As a fan of both aRPGs (especially Diablo 1 and 2) and Souls-like games (especially Demon Souls and DS1), this game is a dream come true for me. The game draws heavily from these genres and incorporates a few ideas from farm sims and metroidvanias - drawing on their background from Ori - to create something bold and unique.

Diablo 1 (heavy influence): Includes RNG (loot and enemy spawns), isometric view, centralized hub, dark atmosphere, replay-ability, fixed camera etc. What I particularly love about their approach to the genre is how they've moved away from the mindless combat of current aRPGs, which typically involve running around, 'exploding the screen' with ridiculous numbers for damage, stats, currencies etc.

Dark Souls (heavy influence): Features methodical, visceral, tactical combat with rewards for well-timed dodges and parries, stamina management, sparse save points and waypoints, and tougher boss fights.

Farm sims (light influence): Allows us to collect resources outside the main hub to help build your main base, create furniture, etc.

Metroidvanias/Ori (light influence): Offers interconnected paths across a centralized map, with plenty of hidden treasures and some platforming elements (crossings and jumps).

People who are not fans of the current state of aRPGs—especially end-game combat and the screen clutter typical of games like Diablo 3 and Path of Exile—appreciates the isometric view w/ fixed camera and a tactical approach to combat.

aRPG and/or Dark Souls purists who enjoy these games for what they are and are not too open to mixed ideas. Even so, I urge you to give this unique gem a try—at least reach the main hub and unlock some of the side missions there—before you completely dismiss it.

Stay true to your vision. Feedback is crucial for all games, but be careful not to cater too much to a particular group of fans (aRPG fans might ask to speed up everything, DS purists might ask for more unforgiving combat, etc.). The most recent game to completely ruin its premise for a more tactical approach to combat was Diablo 4. The game was ruined by this feedback, and the current endgame already has the mindless gameplay of running around exploding the screen like D3 and PoE, ‘gold sink’ where you spend billions of gold to perform simple tasks like item re-rolling, builds causing trillions of damage etc—it's sad. So far, PoE 2 also has a strong vision of what they believe is the evolution of aRPGs and I truly hope you both stay true to it.

Performance is king. FPS dips are quite frequent, and I have a 3090Ti. Also, consider that not everybody has an NVIDIA card, so make sure to add both DLSS and AMD FSR tech as soon as possible.

Build diversity. I'm only level 16, but so far, Archer and Mage pure builds—even building 100% focus—are not possible and just a gimmick (spells and arrows consume focus and don't have a basic attack to their weapons, needs to be addressed ASAP in my opinion for enthusiasts of ranged builds). Feel free to correct me if pure ranged builds are possible past a certain level (or by acquiring specific unique items); even so, it should be 100% possible from level 1 onward if you want to promote build diversity from the start and win over people who hate melee combat (lots of people).

Take your time before releasing the multiplayer patch. It is one of the most complex aspects to introduce in any game, and the number of bugs will skyrocket. It is a feature that many people look forward to, and they will get super frustrated if you release it in an alpha stage.

Loot and RNG. I know loot is full RNG, but the loot from bosses/mini-bosses could see a slight increase in rarity. Having bosses / mini-bosses dropping trash loot is detrimental to the experience. Fixing this would add to the 'dopamine effect' from aRPGs. :D

Lastly, thank you for spending the last six years creating my dream game. I wish you the best of luck!

No Rest for the Oven. It still needs to cook, but there is a game here (which is more than I can say about other "games").

These are some suggestions for the devs and some of my pain points from my initial playthrough. By no means do they have to change all of them in the way described below. So, off the top of my head:
- Add key rebinding as soon as possible.
- Add a "Quit to Desktop" button. Can't have a PC game without that one - They added this one in Hotfix 3
- When speaking with NPCs, reading notes or kicking ladders, make it so the character does not need to face it to interact.
- Environment readability needs to be improved. Sometimes you can't see things like flowers/shrooms because they blend with the background colors.
- Camera sometimes moves in a position where you can't see your character.
- I get that the game should be hard, but it would be nice if the monster/boss attacks were better telegraphed. (Example: you should be able to see where a bomb flying towards you will land, a chime sound when you can parry, the autotarget dot should reflect what kind of action you can do to that monster, etc) This goes a long way towards improving how the combat feels.
- Movement (especially during combat) is sluggish. Not sure if enemies input read, but if they do, it would be nice for us to have animation cancelling when doing dodges, would make it more responsive.
- Durability is useless and has no place here. It does not add to any of the mechanics, it is just a pain for the player and not fun at all.

