The World's Longest Review: Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk
This was too much, even for me.
A-Maze-Ing
The world is a lot simpler once you squish it down to a binary. Are you with us, or against us? Do you approve of this or disapprove? You might think there are two choices, but there are usually more, it’s just more convenient to simplify it.
Some things are more complicated, sure, but they get reduced to yes or no because they’re complicated. Taxation? Yes or no? Immigration? Yes or no? Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk? Yes or no?
Wait, that last one is complicated. VERY complicated, in fact. So complicated, it requires a massive, rambling screed to discuss.
Today, I’ll be taking a look at Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk. A game that I played for over 60 hours, but still can’t decide whether I like it or not. It has a lot of good things, and an equal number of bad things. It’s a mess of systems that are never explained, but those same systems are somehow harmonious and fun to play around with. The game doesn’t ever expect you to, sadly. The game doesn’t expect much from me, much like my dad, but it’s still a good time that’s marred by terrible choices and some annoying UI mistakes.
Read on if you want to know which side of the binary Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk falls into. Should you play it, or should you Labyrinth of refrain from playing this?
I’ll see myself out.
Gameplay
Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk is a first person dungeon crawler RPG. You make a party of little puppet soldiers, then descend into a dungeon where you explore, find treasure and fight monsters in turn-based battles.
The dungeon exploration takes place in first person. You move around in real-time and navigate a maze. Your objective in these is usually to find a red exclamation mark and get an event that progresses the story.
Whenever you run into an enemy, you go into a turn-based battle like in most RPGs. Here, you give orders to your soldiers to attack, defend or use other techniques to defeat your enemies. Your puppets can attack with weapons, use different spells, or block to defend. You can also give them individual orders to use items, or boost their attack and/or defense for one turn using a limited resource called Reinforcements.
This game’s most prominent feature is the Covenant system. Instead of having a party of five characters, you have a party of five Covenants, which are groups of soldiers. Instead of giving orders to each party member individually, you do it through their covenant. If you have a group of 3 guys in one party and order them to cast Fire, the entire group will use their collective stats to cast one instance of fire, not 3 separate fires. Attacking is different. When you attack, they attack individually. There’s a lot to cover in that system, so I’ll elaborate on it a little further on, along with a lot of other systems.
The basic flow of the game is what you’d expect from this kind of thing. You explore the dungeon, fight enemies, find items and loot, level up your characters and take on more challenges.
There are different character classes, ways to re-level your characters to make them stronger, item synthesis, which lets you make stronger equipment, and many more ways to make your numbers go up.
It’s a pretty convoluted tangle of rules that work alright with each other. To better understand them, they have to be explained, and there’s a lot of them, but the general idea with them is that they’re okay on paper, have a lot of problems in execution, but somehow manage to be a little greater than the sum of their parts.
These systems are a little wasted in the game, since you don’t need to use them too much to beat the game. The game is hard, but in an RPG way, where you need bigger numbers to progress at certain points. Good thing there’s a system to increase your experience gain. That sounds like it’s a convenience for the player, but in reality, it’s a sign that you will need to stack EXP to level up in astronomical quantities, which isn’t far from the truth.
There main problem with the game’s difficulty is its RPG aspect. You have all these mechanics to work with, but for most of the game, you can get away with over leveling and brute-forcing most of the challenges. This is a problem I have with RPGs in general.
The game does require you to understand and use its multiple systems at the very end, which is frustrating. Most of the game is a numbers-based cakewalk, then the second-to-last boss and the final story boss both make you wail and obnubilate as you get clobbered by “The Spell That Kills You” over and over without really knowing how to mitigate it.
The core gameplay is relatively simple, just some RPG combat and number-mogging. The dungeons are quite straightforward, with not much in the way of puzzle solving, just a few traps that boil down to “this place is full of poison gas”, which is a bit of a letdown, but it works fine for the most part.
There’s a story there, too. Lots of text. So much so that it even gets its own section here.
Before that, we gotta elaborate on the gameplay, which means taking a magnifying glass to this game’s pile of seemingly incongruent systems. Get ready, because this is going to be almost as long and bloated as the game itself.
Covenant system
To really understand how Labyrinth of Refrain works, you need to understand the covenant system. In most RPGs, I’d say around 99% of them, your characters are the basic building blocks of your party. You have a character with a class and stats, their own identity, and they have their own job and role in the group. If you have a wizard named Merlin, he knows the fireball spell and maybe lightning, as an example. In Labyrinth of Refrain, things work in a different, and much less intuitive way.
Instead of having your characters be the thing that knows spells and such, these are handled by the covenants. Covenants are like squads; groups of characters you put together within your party, and they act as one. They attack as one and defend as one, with some specific exceptions. In Labyrinth, Merlin isn’t the one who knows fireball and lightning. Merlin doesn’t know anything. His covenant is the one that dictates what spells he knows. If you want Merlin to cast fireball, you have to put him in a covenant that knows fireball.
These covenants can house up to three characters in them, but most covenants have less slots. Your party is made up of five covenants, meaning you can have up to fifteen puppets in your party. Fifteen active combatants. Once supports get involved, that number balloons up to 35.
