To develop the action role-playing game No Rest for the Wicked, Moon Studios looked far beyond the company’s well-regarded 2015 debut, Ori and the Blind Forest, and its 2020 sequel, Ori and the Will of the Wisps.
At first glance, No Rest for the Wicked has combat reminiscent of the Dark Souls franchise’s slow, consequential action and big boss fights, with a dark fantasy setting drenched in the politics and intrigue “Game of Thrones” made popular.
But Gennadiy Korol, one of the studio’s founders, is quick to identify several other influences: the fighting games and Monster Hunter series that led to the game’s combo system. The animation of Hayao Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke” that steered it away from motion capture. The subtleties of Animal Crossing’s camera that inspired its curved horizon.
And with much fondness for the popular Diablo and Baldur’s Gate franchises, along with the often overlooked Nox, Moon Studios hopes to innovate on the genre by wearing its inspiration on its sleeves.
“We’re trying to take all these inspirations we have from growing up with these games, from playing recent releases,” Korol said. “We take what we really like and we put it together into this unique mix.”
Even its release strategy was guided by previous games. Buoyed by the success stories of Hades and Baldur’s Gate 3, which helped change the perception of early access, Moon Studios released a preliminary version of No Rest for the Wicked on the PC this month. The studio intends to incorporate player feedback as it iterates on the game’s core features, which include crafting mechanics, resource gathering, unique loot and customizable equipment in addition to its quests.
Korol said the game presented particular creative and technical challenges for the studio, including a camera that moves from a conventional isometric position to a more suspenseful over-the-shoulder position during climactic moments in combat. He promises side quests that will introduce morally ambiguous, personal stories, and the introduction of online co-op and player-vs.-player combat.
Moon Studios was founded by Korol and Thomas Mahler in 2010 and published the first Ori with a team of fewer than 20 developers. A Metroidvania set in a fantastical forest, Ori and the Blind Forest was defined by its gorgeous art as much as its slick controls and challenging levels. The sequel, an allegory about found family, grief and cyclical violence, was even bigger and prettier.
Ninety people are now collaborating remotely on No Rest for the Wicked. While it is a departure in both tone and genre, the game still carries the studio’s powerful art direction and clean execution.
“We’re trying to perfect our craft,” Korol said. “We’re trying to level up on every level in every single department.”
What constitutes sustainable growth at Moon Studios, however, is complicated by a 2022 investigation by GamesBeat in which several employees anonymously described an oppressive and toxic workplace. Korol and Mahler were accused of micromanagement and creating a hostile environment.
Moon Studios said recently that it stood by the statement Korol and Mahler provided GamesBeat, which said that the experiences described by the employees were unrepresentative of the studio. “If at times we are brutally direct in our critiques and challenges, we are also genuine and vocal in our praise,” the statement read in part. “We are incredibly proud of everything we have built and achieved together.”
With its early access release of No Rest for the Wicked, Moon Studios is betting that what it calls a handcrafted world will push forward a genre that often relies on procedurally generated levels to keep players engaged for dozens or hundreds of hours.
Matt Nava, the creative director of Giant Squid, which has made Abzu and The Pathless, notes that the term “handcrafted” can be as much of a marketing term as “procedural generation” was for No Man’s Sky.
Procedural designs can be used to create original levels in certain games or populate open-world environments with foliage and terrain. All games, Nava said, approach world design on a spectrum of procedurality that can affect their quality.
When Nava was the art director on the indie darling Journey, he opted to hand-paint shadows to achieve his desired effect, rather than rely on the game’s calculations based on its light sources.
“Whether the game is good, bad, moral or immoral depends less on the level of proceduralism and more on the design choices behind it,” Nava said.
In No Rest for the Wicked, Moon Studios wanted to craft a large number of compelling scenarios and combat encounters and place them in an interconnected world that wraps around itself, evoking both Metroidvanias and the first Dark Souls. Its goal is to provide players replayability with a world that changes as the story progresses, as new enemies eventually replace old ones to pose different challenges. Those environments and characters will all be hand-painted and hand-animated.
“This is our magnum opus,” Korol said.
