No Rest for the Wicked is the type of game that grabs you immediately. From the presentation, the opening sequence and combat, the game just CLICKS. It feels good to play, it feels fun... for the first dozens of hours.
As you play, the cracks start to appear and they become increasingly more annoying.
Starting off with progression: Loot is randomized. Every chest, every drop is random and this means that you could potentially get something really good or straight up garbage. On paper, this shouldn't be so bad. There's a variety of games that have this exact system but the reason why it doesn't work here on NRFTW is because your gear can be upgraded.
The game expects you to upgrade your stuff as you progress through the main quests. Enemy scaling ramps up considerably if you don't but why would you even bother spending resources upgrading things that you may throw away on the next minute? Well, normally, that wouldn't be a problem but it conflicts directly with the resource gathering and town restoration feature of this game.
See, in No Rest for the Wicked, you're asked to help rebuild the main town, Sacrament. Every store can be upgraded and this is the main slog that makes the game lose all of its traction.
Every single time, you're expected to stop and gather resources, chop down a tree and break some rocks. The problem is that the nodes reset on a IRL timer and each node only gives two of its main material with the chance of giving an extra (i.e: trees giving logs and potentially, sap).
ONCE AGAIN, this wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for two things:
1. Town requires A LOT of materials. Some town upgrades has you gathering 20 nodes worth of trees or rocks, sometimes more.
2. The exact same resources you need for your town upgrades is shared with your gear.
The combination of these two factors turn progression into an absolute chore where you'll spend more time collecting resources like some sort of survival game instead of exploring, fighting enemies and completing dungeons like, y'know, an ARPG.
Everything else in this game is phenomenal in my opinion. The game is gorgeous, each area is a relatively enjoyable experience thanks to the platforming. Combat is just the right amount of challenge, despite the fact it can be frustrating sometimes with how enemies don't have to worry about Stamina (used for actions) or Focus (used for spells and skills) but since there isn't much of a punishment when dying, outside of durability loss, it's not a huge deal.
This is why the game hooks you in from the get go but it loses momentum as you push past the 10 hour mark and I'm honestly struggling to convince myself to continue.
I want to! Because the game is super fun! But every time I open it up I'm spending more time chopping trees because I need to upgrade my gear before progressing but then I need to upgrade my town to be able to upgrade my gear by refining the basic resources that I now need to gather all over again.
The way this review ended up being written is exactly how you go through the game and its systems.
You see a system that works just fine on paper, then you realize that it conflicts with something else, which conflicts with something else and you end up juggling these conflicting mechanics instead of playing the actual game.