This system, like everything else in this game, is like a russian nesting doll of mechanics, so I have to explain the supports. Each covenant has slots for supports, which are characters you put in the group that don’t do any active fighting. Having them in these slots provides passive bonuses to the active guys. Each covenant has specific slots with specific bonuses. VERY specific. For example, one covenant might have a support slot that gives you a 25% bonus to defense. Specifically the third support slot. So you put a puppet in the third slot, and you get that 25% defense bonus.
Now, if you thought this system was already restrictive and specific, wait ‘till you hear about the conditions. Some covenants place restrictions on what type of characters can be put in certain slots. There’s the Gossip Pact, which can only be filled by female characters. Some have class limitations, others require specific nature types, and some have slots that can only be filled if a character has an even lucky number. It’s rules on top of rules.
Now, with all these stipulations and conditions in mind, you can imagine how annoying it is to fill a party. First you need to find a covenant that does what you need. If you have one. You scroll through the list and read what spells come with each covenant, using the inconvenient UI. Then you place the covenant in your party. Next, you hope and pray that the characters you have can fit into that specific covenant to make use of it, and get some filler puppets to warm the benches in the support slots. Now that you have accommodated all your little guys (or gals), you can finally go on your way adventuring.
This system is a pain in the neck. If you need a specific role filled, you can’t just create a character to fill it, you need to get a covenant for it. Need some heavy magic damage? Look for a covenant that has offensive spells. Need regular damage? Things get complicated.
Covenants drop like items. There are some you can get by defeating specific bosses, meaning you only get one copy of it at a specific time in the game. Others drop like regular items, so if you need a specific covenant, you have to go hunting for it. You can have multiple copies of these. This means your party’s composition is dependent on what kind of covenants you have on hand.
The conditions aren’t as limiting as they seem on paper, but it’s still a nuisance. Most covenants are neutral, but whenever you want anything that’s actually useful, they usually have restrictions.
The worst restriction is the character limit. It’s like twitter back in 2009. Once you play the game enough and see through the matrix, you’ll realize that the most efficient strategy is to use as many 3-character covenants as possible. Each character you have out is an additional attack, so you want more of them, regardless of the covenant’s utility.
There are exceptions, like the offensive magic covenants, but these often have one very specific restriction: one or two characters. Most have only one.
Why is this a problem? Well, because everything in this game is numbers, and magic takes a lot of numbers to use. Spells are very expensive mana-wise. A character will have only enough mana to cast two or three spells before they run dry, and for most of the game, a single character’s spell power is very low. This means your very expensive fireball will only tickle your enemy and warm them up a bit.
This can be remedied by having more characters. Each character adds their mana to the covenant’s mana pool, which means more resources to cast spells. The less characters, the less mana, and the less attacks you can make per-turn.
There’s one covenant, Pecco’s Pact, that has very powerful elemental spells and even some healing magic. It’s limited to one character, and a few supports. It has a lot of utility, but you can’t make much use of it, since every spell is expensive and you only have one person in the slot. On top of this restriction, you have more conditions. In order to use the elemental spells, the thing you’d pick this for, you need to put supports into specific slots. If these slots are empty, you can’t use the spells. When you have someone there, it lets you use the spells, but it also doubles their mana cost. So you end up in a situation where you have one mage all by themselves, who can barely cast a spell, then you need to get another body in the support slot to use that already expensive spell, and it raises the mana cost by even more.
Some covenants require you to sacrifice a support to use, adding even more limitations to an already restrictive system.
One more thing. Covenants also cost reinforcements. That’s… that’s another number I’ll explain in a second. Just let me catch my breath. The more powerful covenants tend to be more expensive, but as you use them to fight, they level up, lowering their cost.
You can also put each group into either the front or back lines. Combining these gives you formations. Enemies are more likely to target the front line, but I’ve seen the back line take backshots just as often as any other. Maybe it’s a placebo or a very small statistical difference. Formations are pretty cool, giving you a layer of strategy to what physical configuration you put your army in. They give you bonuses to things like defense to certain positions, extra damage, more magic power and, if you put everyone on the backline, it lowers their damage but raises their defenses and makes them more likely to flee a battle. There’s some good stuff in this sub-system. Good job, devs.
Then there’s the items and how they interact with the covenants. You have three people in one slot, and everything affects them as one, but whenever you use an item, it affects them individually. If an entire group is killed, you have to revive them individually with items (in battle). If you want to heal them with a potion, individual target. Same thing with the very limited and frankly useless resistance items. You have to waste a character’s turn to give someone a resistance item that lasts for three turns. Same with the attack/defense boost; it only affects one puppet in a group.
This constant tug of war between individual and covenant is a lot like the conflict between the individual good and the greater good in society. A load of malarkey, and the tragedy of the commons sets in and no one thinks it’s their job to sweep the living room. What was I even talking about? Oh, right. The game.
A quick word on magic
Now that you have the context for how weird it is to find a spell you want, and how convoluted and expensive it is to use, then surely they must be extremely powerful.
They are. Contextually. They’re strong, but balanced by all the ridiculous limitations put on them. You don’t get any useful magic covenants for the first part of the game, and when you do, you can only use their spells once or twice before running out of mana. This isn’t much of a problem thanks to another mechanic I’ll get to later, but it’s still a limitation. In the early game, they’re the only way of dealing damage to multiple enemies, and they can deal decent damage to enemies that are weak to a specific element.
