Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk Reviews

Great story. Good gameplay. I enjoyed it.

i love the mechanics and gameplay, but the story and writing are awful. i just skip all the story.

The game has a solid start but over time the mechanics just become problematic. The whole "gore" system turns avoid into a must-have stat and any other defensive stats are nowhere near as useful. Everything about the gore mechanic just turns the late game into a slog. You'll spend too much time going through menus to disassemble or sell items for repairs. It's just a lot of unnecessary button presses. Most of the late-game maps are also just bad designs filled with enemies to pad out the play time. TL;DR: Great early game, bad late game.

I love this series so much. This was such a great game. Such an amazing story. If you have not played any of the two labyrinth games i suggest starting with this one as it is much shorter. ~50 hours for the normal ending and +10-20 hours for the true ending The game is not very easy. The normal ending is generally doable but the true ending can be really hard so beware. There were multiple points where i wondered if i should just quit. The story has some dark themes so also beware of that.

Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk is a grid-based Dungeon Crawler. As a magical book that can summon puppets, you travel through different realms, battle monsters, find treasure and, at certain points, continue the story in the overworld. The story of the game is honestly pretty good, though it starts out slow and is a bit hard to understand at times. It's worth sticking with, though, even if it is told a bit too fast, or too slow, or too obscurely here and there. I ended up enjoying it more than I thought I would. The problem, however, lies in the most important part - the gameplay. It is sadly very repetitive, with a lot of obscure stats, useless pacts (items you can slot your puppets into to gain access to skills) and bosses that you need certain pacts or items to defeat, but if you miss that information, good luck unless you just look it up on the internet because it will not be mentioned again. This is especially terrible with the final boss where you need a certain pact to even begin to scratch it and not die immediately, and how to get it (and that you even have to get it at all) is extremely hard to discern and player-unfriendly. I was still going wrestling with myself on recommending the game up until that boss, but I think overall, I just can't really. Despite spending quite some time on it, I constantly went from moderately entertained to annoyingly frustrated, sometimes multiple times in the same dungeon floor. Enemies are annoying, because there are a lot of them and while you do eventually get a spell to avoid them, they still can easily run into you or just pop up in a one-grid wide floor. And battles are easy because most of the time you just put your puppets on auto battle or use aoe spells over and over. Only the bosses require a bit of tactics, and even then, brute force wins most of the time, which makes the few times it doesn't even more irritating. It's hard to tell just *why* you lost a fight. Do I need more resistance against the element attacks of the boss? Do I need to grind? Do I need to soul transfer to make my puppets stronger? Your puppet's stats are hard to read and equipment is too numerous and has too many stats to really tell what exactly would make your puppets stronger aside from the obvious strength or DP (think magic). It's complex for the sake of complexity, but it makes it all the much harder to play and have fun with. The gameplay loop itself, at least, is entertaining most of the time because slowly uncovering the entire grid of a dungeon floor is just fun in most games that feature it. You find treasure chests, and locked chests you can only open with a key later but that usually contain powerful equipment, and grinding, while annoying at times, can be done faster with the Stockpile feature, so you at least feel a constant sense of (very slight) improvement. Only for the next boss to probably kill that sense of improvement immediately. I don't know, to be honest - just like the game, I feel this review is all over the place. Overall, though, I just don't think I can recommend it unless you are a hardcore fan of grid-based Dungeon Crawlers who loves maximizing their characters even through some obscure, hardly explained systems. The story, at least, is somewhat worth it - if you can make it through the game surrounding it. It's much, much better than Mary Skelter (which I hated), but it's no Grimrock or Grimrock 2 (which I loved). It's off, somewhere, doing it's own thing, for better or for worse.