No Rest for the Wicked

I have no trust the devs will release the game or honour any promises of content, they have consistently used shady FOMO marketing tactics and clearly promised a release date they could never meet.

Game is halfway decent, but the devs are just not trustworthy, repeatedly spammed the steam page with last chance final offers before October launch to try and get everyone to buy; then delayed by 6 months after the refund window for most people. I bought well before that, but that is just incredibly shady and honestly lies to those who bought it. If this was something like an amusement park, restaurant or (mostly)any tangible real world item that was sold to consumers as being ready in a month you must pay now; then after customers paid they were told oops we meant 7 months we're keeping your money there would be major problems to pay for that organization. But because it's a video game it's part of doing business and if you complain you are the problem. Waiting for buggy launch, day 1 DLC and Microtransactions.

False advertising with 1.0 trailer, to hype up new players to buy early is scummy Evidence: - youtube video 1.0 trailer months ago - they gave deadline for new players to get the game before july 8th or smt to recieve ''founders'' pack (in game content). Now after they delayed the game, they moved the deadline to january 2027. Wait for full release whenever it will be. And even then watch reviews and wait few months.

Mahler is a clown, enjoy the delay dents

They promised version 1.0 for October, and now they’re delaying it by six months—even though they had already released a version with exclusive cosmetics for pre-purchasing before the launch. They’re playing on the community's FOMO.

So the game is pretty fun, but I feel what they did was not a good look. They announce 1.0, make founders pack available for people to buy for the hype > people buy it giving more funding then they announce 2 months later launch is being pushed back 6months? Pretty Sus if you ask me.

Lots of bloat & grind, feels more like an MMO with tiny player count rather than a soulslike. Expect to spend most of your time woodcutting, mining, fishing, going back to the same area to clear the same 5 enemies for daily quests, and selling 8 copies of the same trousers with slightly worse stats than the ones you're wearing (which you have to do all the time because for some reason they combined this gear avalanche with limited inventory space??). I assume there is (or was?) a good game buried in here somewhere, the opening section is quite engaging but everything slows to a crawl once you reach the hub area. The art is great (as you can see from the trailers), but the characters & setting are pretty bland. The "dark fantasy" elements are again limited to "everyone is dirty and minor npcs die a lot". It's hard to get invested in the story when there's so much bloat in the way of the pacing, and in any case it's been 2 years since release & apparently the story still won't be finished for another 6 months. Ultimately, the studio took a big risk trying a game of this size as their first attempt at a new genre (For the record, I did enjoy the Ori games), and the CEO crashing out online instead of taking the L & moving on is not a good look.

Although I enjoyed the game in early early access, the developers have lied about the use of AI. In a direct quote from CEO Thomas Mahler, the studio is "using AI to help eith tooling, bugfixes, and so on, like everyone else is. We'd be stupid not to. It's a genuinely useful tool." Generative AI is not simply the creation of assets, and not labeling the game as using it in the process is lying to their players. If I had known the game used AI i would never have played it in the first place. I am incredibly disappointed and will not longer be supporting the game and its development.