*Edit 1: So I've played a bit before and after the Hotfix:
- Before the hotfix, I was soft-locked after beating the 1st boss at level 4. No equipment or weapons were dropping so I kept dying to the respawned enemies, that seemed to be more difficult during the day, until I had no gold to repair. It was just frustrating. Thankfully the hotfix has made it so you can get out of this death spiral and actually continue the game.
- Durability is better now, but I am still of the opinion that it doesn't add to the game. It is just a way to force us to go into town and check in with all the NPCs. Tedious.
- I don't think there is any need for timers when building improvements. Why wait 15 minutes to an hour or more for a simple upgrade?
- Inventory management and the fact that you have to unlock rows for each separate tab takes away from improving your character. It makes me prioritize the resource tab upgrade (since that fills up the fastest) instead of anything else.
- It would be nice if all upgrading equipment would take into account the items that are in the community chest, instead of making me run from and towards the community chest.
- The stamina fix has made it better to time swings and combos. Still punishing, but much more fair.
- At least one of the heavy enemies has a double bomb throw. This is next to impossible to dodge since he throws them one after the other and staggers you both times, while also setting you on fire. Would be good to have at least a bit of a delay between throws to give time to dodge.

*Edit 2: Seems like with Hotfix 3 they've really improved performance and added a camera zoom option as well.

All in all I feel it's pretty decent for an Early Access game. I've left it for now and will return when the game will be out of Early Access. The quick response to feedback makes me really hopeful that devs will make a true gem. The world building, story characters, artistic direction is top notch, and, with time, the gameplay will be on par as well.

I was really anticipated for this release, since i adore moon studios for their ori masterpieces and also love dark fantasy rpgs and character action games in general. since i don't care much about the diablo stereotype of arpgs, their promise about changing up the genre instantly got me hooked. i've bought no rest for the wicked the moment it got released and was genuinely satisfied from what is there already and also really surprised by the sheer amount of negative reviews and overly harsh critique for a day 1 early access release, as it turned out no rest for the wicked is a masterpiece in the making.

what i liked:


(+) immersion and atmosphere is definitely one of it's biggest strengths. everything works out so well and this one will shape into one of the best dark fantasy experiences ever made.

(+) the combat is also one of the major selling points of the game. it's rather slow and "methodical", feels heavy and impactful - which i personally like a lot. enemy attacks are well telegraphed and good to read, which is pretty impressive for an iso game with a fixed camera. probably one of the best isometric action combat systems ever created to date, even in this early version of the game.

(+) build variety is already decent. a lot of different weapons, scaling with different stats and up to 4 weapon arts per weapon, which can be extracted from other weapons to mix and match your favorite setup.

(+) interaction with your surroundings is stunning for an isometric game and feels very well naturally implemented in the best possible way.

(+) absolutely loving the lore and world building - a lot of flavor texts and backstory going on. gimme more!

(+) obviously can't say much about story as a whole, but what's already in the game, is really intriguing and well made. can't wait for more!

(+) level design is magnificent and well thought out. there's a lot of connectivity going and secrets all over the place. exploration will be rewarded.

(+) kinda liking the game-play loop in general. you'll be backtracking a lot after finishing the story for dailies and weeklies, especially at this stage since there aren't as many levels live yet, but things are always changing a bit. enemies grow not only in power level, but will be replaced with other types and variants as well to keep things fresh. hell, i've even had an occurrence where suddenly a hole in the wall which served as a passage got shut down.