Utility spells, on the other hand, are kind of useless. First off, good luck finding any. Everything goes back to the covenant system, so if you want a specific utility spell, go look for that needle in the haystack of covenants clogging up your inventory. Once you find one, see if it meets your requirements. It usually won’t. For example, I had a hell of a time finding a useful defensive covenant. There were some that had defensive buffs, but they were weak, expensive and specific. If I want my frontline tanks to shield the rest of my party, I can’t, because the spell raises their own covenant’s defense, not everyone else’s. I could put my squishy little guys in that covenant and have them protect themselves, but I’d rather have them use their powers to kill monsters. Once I actually found a covenant with defensive buffs, I found it was more useful to just have my tanks block and take damage regularly. Tanks don’t have much mana to cast spells anyways.
Then there are the active defense spells, which are complete nonsense. These can counter specific types of damage. Again, like everything in this game, VERY specific. You have to go over every single covenant with a magnifying glass looking for the spell that reflects the one type of damage you want. You found the spell that reflects pierce damage, now you can use it against the boss that keeps piercing your dudes and turning them into shish kebabs. Great. You go into battle, you activate the spell and the boss doesn’t target that covenant with an attack. No big deal, just re-cast it in the next turn. You do that, and the boss hits you this time. Great! But he hit you with an attack that wasn’t piercing damage. Not great. No problem. I’ll re-cast it for a third time, and then I’ll get that juicy reflect aaaand your covenant is out of mana. The only reflection happening here is you reflecting on your choice to play this game.
Worry not, there’s the Phalanx Pact, with its wonderful Phalanx defensive formation! A late-game pact which has a stance that lets you reflect damage, no matter the type. Amazing! Finally, a defensive spell for the working man, and the covenant even has three slots! What a bargain! Except you didn’t read the fine print. The phalanx stance gives you a chance to deflect damage. For one turn, and it’s expensive. With bitter disappointment, you go back to guarding like normal.
There’s also the magic version of the Phalanx, which has a chance to deflect any magic damage. I used it on the final boss when it uses its “Spell that Kills You”, and it didn’t reflect. It doesn’t work against that one. Then I went against another boss and used the reflect spell when it unleashed its signature “Spell that Kills You”, and it didn’t work. It doesn’t reflect that, either. Whoops! Silly me. I guess I’m a drooling dumb-ass for thinking the magic reflect spell would reflect magic. Oopsie!
This is a perfect segue into debuff spells and their complete lack of purpose. Debuff spells in Labyrinth of Refrain work like debuff spells in any JRPG, meaning they don’t work. First off, finding a debuff in this game is like finding a vegetarian tiger. They’re just as useful as one, too. If you’ve played any JRPG, you know that bosses are immune to every single status effect. Same thing happens here.
There are some exceptions. There are two covenants which have a debuff spell that actually works. The reason why it works is because they’re necessary to fight specific bosses. One has a spell that SPECIFICALLY and ONLY works to debuff one of the secret bosses so you can damage her. The spell lists that one boss by name and the description is basically “Use this on Junon so you can actually damage her”. It’s technically a debuff since it removes her armor, but without it you can’t really damage her, so it’s less of a real debuff and more like using the blue key card on the blue door. That spell has zero effect on anything else. There’s also the Great Sage pact, a covenant with only ONE spell: a debuff for the final boss. This one is even more questionable, since it says it “weakens final boss and seals its abilities”. It doesn’t do that. When you use it, the boss takes a little more damage, and its spells only do 99% of your maximum health instead of killing you instantly.
If you’re thinking that the debuffs could be useful on regular enemies, then yeah, you’re right, but why would you do that? Why would you waste a turn putting a weak debuff on a regular enemy when you can set your party to auto attack and wipe them out without using any resources? Regular enemies don’t need any special strategy. Just whack them over the head until they die. You’ll have to fight an identical group of them again in a few seconds anyways. Save yourself the trouble.
I swear Dragon Quest is the only JRPG series where debuffs are actually useful. Stranger of Sword City, another dungeon crawler, also has spells that actually work. They even work on bosses! Imagine that. Using a debuff on a boss and have it actually do something. What a concept.
Character classes
Now that I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on the minutia of these convoluted systems, I can finally talk about the actual characters you use.
The game features eight classes (called “facets”). You start with six and can unlock two more as the game goes on. Since you already know that the covenants are the things with the spells, you know that the characters don’t do that. What do they do, then? They provide numbers, and a weapon.
Here’s a quick breakdown of each class so you know a few of their quirks:
Aster Knight: The closest thing to a regular fighter. They’re well-rounded and use a spear to fight. They can have high damage and defense, depending on RNG, since a lot of their skills are luck-based. They can be male or female.
Shinobushi: The assassin. Can dual-wield weapons if they’re proficient in them. Their main form of defense is dodging, and can deal a lot of damage with some preparation. Can be male or female.
Theatrical Star: Dancer. A support-oriented class that uses a bell. Large mana pool, high charm which means they get targeted often. Usually put in the back row. Can be male or female.
