CHENNAI: A cold, dark night. I am at sea and something doesn’t feel quite right. My shipmates are avoiding me and the captain decides that it’s best if I keep to myself and out of the way until we reach the shore. I go to bed; alone in my quarters. When I wake up I’m surrounded by fire. Enemy armies rage through the ship. It feels so unreal, almost like I am dreaming. Soon, the ship has sunk and I am marooned.
As I explore my new surroundings, I find that the land is guarded by giant spectral beings, almost like the Nazgul from the Lord of the Rings. They are imposing, scary and impossible to defeat. They pummel with the force of twenty men. Still, I cannot look away. They are so incredibly beautiful: the shining tips of their axes.
The moonlight glistening off their pristine armour. Even their strikes that shatter the very earth around me are just so graceful. This is expected. When the developers of the Ori games, Moon Studios, decide to release their newest game, you know it is going to be beautiful. It did not, however, compensate for its difficulty. No Rest for the Wicked is probably the most frustrating game I have ever loved.
Sure, it looks like Diablo. It has an isometric-view, the dark fantasy setting, and trunks that drop loot. But the battles are infinitely more complex in the Wicked. Spamming the attack, parry and dodge keys get you far in Diablo, but do NOTHING in the Wicked. There’s a stamina bar that drains every time you swing a sword at the enemy. It drains when you dodge, it drains when you run.
Reactions appear lagged. The goal isn’t to fight any and all enemies that come your way, but to stay alive through the few that cross you. I kept my distance from souls-like games like these in the past, because the difficult boss battles made me cry. Wicked was an exception — simply because it was too pretty to resist.
The art style is also incredibly clever. The nightmarish landscape with Moon studios trademark “illustrated” tone is how the game hides its secrets. The surroundings seemed to change every time I crossed them. It felt magical in the way new pathways revealed itself, showing me areas of the map that otherwise remained hidden. This is actually how I managed to defeat my first big boss. I found the hidden caves, talked to new NPCs, gained more experience, and found better loot. I was suddenly not that bad at this. An entire sub genre of games are now open to me.
It’s not perfect. I particularly dislike the poor quality of loot that I collected in the game, especially after all the hard work of defeating particularly nasty swamp creatures and ferocious wolves. Wicked is also still in early-access, and the cracks started to show when I reached the first big settlement in the game. There were vast chunks of land that refused to load, the game was sometimes unresponsive, and it frequently crashed. It is advisable to wait for the final version of the game if frequent bugs and constant updates are not your thing. You can however, wishlist it for the Xbox and PlayStation to purchase it when the stable version releases.