(+) superb art style and graphics. the art direction is heavily stylized, grimy and generally very dark - absolutely lovely. lightning and shadows doing a lot of work as well.

(+) ost and sound design is top notch. calm, somber and enigmatic most of the time, but not shy to spice things up at the right moment. vinyl when?

(+) the voice over is genuinely great! they've got a decent cast of voice actors and every single npc in the game is fully voiced, even the more trivial ones, whom don't even serve a purpose for a quest or so. excellent.

(+) dialogue quality / writing is pretty forceful as well. even the more subsidiary npcs got some interesting bits and pieces to say, for the most part.

(+) town development - it's lovely to upgrade the merchants and see the city grow in actuality.

(+) didn't expect player housing at all and i like it. placing can be a tad bit finicky and i can't tell how in depth it will be, but it's a neat touch for sure.

(+) reasonable crafting to soothe the equipment rng. // early access patch 1 added crafting from storage which was basically my only little gripe with the crafting.

(+) physics are so well made. it's always a pleasure to watch a tree falling down a hill or so. small things like that make the game really stand out.


what felt debatable to me:


(~) map markers definitely coming in handy for the various chests and resources, but they're way too limited to make real use of. there shouldn't be a cap for placing markers on the map, at least for the more generic ones. also there has to be an option in the future to show markers only on the map and not on the edges of the screen while playing, it just hurts the immersion and serves basically no real purpose as it is.

(~) people complained a lot about the repair costs in a game with a higher difficulty and souls combat. i can tell you, it's whatever. even if you're dying a lot, the repairs are dirt cheap and you'll have a steady income of money anyway.

(~) another complaint was about the inventory size. let me tell you as much, it's not as restrictive as people make it out to be and part of the character progression. not going to say much more, because of potential spoilers.

(~) missing qol features - it's an early access game. nothing more to say. if you can't handle missing qol, better stop playing early access games in general. you're paying for play-testing an unfinished game. // early access patch 1 added keyboard remapping.

(~) performance issues - performance isn't the best. demanding on the hardware, low overall fps, some frame-drops here and there, but at the end of the day the game is more than playable as it is. haven't had a single crash so far. also same as qol features - this game just released into early access, performance instabilities are more than expected. // performance definitely increased with early access patch 1 and my frame-rate is much better now. people who experienced performance issues on early access release, might give it another go.

(~) equipment weight. it's fine, not much more to say. if you've played souls or which is using a similar approach to equipment weight, you won't have a single issue. then again if you mindlessly put on every single item (especially in the beginning) without activating a single brain cell.. well, you'll be punished harshly for doing so. fighting overweight is no joy. it's kinda funny, the first weapon you'll find after the tutorial is a heavy greatsword (at least in my case), so dipping into heavy equipment weight is much expected. either get a more lightweight weapon or don't equip an armor on every single slot until you put enough points into the appropriate equipment weight stat.

(~) so early access patch 1 improved the inventory logic for the most part. the separation of cooking items/meals, miscellaneous crafting items and other consumables into their respective inventory tab is a welcome change, but putting runes as well as housing items in the weapon/armor tab is really bad. this one was already quite contested and there is no need to bloat it up with even more things. both runes and housing items could very well use their own inventory tab, but for the love of god, remove them at least from the weapon and armor one / revert this change.


what i didn't like:


(-) obtaining the resting bonus takes 4 hours and only if you're sleeping in a tavern bad. concept is neat, takes too long to achieve tho.

(-) farming clay is kinda too rng for my taste, especially compared to other resources.

(-) at times the information in dailies is rather sparse and you have to search blindly for the last missing enemy.

(-) food and utility quick slot items reset to a default or random (i don't get the logic) item after every game restart. pretty annoying, i have to admit. should be an easy fix tho. // got fixed with early access patch 1.


I'll update this review as i keep playing and as soon as updates or bigger changes coming in.

The core gameplay is absolutely incredible. They have already released THREE patches to the game in a span of FOUR days. This dev team is some next level stuff. Also everything else about the game is amazing (besides inventory management).