Marginal Maze: Mage. Since magic is tied to the covenants, these are mostly mana batteries. They have high magic power and a large mana pool. You can make a lot of these and put them in the support slots to boost magic. They fight with a lamp and can be in the front or the back. Can be male or female.
Peer Fortress: Tank. Highly defensive, beefy class meant to take hits in place of your other soldiers. Uses Katars, which are bladed shields. Can intercept attacks meant for other targets. Can be male or female.
Mad Raptor: Archer, but the game also mentions how they’re good at magic for some reason. They are backline assassins that dodge attacks and do big damage with random critical attacks. They use a crossbow. They have a skill that has a 10% chance to unleash a storm of attacks on every single enemy, which is great when it happens. These, like the shinobushi, can deal tons of damage in theory. We’ll get to that in a second. Can be male or female.
Gothic Copellia: This is a coinflip character. They can deal massive damage at random, and they have a chance to stun their target. The first of the two unlockable classes you get later into the game. They use a hammer. These are useful as fodder for the upgrade system, which I’ll get to in a bit. This game has way too many systems, but I’ll cover them as they become relevant. This class is gender neutral. A true they/them. I thought this meant they could be put in any gendered slot, since they’re neutral, but no. Apparently they’re not neutral, but NOT-female and NOT-male at the same time. If a covenant slot requires a specific gender, they can’t be put in it. Some very rare covenants require Gothic Copellias specifically. They are very weird and when you get them, you don’t really know what to do with them, since they don’t seem to fit anywhere, and they’re new, so they’ll be a lot lower level than your already established party.
Demon Reaper: Even more murderous assassin. A weird berserker. Like the other assassin classes, can theoretically deal a lot of damage, if the stars align. There’s a lot of RNG in this game. They’re ultra-high risk characters that thrive on danger. They gain more damage as they take damage, and become stronger as they lose parts. They use scythes, which are bizarre weapons that put everything into attack. When a scythe is equiped, it takes up both hands and the feet, meaning you can’t equip leg armor or a shield. Demon Reapers can only be female.
Like a lot of aspects of Labyrinth of Refrain, the characters seem deep and complicated at first, but you can flatten them down to their most significant bits. Mad Raptors are described as being “good at magic”, but then you have the Marginal Maze class which seems to do magic, too. Which one is better? The one with the highest numbers, which is the Marginal Maze. It has more magic power and a larger mana pool. You could also, theoretically, and if you’re being as efficient as possible, use only Aster Knights and Marginal Mazes and ignore everything else. The M. Maze has better numbers in magic, which means they can use support magic more efficiently than the dedicated supports, and the Aster Knights can deal damage and tank, which means they can replace every other class.
I ran a relatively balanced group thinking that each class had something to contribute to the team, but after several dozen hours, I found that you could overlook most of their traits and focus on numbers.
They have other traits, too. A lot of them. Stance, which is either Sun or Moon, which determines if they’re defensive or offensive. Changes very little, but some covenants restrict the stance type. Lucky number does something unexplained, and there are covenants that use the lucky number, including one late-game covenant that requires an even lucky number. You don’t know that until you get it. They have growth types, which determines how their stats are distributed when leveling up. Then there are their skills, which are class-specific and they are unlocked as the character gains levels. These are used in the Soul Transfer.
Guess it’s time to explain yet another system! Wahoo!
Soul Transfer
This is the class change/prestige system. You can take a character and transfer them into another body, resetting their level to one. With this you can change their class and even their stance and gender.
Why would you want to demote a character back to level one? To gain more numbers. When you transfer them, they get a stat called “Soul Clarity”, which means their base stats get higher. The more soul clarity, the more numbers. You can raise this up to 99. When you transfer a character, their level adds soul clarity. If you transfer a level 99 character, you get +20 soul clarity. This increase in numbers is considerable. A level 10 soul clarity 1 character is significantly weaker than a level 5 soul clarity 20 character.
When a character is transferred, their skills can be brought over, too. This lets you build stronger soldiers with cool skills. For example, take a Mad Raptor, take their Fancy Footwork skill, which raises your attack every time you dodge, combine it with the Theatrical Star’s Actor’s Tenacity skill, which also raises your attack when you dodge, and you get a character that can’t be hit, and gains massive attack boosts when it dodges.
There are a lot of combinations to mess around with, and the system is genuinely fun. You can make strong characters with weird traits, but there are some caveats. For one, transferring is best when you can get the skill you want and +20 soul clarity, and that’s done by taking a character to level 99 before transferring, which means a lot of grinding. The really good innate skills from each class can’t be transferred unless they’re level 99. The other thing is that a lot of the good skills are locked behind specific weapons, like the Mad Raptor’s skill where they can attack every enemy on screen multiple times, which is locked to crossbows only. You can plan around that sort of thing, but it’s still more restrictions.
This mechanic lets you make powerful characters, but it takes a long time. You have to raise your little puppets, give them a ton of experience and then transfer them to gain power. Some classes, like the shinobushi, are very strong, but they need some soul clarity and skills to get to their true potential, which isn’t obvious at first. Not much in this game is readily available.
