No Rest for the Wicked has most definitely surpassed my expectations. Its an artistic master piece fully crafted from fantasy elements without abandoning completely real life elements. The combat is deeply satisfactory and very intuitive from the get go. Dual wielding and weapon switching is smooth and doesn’t interrupt the flow of the combat. As far as offering a challenge, this is a game you can take at your own pace very accessibly, between weapons, move sets, and abilities you can expect a good amount of customization in your combat experience, you can mostly build your character to how fast or how slow do you want to approach the game. once you get to Sacrament you are offered many other activities to partake in: from rebuilding the town, exploring unseen areas from the map, farming areas for much needed upgrading materials, or even foraging for cooking ingredients to make various consumables with great buffs. Have I said already that the game is beautiful? As far as the levelling system goes, its a perfectly serviceable and typical action RPG levelling system, if you have played the Souls series, Bloodborne, Elden ring, etc; you’ll find it very recognizable, comfortable and intuitive, choose an attribute and increase its values to your liking. Paired with a respec system once you unlock it at the crucible, makes it extremely easy to try any build at your heart’s content as long as you can afford it. The resetting of the map is a great tool to make every and all areas as repayable as possible, and you’ll have to, if you want to experience everything this game can offer retracing your steps for materials and enemy grinding is highly build upon. Enemy variety is very good for just this first part, with many factions to take on all with their unique drops, from weapons and armours, to quick use items like bombs and vials that will make your combat experience even more versatile (I personally love the bird people). But that is as far as my most sincere praising will go for now, there is much to love and like from this game but I also want to take a time to talk about what I think it can be improved upon. I feel like, the potential for this game is (in my opinion) greatly unmatched. I don’t know what the devs have prepared for the 1.0 release but I don’t want to be disappointed because I truthfully believe it can become a just PERFECT GAME. First of all I would like to address the elephant in the room: Give us a farm. Please? There is a area in the town with unused plots to farm and omg that would be an incredibly great addition. it may detract a bit from the foraging and gathering style to resource farming the game already has, but I think the experience would benefit from a more profound sandbox experience, and to that I would add my complains (or more like suggestions) to the town systems. Sacrament is beautiful (I doubt you can actually make anything ugly with this art style, but not for lack of trying tho) but you know what is even more beautiful? Marin Village. From the start the game offers you multiple options for housing, all around Sacrament you’ll find a verity of houses where you can do your living, crafting, forging and mad alchemy stuff, and its very generous for the space many options offer, but I would say that we could have many other options outside of Sacrament, and so the plots of land for farming. I am sure 1.0 will come with many other towns and even cities and some of us probably would think about the possibility of having your base of operations somewhere else (or many bases). Those are honestly my main “issues” with the game. Now for mor subjective opinions: The pacing of the first chapter of the story has felt a bit rushed, I think we cold use more secondary objectives, to build on the cathartic moment with the madrigal at the end. Although id say combat options and versatility are plenty enough I would say the game would benefit outstandingly from a more in-depth approach in the likes of path of exile or Remnant 2 maybe. Procedural generating, now it may be extremely complex for the length the development has been going at this point but is one of my favourite things from Remnant 2, I understand what the development team was going for with the map, but sometimes a bit more of randomness (specially in map generation, whether it might be for dungeons or specific map areas) goes a very long way for replay value and continuous exploration. Oh, I would like to have a pet please, a companion with its own usefulness, for carrying objects maybe? A bit of support in combat? or out of combat? What else? Oh, and lastly, we arrive at this island with one purpose only, many NPC’s make it very clear that we only exist to confront the pestilence, but we’ve been given the chance to be more than that helping rebuild Sacrament, Why not add more areas that need our help in the reconstruction process of the island, not only so the people might see us differently, but for ourselves, to feel we are actually rebuilding our home?
And that is a big part of what I have to say about No Rest for the Wicked. This game really has the potential to become one of my favourite games of all time. I cant really say anything bad about it, it just feels right to me, and I have a pretty modest PC, and it just works. Amazingly. Everything does. There are areas for improvement off course, like in everything, but specially for this game, the improvements can elevate it to a completely different level. I have a lot of faith in the 1.0 release, and I know, that weather the devs read this review and/or add or not any of my suggestions, I’ll enjoy it deeply. Absolutely recommended.
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