No Rest for the Wicked drops you on Isola Sacra as a Cerim — a holy warrior sent to deal with the Pestilence, a plague that twists people into monsters and tears the kingdom apart from the inside. It’s not just “kill the corruption” fantasy; you get pulled into political fights between rulers and rebels, with the whole island caught in that crossfire. The tone is closer to grim epic theatre than standard Diablo-clone noise.

Combat is top-down but reads like a Souls game: animation-driven swings, tight hitboxes, parries, dodge-rolls, blocks, and a stamina bar that actually matters. Every weapon has its own moveset and feel, and armour weight changes your movement — agile sets give you quicksteps, heavier ones commit you harder. Focus builds as you fight and lets you trigger bigger attacks, but greed still gets you killed. Death sends you back to the nearest Cerim Whisper, with enemies you already cleared staying dead, which makes pushes feel like real progress instead of pure repetition.

Underneath the combat is a soft-class system: you invest in attributes like strength, dex, faith, intelligence, stamina, and so on, shaping your build without being hard-locked into a single archetype. Weapons can be enhanced with runes, gear comes in different rarities, and you’ve got room to pivot rather than reroll if you find something that changes your plan. It’s more about how you play than how many affixes you’ve stacked.

The island hub of Sacrament is the other half of the game. You can buy and decorate a house, upgrade the town, craft gear, and engage with slower systems like fishing, farming, and resource gathering. Progress in the wild feeds back into the settlement, and the settlement in turn feeds your character’s long-term power. Endgame is anchored by the Cerim Crucible, a mode built to stress-test your build and patience, with co-op and PvP planned as the game matures in early access.

In the Vault, No Rest for the Wicked fills the “ARPG for people who actually like getting hit in the face” slot: slower, heavier, and more precise than most loot games, with enough systems around it to justify living there once it fully lands.