I like this system. It lets you plan a build, and make something of your own. It’s one of the few mechanics in this game that isn’t a mess of RNG, so you feel like you have some control over it, and that you’re doing things strategically and with purpose. It’s also rewarding seeing your weak little puppets suddenly crit a boss for six-figures when they were struggling to kill a basic goblin a few hours ago.
Speaking of RNG and critical hits...
Gore system
If you’ve been good and RNGesus smiles upon you, you can perform something called a “Gore hit”, which is a double critical hit. It’s a super damaging attack that destroys a piece of the enemy.
Cool. That means you can target specific limbs on an enemy, and deal damage to them to weaken them and prevent them from doing stuff, right? Like, you have a tanky enemy, so you break its shell or something, and then it’s vulnerable to attack, right?
Well, that’s how it would work if this game were designed by rational people and not by flipping a coin. The gore system is presented as this grand, wonderful thing that will add depth and strategy to the game, but it’s another blast of RNG, and it’s completely antagonistic to the player.
First off, you can’t target body parts. If you get a gore hit, the part that gets damaged is completely random. This would be a problem, if gore hits had any strategic value, but they don’t. You can destroy an enemy’s parts, but it has no effect on them. Break a sword wielder’s right arm? They can still attack. Break their leg? Does nothing. Break their head? Nothing happens… to the enemies, at least.
If you remember the game’s lore, your little characters are all wooden puppets. If they take too much damage, they break. If an enemy lands a gore hit, they can break a random part. If they break their head, they die instantly. This means your little guys can get randomly one-shot, if the dice rolls against you.
Breaking other parts has negative effects, too. If they break an arm, they can’t use it. Even if it’s their weapon arm. If they break their legs, not much happens, if they break their body, they take an absurd amount of damage, and as mentioned earlier, breaking their head kills them instantly. Breaking any part lowers their maximum health.
To fix this, you need to go back to base and pay a few silver coins to have your puppets repaired. If a puppet dies by having its head crushed, you can’t revive them unless you take them to the repair shop.
This system exists only to punish the player. You can use it, in name only. You can, and will get gore hits on enemies, and it will do a ton of damage, but it won’t change anything meaningful. It’s just a red critical hit. You can supposedly headshot an enemy, but in my 80+ hours of gametime and hundreds of battles, I don’t think I’ve seen it happen once. I have had a lot of puppets get headshot. That I have seen. Multiple times.
The gore hits are another mechanic that seem to provide some sort of depth, but they’re just convoluted ways to present more numbers. It’s for the benefit of the enemy, and to the detriment of the player. I would have liked it if it had any actual tactical value, like how anyone would think a mechanic like this would work. Not even enemy drops are affected by gore hits. You don’t get better loot by breaking specific parts like in Monster Hunter.
Dungeon Design
Hey did you know that the dungeons in Labyrinth of Refrain are labyrinths? Wow, yeah. Who could have seen that one coming?
This game is around 60 hours long, and it has 6 dungeons. If your hair isn’t standing on end, it should. There are more post-game dungeons, and there’s one which I’ll get to which is technically three dungeons, but expect to spend a significant chunk of time in each one.
Each dungeon is a maze of dead ends, countless enemies, vague objectives, confusing layouts and evil tricks. Normally, I’d go over each of the dungeons but this review is already longer than a novel, and I think highlighting one particular dungeon will explain every pro and con of this game.
The Three Towers of Umbra
This is a mammoth dungeon that happens just after the game’s halfway point. It’s the biggest main dungeon. As the name suggests, it’s made of three towers, and each is almost its own dungeon. It’s a horrid, mind-numbing slog of backtracking that shows the lowest of the low this game has to offer.
The Three Towers sounds simple on paper. Three towers, each with a ruler, they’re at war with each other, and you are caught in the middle. Since you’re an amoral murder hobo, your goal here is to kill everyone, regardless of allegiance. You do this by ascending each of the towers to fight their respective boss. Pretty straightforward… right?
WRONG, bucko! Each tower is connected to the other in certain floors. The flow of each tower, which is supposed to be up or down, is complicated by which floors connect to which tower, where and in what direction. Other than the bridges, each tower is its own separate entity. You can enter one tower and get to the top, but to get to the other, you have to go up to a floor, go into the second tower then you can ascend or descend there. For the third one, you have to go down into the basement, then go into it because it has no other connections.
You gradually find this out thanks to the wild goose chase you’re sent on. You have to go up and down each tower like you’re a kid playing in an elevator, talking to NPCs which give you vague hints about the tower’s story. You end up in situations where you go all the way to the top of one tower, talk to someone, then they tell you to go talk to the guy in the other tower, so you go to that other tower, and that guy tells you to go talk to the leader of the tower you were just in. Then it turns out you were supposed to go to a room you walked past dozens of times, which now has an event to view, and THEN you go back to the top of the tower you were on, so NOW it can tell you to go to the other one.
All the while you’re dealing with a massive map full of dozens of rooms, with enemies crawling along every surface, and giant elite enemies patrolling.