Overall recommend,. Im having a lot of fun. But as a fellow game dev I have some feedback for developers as they finish the polish on this one:

No Rest for the GPU

No Rest For The Wicked Early Access came out today, and I played for 23 and a half hours and beat everything in the game. I beat the main story, all the side quests, all the rewards, all the challenges, and after you've done all that, there's a bit of endgame, and I played some of that, too. I could have gone further in the "crucible part" of the endgame, but other than that, I beat everything the game has to offer so far, so I wanted to do a review.

After playing the game, many things went well, and there is much room for improvement. I'm a Dark Souls and Elden Ring lover. One of the most frequent questions people ask about this game is whether it's more like Dark Souls or ARPG, and to me, it feels like a combination of both genres for many different reasons; first of all, the combat is prolonged and very organized, it's not like "Last Epoch" or "Diablo 4" unless you're fighting an Uber boss. Still, even every rat in this game's simple enemy category can trouble you. For example, I fought a couple of bosses and got 99% of their health; I made a mistake, took 100 damage for it, and died instantly. If you do one thing wrong, you can be punished instantly. You're going to die a lot, but that's not going to stop you from trying. That way, you can level up more, but it will also require much effort. That's why the game always feels quite rugged. The maximum level limit in the game is currently 30. I am currently at level 30 and cannot level up any further.

I have a robust system that I always play on Max settings and I never had any problems; it was very nice. Many people who didn't have such a great system struggled and were surprised and quite upset that this was Early Access. Of course, DLSS will come. We'll hope they do more development, and then it should come to console and other things, but many people voiced that they had performance issues; some had to return the game outright because even some streamers with pretty good PCs weren't running. I didn't have that problem with anything else performance-related. I played the game with the controller, and this game is designed for controllers. When I tried it with a keyboard and mouse duo, the game felt restricted to me. For this reason, I can understand the complaints of those who use Mouse+Keyboard.

I've been waiting for this game for a long time and loved it. The environment was beautiful, the story was excellent, and I loved the voice acting; it was one of the best I've ever heard in any game. It was an incredible job. I enjoyed the detail of the bosses, and I was very impressed. I enjoyed fighting different types of enemies on various maps. I loved the little puzzles I encountered on the maps and the secrets they put everywhere; it was very cool. Overall, I also liked the items and the process of choosing and upgrading different weapons. Apart from that, I felt good when I got some health regeneration, a vital mechanic in the survival game.

Many streamers I read or watch constantly talk about the difficulty and brutality of the game and discuss it. Dear friends, yes, you will die a lot. You die a lot. In this sense, there is no problem. The biggest problem is that when you die, you lose the durability of everything. As a result, your equipment breaks. Immediately afterward, you move to a town called Sacrament. And after you go to the Sacrament, you have to go to the blacksmith on the left-hand step; okay, you go to the blacksmith, you repair your equipment, and then you go on your merry way, right? I hear a lot of people saying that stamina is one of the biggest problems; stamina is a stupid mechanic to them because they die all the time. Then you must go back to the blacksmith and spend gold. This sucks for most players, and I have no problem with that! I don't have a problem with the penalty for dying. I'm familiar with that from the Dark Souls series. I don't have a problem with paying gold, and I don't have a problem with gold being valuable. I wish the blacksmith were closer, but that's a trivial matter now.

Let's get to the point where this could be more pleasant. Your gathering tools are durable! Your shovel, your pickaxe, your fishing rod, and your woodcutter's axe. These have durability, and it's pretty unpleasant to have durability on them. For example, you have a place to go for your mining pickaxe. You have reached there. Do you want to know what happens to me every time? Please forget the deaths you have experienced. I extract two or three ore nodes, and my pickaxe breaks. When the durability reaches zero, it breaks instantly. Your pickaxe is destroyed. So, whenever I'm halfway through mining, I must keep buying new pickaxes. I have to carry an extra shovel and pickaxe with me, but in the meantime, what I'm carrying is weighing me down, slowing down, and restricting my movement. This system could be better. At the very least, the durability mechanic should be eliminated for gathering tools like pickaxes, shovels, and axes as soon as possible. At the very least, prevent my pickaxe or axe from completely disappearing when it runs out of stamina. Let me go with these items and repair them. Buying new ones is both inconvenient and expensive. Also, the rate at which these tools lose their durability is relatively high. This needs to be examined tremendously.

