"Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk" Review: A Maze of Witchery and Complication

Player(s): 1
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, PC (Steam)

Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk has all the elements you would think you’d need to make a solid dungeon crawling JRPG. With much of the staff behind Disgaea and other Nippon Ichi hits behind the development, a campaign with dozens of hours, and a huge amount of customization available to build the battle team of your dreams, my time with the game felt okay at best. It was a serviceable if not good dungeon crawler marred by a meh story, unnecessarily complicated game systems, and a lack of modern niceities that, while I get excluding them really gives a player an old school experience, ultimately renders the game frustratingly unfollowable at times.

Minor spoilers for the story below
​
The game opens with the arrival of the witches Dronya, also known as Baba Yaga, and Luca, to the town of Refrain, where a summons from the acting mayor has drawn them to do some exploring down a well so overwhelmed with a dangerous miasma that no human could hope to enter it and survive. So how do they plan to explore the well? Well. There’s a book. A book supposedly written by the only person who has entered the depths of the well and survived. A book with a soul bound to it. I know, wild right? And there’s puppet soldiers to accompany the book and fight whatever may be down there. Game loop is explore the dungeon for a bit, gather precious mana and items, report to Dronya to advance the story, repeat for hours on end. Pretty straightforward, but of course there’s twists and turns to throw you for a loop and make you constantly rethink your strategies. As the story progresses, you find out the truth about the town, Dronya and Luca, and the labyrinth itself. 

As for the puppet soldiers, they are just that: puppets you can customize to a ridiculous degree and put into “covens” to form your battle brigade. The game very very much wants you to utilize this grand and honestly overly complicated system to best build a puppet brigade worthy of Baba Yaga herself. The basics are there are 6 “classes” of soldier (with a few more unlocked later) with various stats you can adjust, and 5 covens in which to put these soldiers in. These 5 covens consist of pacts, and pacts can have anywhere from 1 to 3 attackers, and 0 to 5 supporters who can give the attackers a bit of a stat boost. These pacts also control what kind of magic spells (known as Donum) you’ll have access to, which really makes using magic for the most part kind of pointless, and really is a stain on the battle system. The game also actively encourages you to recycle your soldiers into new bodies, because the further you get into the game, the more likely it is access to new stat options will allow you to build a much better puppet than your initial ones.

Other quirks of the game include 

• Reinforcement points, a set of points that are used to bring your brigade into the dungeon and allow for special skills to be used, but spending them are also are the only way to use items in battle.
• A “Gore Hit”, which not only does a lot of damage, but lowers the max health of an enemy or a member of your brigade. 
• A neat system that allows for bonus attack damage based on a variety of factors.
• A whole alchemy system, allowing you to combine weapons and armor into something stronger than what you can find in the dungeons, along with some other neat features.
• You can decide on if a puppet soldier is male or female, which can affect covens and equipment. However, it really means that I can have a team of nothing but cute anime girls and that’s good. Boys are icky.
• I think… Multiple endings? Or at least story branching? Look, I’m genuinely unsure. But at least 3 different times I got “bad” ends and the credits rolled and then some story points made some sense but I have no idea how it works and it is never even mentioned in a meaningful fashion.
• Tons of post-game content. You could play for dozens more hours if you wanted!

I genuinely think there’s good game in here. The art for the characters and the monsters are great and lovely! I like the dungeon designs. The music is top notch and the voice acting is impeccable, if English only. The actual dungeon crawling is, for the most part, enjoyable. But there’s so much bad and unsavory bits holding those good parts back that it made a potentially wonderful experience average at best. There’s a karma system that I started getting points for early game, but their use is never quite explained, and by the time I got to the tutorial for it, I was almost in endgame, some 40 hours later. The coven system and building puppet soldiers may be really fun and interesting for some, but I imagine many will be like me, and want to spend as little time possible dealing with it as they can, which in turn really limits the experience of the game. There’s just a general lack of information in the game: I couldn’t access the tutorial information again (which isn’t necessary but is nice to have), dungeons can be upsettingly obtuse in what your goal is (especially in the later dungeons), the menus are kinda miserable to flip back and forth inbetween (making doing alchemy awful as you try to upgrade your brigade’s equipment). I’d kill for a bestiary, or even would pay mana ingame to gain like “witch’s insight” to get a tip as to what I needed to do next. And the story? Not only did it not really get interesting until I had already put 40+ hours into it, there’s enough gross and upsetting content to really turn off some people (why is everyone punching children!? Why are there MULTIPLE sexual assault instances?!) Any one of these things would marr on a game, to have them all at once is really disappointing, on top of complicated systems that are a pain to learn and hinder your progress to discovering the truth of Refrain. 

Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dus​k has a lot going for it. When you are actually in the dungeons, it’s fun! I like exploring the world! There’s really good music and fun dungeon designs! And while I feel many of the systems surrounding the core game mechanic are complicated, at least they’re interesting and relatively unique. But the black spots on the game are so dark, not even the catchiest tunes and the most wonderful art can shine through enough. 

-Janette G

---

Graphics: B+
Sound: A
Gameplay: C
Value: C+

OVERALL: C+

Pros:
+Great music and art
+Some of the best dungeon crawling I’ve done in a while
+Tons of hours to play through

Cons:
-Many of those hours are spent micromanaging your team
-Or wandering around aimlessly trying to figure out what your next goal is because you have no information to follow
-Bad story pacing and complicated game systems really detract from the core game loop

Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk is available now, for more information please visit http://nisamerica.com/games/labyrinth-of-refrain/

Disclaimer: This game was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.