As the final cherry on top of this rancid sundae, the dungeon’s map is messed up. For some reason, going up the map shows you the floors in descending order, and going down the maps shows them in ascending order. So if you’re on floor 4, and press down thinking you’ll see the map for floor 3, you get floor 5. This is obvious if you look at the floor numbers, but when you’re first mapping this out, and you don’t know where anything is or how it connects, it’s another bit of confusion thrown in for no good reason.
The whipped cream on the cherry of this stretched metaphor is the fact that the top floor and the bottom floor are next to each other on the map. The basement level is above the top floor in the map rotation. If you want to see how the basement connects with the first floor, you have to scroll all the way through to the top, then remember where the stairs are, and scroll all the way to floor one. Sounds like a mild inconvenience, if you’ve never had to deal with it in-game.
The elite enemies are a kind of guard that roam around the map in a fixed sequence. These are denoted by their purple icon and little horned enemy logo in the mini map. They’re extremely difficult, being several levels higher than anything else in the dungeon. Extremely difficult in this game means that they do a ton of damage to everyone in your party. You have to sneak past these guys, and avoid them at all costs. They roam narrow hallways, so if you see them you have to run back, and if you bump into them in a blind corner, you’re put into a battle that almost guarantees one of your puppets is going to die before you can escape. Escape, as you can guess, is dictated by RNG.
On the subject of randomly running into something that can cave your head in: the events. This game’s entire point is to get to a little red exclamation mark on your map. These are events, and they move the story forward. You never know what an event will be. It could be a random NPC telling you something irrelevant, a story event or a massive boss that will murder you in one turn. You can’t escape from bosses, either.
With all that, you can imagine what a pain in the ass the Three Towers of Umbra is. It’s a massive, multi-hour dungeon full of time wasters and nonsense. I had to save before every event because there was a chance it was either nothing, or a boss that was way higher level than me. The dungeon’s story tries to guide you in the right direction, but it makes no sense. You’re told you can pick a side in the war, but when you do you’re still expected to kill one of the bosses first, then the other. Then one of the bosses you’re supposed to kill disappears into a hidden part of the dungeon, with zero indication. So you’re stumbling blindly around until you find where you need to go.
This dungeon is full of unmapped areas, which are dark sections you can’t map. They show up as black on the mini map, and you can’t see the walls or anything unless you look at the actual, physical walls with your eyes. This section is also full of poison gas, which slowly kills you until you unlock a skill that negates it.
This one dungeon took me over ten hours. At one point I stopped calling the game Labyrinth of Refrain and just called it Towers of Umbra, because all my play time for multiple sessions was spent in this one godforsaken dungeon. I must have gone up to the top and down to the bottom of each tower over twenty times each, looking for the next thing to do, fighting horrid bosses and getting stuck. The towers are also full of dead ends with mirrors and masks in them, which seem like they would be part of a puzzle or something, but no, it’s all just set-dressing. You don’t have to solve a puzzle to progress, you need to find the right breakable wall, bash into it, and then continue. Literally hitting your head against a wall until you can go forward.
The game overall has a lack of any puzzles or interesting dungeon mechanics. It’s all just poison gas and cryptic events. One dungeon, The Verdant Phenom, had me running around like a headless chicken looking for a fairy that just kept popping up in random event locations to giggle and run away. Then after hours of this nonsense, I found another fairy that told me to go kill a giant flower that was terrorizing the garden. I got a skill that let me go into the poison area, and went in. There, I found a giant flower that was terrorizing the garden. It started a boss fight, and it killed my entire party in one shot. I didn’t see any other indication of what to do, and I was told to kill an evil flower, so I did a lot of grinding to see if I could kill it. After hours of trying, it still kept clobbering me into the dirt. I kept wandering around aimlessly until I ran into an event in an area I had already been in multiple times. I triggered the event, and lo and behold, an evil flower showed up. A different one. It started a boss fight, and I was so over-leveled from being lost that I killed it in one turn. Then the dungeon continued. Hooray?
This is something I read others were going through in the Three Towers of Umbra. I read a forum post where one guy got so lost here, and spent so much time trying to find the exit, that he accidentally over leveled and, when it came time to fight the real boss, he killed it in one go and kept steamrolling past the rest of the game.
The dungeons in the game aren’t anything to write home about. They’re vague, cryptic and their objectives are just “go to this location, then go to that location” with no rhyme or reason. There’s a vague sense of progression. Some have you going forward, others have an obvious up or down flow, but most have you zig-zagging across the entire thing like you’re in a Scooby-Doo chase, going in and out of hallways, talking to random people, and going back to the same room you’ve been in twenty times, but this time a new event showed up because you unknowingly triggered something while goofing around four floors down.
Then there are events that are just a cutscene, then you have to go back to base to report to the witch. It happens multiple times, and it completely kills any flow you might have going. You find an event after scouring the dungeon, only for it to be an unrelated story cutscene that ends with “go home, Roger”. You go back to the base, and your next objective is to go back to where you were and trigger another event, which then tells you to go back to base. It’s infuriating.
The dungeons are designed to be so long and exhausting because they can be, thanks to the game’s mud exit system.
Stop and go design and the mana rope
At some point in the game, near the beginning, you unlock the ability to use a Mud Exit. This lets you escape a dungeon at any point. Once you get the ability to create two mud exits, you can place them down, use one to go back to base and the other to teleport back into where you were in the dungeon. This completely kills the risk/reward associated with regular dungeon crawlers, and gives the developers free rein to make the biggest, longest most convoluted dungeons, simply because at any point, you can fly back to base, recover and go back.