My biggest problem with the game is the same as what everyone else has said, and I can describe it to you. This game has the worst inventory and stash management I've ever played. I can't even begin to describe in words how bad it is. First, if you just started playing, you might not notice it. It takes a while to see it, but you will feel the impact once you start playing. Looking at each item individually and not being able to compare between items is a considerable shortcoming. The developers must overhaul the inventory management as soon as possible to make it easier.

At one point in the game, you will buy a house. I immediately purchased a house. What was the first thing I did in my house? I put as many stashes of 20 slots in it as possible. This made me very angry because the game tells you: Hey, take this shovel, cut down this tree, fishes there, okay? I'm doing the activities that you want me to do. I'm playing the game, and you need to do that because there are a lot of different crafting and building your city, as well as stuff like that. If you want to pressure me not to collect everything reasonably, you have to let me extract my ore/materials in peace. Our current inventory management system will drive people crazy when players go far enough. For this, the developers should immediately simplify and fix this system.

One of my favorite things about the game is that you mustn't block it directly when fighting an enemy. Parrying or rolling towards them is one of the best moves to make. Once you memorize the attack patterns of monsters in general, you will start to enjoy the fights more. Yes, but after continuously gaining experience and beating everything, you'll want more content. But it's important to remember that the game is still in early access. More content and mechanics will come to the game. There are already roadmaps available. The game plays itself even as it is. The locations, the color palette, and the voiceovers are perfect. I look at the works company positively. The shortcomings and problems in this game can be easily fixed. Since it is early access, there will be performance issues. However, adding technologies like DLSS and Frame Generation to the game will help solve these problems. Keyboard mouse controls can be improved. By fixing the stash and inventory area and systems, the game can come to a much better position.

I loved this game like crazy and look forward to playing it again when some updates come out. This is my brutally honest opinion of the game. This game finds a satisfying middle ground between Souls like ARPG and loot games. Still, I can't wait to see where the makers vision leads.

No Rest for the Dev

This game is truly exceptional with a few, very important caveats. The combat is incredibly well tuned with a heft that makes the player feel strong while offering "weapon arts" that keep things spicy. The world design shows an incredible amount of polish and heart; wherein many times I opened a shortcut and said aloud "that is so clever!". This interconnected world is highlighted by an ingenious fast travel system that links the player between the hub and their most recent checkpoint. This allows the player respite when they need it, but does not trivialize exploration like most fast travel systems. Furthermore, fog-of-war re-envelops previously cleared areas and with it comes new and varied enemies, communicating the presence of a power vacuum left in the player's wake. These systems combine together to form the spine of one of the most compelling games I have played in the last few years.

Then we get to the caveats. Say you find a halberd that you can wield, and you would like to upgrade it before trying out the new boss. You go to the smithy and you realize that you need more iron ingots to upgrade it. Luckily you have iron ore, but you need to smelt it down. Smelting down one iron ore takes five minutes of real time, and you need four total to upgrade your weapon. These little time killers kept poking up repeatedly when I was enjoying No Rest for the Wicked almost to say "No remember, this is a real RPG. Immersion is more important than fun. Fun can wait." If you want smelting to not be as much of a bore, you need to upgrade the smithy. To do so you need to spend iron, wood, and clay (the same resources needed to upgrade all other merchants, so I hope you like watching the tree chopping animation) and then wait 4 hours of real life time (why even have an in-game clock?) as the construction happens. One could argue that this adds to realism, but considering that the smithy is open the whole time and there is no visible construction, I don't really buy it.

All of this is not to say that I think friction is bad, I like friction in games. But locking inventory slots away from the player, then requiring them to carry large amounts of resources to upgrade Sacrament, then timing them out for hours to see the fruits of their labor (read as hours of grinding tree cutting, mining, and digging)? That is not friction, that is simply antifun.

