Game Info: Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk

Developed By: Nippon Ichi Software

Published By: NIS America

Released: June 18, 2016 (In Japan for the PSVita) September 18, 2018 (In North America for Switch)

Available On: PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch

Genre: RPG, Strategy

ESRB Rating: M for Mature: Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Violence

Number of Players: 1 offline

Price: $49.50 new, $42.29 used Thanks to NIS America for sending us this digital copy to review. Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk is a very interesting game. Never before have I played a game that I loved the story as much as I did here while simultaneously disliking a big portion of it. My split emotions go perfectly with the game’s split content. The biggest part of your playtime will be spent exploring a series of dungeons with a team of puppets in classic dungeon crawling fashion. The rest of your time will be spent sitting through voice-acted visual novel (VN) segments. It’s this combination that leads to the very long, and perhaps satisfying, experience that Coven of Dusk has to offer. I have in the past played a few different dungeon crawlers; I’m by far no expert in them, but Coven of Dusk is by far the best one I have played. There were a lot of things introduced over the course of the game that I find very interesting, such as being able to break walls and that not everything was laid out vertically, that really made the gameplay stand out and above other similar games. Combat was also a bit more unique than some others I’ve played. When it starts you have your somewhat standard role-playing game (RPG) combat system where you enter commands and watch the combat play out afterwards, but each unit of yours could be made up of up to three individual units. Each spot in your party is a coven which grants different skills and abilities to the units (puppets) you place into them. This allows a bit more flexibility with the puppets since nobody was a set mage or healer. Instead, you have units with stats that allow them to cast more of the skills that the coven pocesses which lets you the opportunity to move them around between offense and support based off of your needs. Your other main part of play is the VN segments. After reaching a certain point in the dungeons or completing a specific objective a new bit of story would unlock. When you leave the dungeon and return to your cart (your hub for this game) you could then select to play the next VN segment that unlocked. These bits of story are very well-made and excellently translated and dubbed. It is through this mode mainly that the story is given to you and the length of these could change from being really long to rather short. Depending on some of the conditions to unlock these you could even get a few to unlock all at once, but some could take a good while to unlock the next portion of story; sometimes five minutes after returning to the dungeon again. It’s this bit that would really frustrate me while playing. Sometimes I was in the mode to go and explore a dungeon and had to constantly leave so I could watch the next piece of story so I could advance while others I wanted to see the next part of the story and it took me three play sessions to unlock it. One other thing the game did with the story was have a few smaller story interactions happen while out in the dungeon, though sadly none of these were voiced like the main VN segments are.

Highlights: Strong Points: Really solid gameplay; solid English dub and sound design; interesting main story; lots to explore and collect

Weak Points: A weak love story plot; it can require a bit of grinding to level up; lots of unique elements that can make some parts of the game hard to understand; game is split into two parts and can make you spend quite a while in one while you want to be in the other

Moral Warnings: There’s a lesbian love story; rape comes up fairly often in the story; there is strong language in the story; lots of dark themes; takes place in a place where magic, in various forms, exists; sexual content including skimpily clad women; fair bit of killing It felt like to me while playing through this the developers really set out to try and make something unique here. There was not very many things I encountered that felt all too similar to other games including the classes for your puppet soldiers. Each of the classes have their own style to them with some specialized in attacking using lamps, other shields, and even others foe attacking the enemies multiple times. When creating them, you could also change some attributes such as how they’d level-up their skills and give them some unique abilities. I gave one of my puppets an ability that with a single digit percent chance would attack ten times in a row. I had it trigger once on a low health, very dodge prone boss. It made me feel great, but I’m honestly not sure if it was the best ability to choose. That is one problem I had with the game. There was just so much unique stuff it was hard to know what you should really do. I enjoyed that they tried to do their own thing, but sometimes it could be confusing to remember what all each class was supposed to specialize in and what all the unique stats did. On the plus side, I’m normally terrible at these types of games so maybe everything seeming a bit foreign helped to balance the scales out. There was also the kind addition of an easy mode, but you had to reach a certain point in the story to be able to change it to easy. The story starts off a bit weird. You arrive in a city called Refrain, get introduced to Madam Dronya and little Luca, and go through a little tutorial quest. That ends with you losing and then your soul winds up in some weird dimension. While there, you enter in your information for a sort of custom character setup. I say sort of because once you leave that area, you appear at the beginning of the game as a book that was previously used to explore a dungeon. Somehow, your soul is now inside that book and you discover that those characters you meet earlier are not the ones you play as; you play as the book that is in charge of guiding the puppets on their journey through the varied dungeons you must transverse. Upon your arrival though, you are at the beginning of the game again, but you experience events that you didn’t get to see the first time, but you wind up in the same dungeon you failed at last time. This time however, Dronya has a solution to what got you last time and you are able to continue progressing. Progressing here unlocks the VN story segments and through these you get introduced to the different residents of Refrain and a load of different story threads that, truthfully, won’t make much sense until you complete the game. As you progress through the story you start to follow two main story threads: one being a lesbian love story and the other is figuring out what is going on on the surface and down in the dungeons. Obviously, I found the second of these more engaging with my beliefs, but I also just found the love story to not be that good of one. Now, I don’t want to go into too many more details because I don’t want to spoil anything because this game does, if you disregard that whole terribly done love story, have a great story. It can get dark, emotional, happy, and shows some of the best growth of a character that I’ve seen in a long time. The excellent voice acting only helps to amplify this. The end of the story, which felt a bit abrupt, almost had me at tears. There was a lot of curveballs thrown throughout the story and bits of information not given to you, but when it all came out, my mind was blown. As I’ve mentioned before, the game comes mostly voice acted and in full English. There are even some accents present which help to give the game the feel that it was made in English and not a Japanese game that was translated. My only real complaint with the voices is that the selection of voices for your puppets is a bit small. It also sounds like they reused some of the same voice actors multiple times for these different voices. It’s not the biggest issue, but I would prefer them to sound more different from each other then they wound up being. Aside from that, the background music was all pretty good and the sound effects from combat all had some decent weight to them. When you land a critical hit, you know you just landed a critical hit. The art all looks good, but the art used for the VN segments certainly are of a higher quality than that of the dungeons. A lot of the enemies have a lot going on in their designs and I had a bit of a hard time telling what all I was looking at. Some of the dungeons also seem to have some funky graphical things going on, but the further I progressed, the more I realized a lot of the weird bits were a part of some stylistic choices. For example, the second dungeon you go into has a muted sky with some not very great looking objects in it. As I progressed there, I discovered this area was supposed to be based off of a fairy tale storybook. Controls are okay, but I wished some things would have required less button presses than they did. I also never had the game crash on me.