This invalidates things like the limited mana pools and other risks. You can spend all your mana, or have most of your party get killed, then you place two exits, go back, heal and return like nothing happened. This is also necessary because of what I mentioned earlier with the events. Exiting a dungeon and saving before an event is mandatory since you are always at risk of going into a boss encounter.
Now that the developers have a way for you to go back to base on demand, they can do what they love best: making flow-breaking events where you go back to base.
Mana is another thing that limits your exploration. This isn’t the mana you use to cast spells, that’s donum. This kind of mana is called Reinforcements. A lot of actions you can take in-game cost reinforcements. You start with 99. When you go into a dungeon, the total cost of all your active covenants is subtracted from this number. If you use any of the party abilities; using stealth, breaking walls, placing mud exits or anything else, it costs reinforcements. When you’re in battle and you stock exp, it costs one reinforcement per battle. In battle, if you want to use an item, it costs one reinforcement to use. If you want to assign specific actions to a character inside a covenant, it costs reinforcements. If you want to boost a character’s offense and/or defense in a turn, it also costs reinforcements.
This one mechanic is incredibly overloaded. Everything deducts from it. The most important part of it is the wall breaker. You need to break specific walls to progress in certain dungeons, and this costs five reinforcement per use. If you don’t have any more to use, you can’t break walls, meaning you can soft-lock and have to either use an item to go back to base or reload a save. I don’t know why every single action costs reinforcements.
Maybe they felt they needed something to limit how much time you spent in the dungeon. There already is a limit, both a hard and soft limit. The soft limit are your resources: your characters’ health and mana, but you can refill that by going home at any point. Then there’s the hard limit. If you spend too much time grinding in one area, you reach a “mana saturation” and get attacked by special ultra-high level enemies that will do their best to outright kill you.
The constant need to spend reinforcements, their low maximum and the mud exits all combine to give this game an annoying stop and go rhythm. You explore for a few minutes, notice you’re running low on reinforcements, plop down two mud exits (which cost 15 reinforcements each, so 30 in total), return to base, save, and go back. Repeat endless times while you explore a massive maze.
This serves to both break any tension with risk/reward, making it trivial to go back to base when the smallest inconvenience happens, and it makes exploration feel choppy. It becomes a chore.
There is an element of risk to exploring, if you decide to use the EXP stock system.
OH GOD ANOTHER SYSTEM HELP ME PLEASE (Experience Stockpiling)
This is another glorified number slop-type mechanic. You can stockpile experience after each battle. Once you start, you start gaining an extra percentage of experience on top of the one you gain after a battle. The more battles you do in a row, the more the extra mana gets multiplied, up to a maximum of a 16 chain.
If you guessed that this is yet another system that’s presented as a benefit for the player, but it turns out to be more numbers, then you’re 100% correct.
If the game gives you a way to get massive amounts of experience, it sounds like it’s for you to get experience and level up, right? What this means to me, and the reality of the situation is, not that this is an optional little thing to boost your levels for convenience. No. It means you’re going to need to do this to keep up with the astronomical amounts of experience needed to level up. Especially when you’re leveling a transferred character with a higher soul clarity.
This is also affected by RNG, because there is a chance to encounter named critical enemies. I call them critical enemies because they spawn in with the same black and red effect of a critical. These are regular enemies, but with significantly more numbers. You can be stomping through a dungeon, killing little bees and slimes, when suddenly one of them becomes a Devious Bee, which means it has 3 times more health and each of its attacks is an almost guaranteed gore hit. You can either take the fight and hope to survive, or run. If you run (meaning, if the game rolls the dice and decides you get to escape), you lose all the experience you had stocked up until that point. All of it. You don’t just lose the inflated extra experience, you get nothing. Nada. The EXP you’d get from all the fights goes into the bank when you start stocking, so you lose all of it.
That’s the only risk/reward left in this game, and it’s aggravating. Nothing like dropping a chain because of a random enemy encounter that had an Overlord regular enemy with EIGHT TIMES their normal HP and doing critical attacks every round.
Which brings me to the game’s difficulty
Difficulty
If you’re familiar with JRPG “difficulty”, then you know about bosses that just do a bunch of damage to all your party. That’s it. That’s the difficulty in Labyrinth of Refrain. The boss shows up, and it does 4,000 points of damage fifteen times in a row in one turn, hitting your entire party multiple times.
There’s one giant robot boss, the D.E. Machina, who just pummels your entire party for thousands of damage each turn.
“But Roger!” you shout. “That’s an optional end-game boss. Of course it’s going to be really difficult.”
Yes, it is an optional end-game boss. It is very difficult. What makes it so difficult? Is it the fact that it’s a thought-provoking challenge that tests your knowledge of the game? Or is it because it hits your entire party for 80% of their maximum health five times each turn?
If that’s not enough, this game also has something I like to call “The Spell That Kills You”. I’ll give you three chances to guess what it does. As the game progresses, the bosses just start doing an attack that goes one-by-one over your entire party, killing them. There is no other way for me to explain it, other than that. It’s just a spell… that kills you. They cast Death.