I am normally not one to write a review like this, but I genuinely think that if the topics of my first and second paragraphs are expanded upon and culled entirely in the full release, respectively, No Rest for the Wicked has the chance to be a truly once in a lifetime game. I hope they get it right while it is still in the oven.

Had a little fun in the tutorial area, but I'm going to give it some time off now.

This is a gem in the making so I'm not going to refund it, just wait for stuff to get fixed and update my review accordingly.

Here is what I like and didn't like about the game.


1. The game is beautiful. I love the art style and the painted look of the game. It's highly stylized, but dark. Reminds me of the art direction of Dishonored. The look is consistent and professional. The game looks like it costs more than it does.

2. Moving and hitting stuff is satisfying and feels right. I'm not taking this for granted. I've refunded games after 5 minutes of gameplay in the past for general unpolished clunkiness. This isn't it.

3. This is a unique game. You never played something like this before, so don't buy this if you expect Diablo mixed with Dark Souls. Yes, it combines mechanics from similar games, but the end result is completely different. It won't shower you with loot. The itemization is meticulous and purposeful. There is some randomization, but only in the correct places. Combat utilizes space differently than Souls games, because of the camera angle. This game prides itself on doing things differently. I appreciate that.

4. It's rich in customization. Items are random, therefore, you need to make decisions on the fly. You can look up a build online, but if you find a really cool item for something else, that won't help you much. It encourages learning the game and staying in the moment, instead of going straight to some wiki. I love that.

5. A cinematic experience. I'm very much intrigued by the story and the characters right from the start. Everything is voice acted and the characters have personalities. I really hope the game gets to a stable state so I wont have to watch everything online.


1. Resource collecting?. Some mechanics have no place in this game to the point I wonder how they even got there. Maybe I haven't advanced in the game enough for them to become interesting, but resource collecting just isn't fun. This isn't Minecraft or Rust. I would much rather collect stuff by doing the main thing (fighting) and not waste time hacking a tree or smashing some rocks.

2. Penalties. I'm okay with death penalties, as long as they're fitting. Durability loss on death makes sense in Diablo, not in a game where you die 50 times to a boss to learn it's attack patterns. It's been mentioned a lot, but I can't stress this enough. It's not about how much of it you lose. It's about why you lose it in the first place. It doesn't add anything, just bothersome.

3. The active item wheel / cross from Dark Souls doesn't work here, the game is too fast for that. I would rather have one of those item wheels that pause the game (or not pause it) and allow me to pick any item on the fly. The way it is implemented now is very cumbersome because there are many items to pick from and a lot of them are highly situational moment to moment. So committing to one or two at a time eliminates the strategy of using the right item at the right time. Like I said, this is a unique game, so a new control system is required.

4. It tries too hard to be a platformer when the game isn't designed around that idea. You can't actively jump in this game and you use the same buttom to leap from a ledge, climb, dodge, sprint... That's all fine by me, until the game punishes me for falling off stuff. Then it becomes a problem. Makes you feel like the game tries to catch too much instead of sticking to what makes it good.


1. Performance Issues. The game has no place being this heavy, especially with its non-realistic art style. Optimization is very much needed here. Some things took so long to render I didn't even get to see them fully rendered. There were frame drops and freezes while I was on "Performance" graphics mode.

2. It needs better tutorials. The UI is cluttered with numbers and symbols without any prior explanation. Any in-game tutorial would be welcome, even a help page or something I can read. Same for any new keyword or window page available. One thing I really like is games that "hide" certain elements from the UI at the start and the reveal them when they become relevant.

3. Telegraphing is not very good. In this game, you see the action from very far away, so extra indication for attacks would be very welcome. I love that the game expects me to see some guy pulling out a grenade from his pocket from within a group of 4 enemies, but in reality, I'm not going to see that and I have no idea where it's going to land.

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Like I said, I hope the game gets better so I can rewrite this review. I think it has a lot of potential, but I don't want to spoil my experience with an unfinished product.