.

No Rest for the Wicked chugs in many areas, making it hard to recommend until these issues are ironed out. Just about every hotfix has addressed performance in one way or another, but there's still a long way to go. The implementation of DLSS is on the way, which should at least remedy some of this game's performance woes.

The graphics options weren't as customizable as I'd like, though I was able to limit my FPS to 60 in order to prevent massive amounts of stuttering. Even then, frames will dip in areas like the city of Sacrament, where a wide array of NPCs inhabit.

The Soulslike Roots of No Rest for the Wicked

No Rest for the Wicked is a Soulslike, so as you might imagine, playing such a game can be frustrating when the performance isn't up to snuff. Dodging attacks, striking when the time is right, parrying, and more carry over from your other Soulslike games, so a lot of your skills from other games are applicable here.

That's what I'd like to think, at least. I'm pretty good at Souls games -- I've played and completed plenty -- but No Rest for the Wicked really puts you through the wringer. Even the most basic enemies are exceedingly aggressive and have unpredictably long reach with their attacks. If you get hit, these enemies do not pull their punches.

So yes, health can deplete quickly if you're not careful, though I didn't find it quite as annoying as trying to manage my own stamina. While a fix aimed to remedy this, stamina consumption still seems a bit too high, especially if you prefer using strength-based weapons like me.

The slow, cumbersome claymore I carried packed a punch and made short work of bandits -- if it hit them. Better hope you get that swing to connect, or else you'll be punished dearly. And with the stamina consumption being as it is, it's hard to make follow-up attacks or dodge without taking a breather.

Other than that, many of No Rest for the Wicked's systems are nuisances. Every step of the way, the game aims to burden the player. Like many Soulslikes, players have an equipment load that determines how lithe they are. The more armor you have, the harder it is to move around. If you have a lot of weight in your kit, you'll do the "fat roll" that's slow.

Players start out with such a low equip load count, it's hard to have any sort of armor set on without making you slow. You should be able to wear a full set of leather armor without needing to fat roll, but that is not the case here unless you allocate points from level-up to have things take up less weight.

There are a few other things you can do, like enchant your weapons and armor to take up less weight, but at least near the start of No Rest for the Wicked, everything feels a bit too punishing. Not to mention you're limited in inventory space, and with a more robust crafting system than other Soulslike games, you'll be collecting a lot.

Though certainly, when it clicks, it's a blast. The combat is polished and each weapon type has its own set of moves that feel useful in their own ways. Level design requires some annoying platforming, but it also incentivizes exploration and the top-down layout makes No Rest for the Wicked feel a bit more unique in terms of other games in the genre.

For now, No Rest for the Wicked is too unpleasant to play. Between its performance and balance issues, along with inventory woes,  it is much preferable to wait until Moon finds a compromise for these issues. If they're able to fix No Rest for the Wicked's flaws -- and I believe they will -- there's no doubt this could go down as a classic.

No Rest for the Wicked was previewed on PC with a code provided by the publisher over roughly 10 hours of gameplay. All screenshots in this review were taken by the reviewer during gameplay.