You can try to use defensive magic, if you can find a covenant that has it, and if it even works, like the aforementioned magic mirror spell which has a chance to reflect magic damage (except for The Spell That Kills You, that can’t be reflected. You were supposed to know that. How? Don’t ask me.), so that’s a gamble. You can’t debuff the boss, because debuff spells don’t work on bosses, other than maybe some defense lowering spells that reduce defenses by a smidge for three turns. Any of the actually useful disruptive statuses don’t work, except for poison, if it hits, which is also up to a dice roll.
I’ve had to look up how to beat some of the bosses, because this is that kind of strategy guide game, and they say it’s like a puzzle. You have to build a party and optimize for the specific situation at hand. That’s all fine and dandy, if it weren’t for one thing:
The items.
Items
There’s very little you can do against massive damage in this game. If boss battles are like a puzzle, then your pieces are your equipment, and they’re all blue center pieces that don’t fit, and the puzzle you’re trying to build doesn’t have any blue.
What I’m saying is that they’re ineffective. If a boss is smacking me over the head with blunt and fog damage, like it’s hitting me with a rolled up swisha and blowing smoke in my face, I will want armor that has resistances against blunt and fog damage, right? Well, there isn’t any. Armor gives you defense, in general. A number that somehow interferes with the enemy’s attack numbers. The higher that number is, the less chance my characters have of getting their organs crushed. What’s the correlation? Is there a formula? There probably is. I don’t know what it is.
Each piece of gear has a purpose. Armor, meaning the thing you put on your chest, gives you defense, like I said. Helmets/headwear give you a tiny bit of defense, but it’s mostly HIT, a chance to hit. Shoes/leg armor give you evasion. Your hands don’t get armor, that’s where you put weapons. Unless you grab a shield, which gives you defense and a chance to block damage. Then there are the amulets, which give you resistances.
There it is, then. Amulets. If I want to stop getting blunt smoke blown in my face, then I need an amulet that gives me resistance to those types of damage. Well, there’s a problem. Several, actually. First, you need to find the right amulet. Items are random drops, with random stats, so getting one that has the resist you need is the first chore. If you scour the dungeons and find an amulet with fog resistance, congratulations! Now you have an item that gives you… 4% fog resistance. If you’re getting hit for 4,200 fog damage, this little thing can lower it down to 4,032. Not great but, it’s something, I guess. Too bad my tankiest puppet has 5,600 HP. That’s good. The second tankiest has 3,500. That’s not great.
Then comes the blunt damage. There are three types of weapon damage: blunt, piercing and slash. Equipment doesn’t reduce them individually, so I can’t find anything to reduce the specific type of damage that’s turning my party into a smear on the wall.
My only hope is to grind to get bigger numbers, but with that approach I can get a high enough level to kill anything with no effort.
I could always make the equipment stronger by Synthesizing it...
Synthesis: ANOTHER SYSTEM OH GOD IM GOING TO PUKE
Another poorly explained complication to get bigger numbers. Here, you take an item, throw it in a pot and throw other stuff with it to make its numbers bigger. If you throw other stuff, you can give it different numbers. I think. It’s never really explained in-game, guides are scarce and a lot of this is hearsay.
The way I think it works is that you put an item, then put similarly powerful items with it, and the items’ collective stats will combine, get averaged, then run through an RNG dice roll, then the resulting numbers are added to your item. I think. Maybe. All I know is, I put something in, put other stuff in, press a button, and my item now has more numbers.
Sometimes when I add items from other categories, like an amulet to a weapon, it gives it a slight increase from one of the amulet’s stats. If I put in a fire resistant amulet, my weapon can get some fire resistance. How much? About 1%. That’s not a stat increase, that’s a numerical slur.
I fumbled around with the synthesis system and managed to get some improved gear, but I can’t say I mastered it, or that I really understand what’s going on.
Making new items is fun at first. You put bigger numbers on your gear, which is neat, but after a while, it’s not enough. You don’t need to use synthesis at any point in the main story, except maybe at the final boss, so you can mostly ignore this mechanic, but when you get to a point where you need better gear for the optional bosses, you’ll be left at a loss. It’s poorly explained, esoteric and the way it works is obscured behind hidden stats and dice rolls.
You can make good gear, if you know what you’re doing (unlikely) and if you mash together a lot of the same high-tier items, but that’s a huge chore. Getting high tier items is relatively easy, but getting the good ones is another gamble. Each item has a list of possible descriptors that affect their stats. Things like “lucky”, or “divine”. There are a total of 26 of these. Some of these are negative, like “unlucky”, which reduces your luck, “wounded”, which reduces your chance to guard, and “broken” reduces the item’s stats to less than ¼ of what they should be. The game never tells you what these descriptors mean. You can look at the stats and infer, if you have two of the same item with different titles, but how are you supposed to know that “lustful” reduces Charm? It’s like giving an item the “gooner” descriptor, and it lowers your horny stat.
From what I’ve seen, most people just save scum to get better items. They make a save point in front of a drop location, grab the randomly generated item and reload the save until they get something good. That doesn’t sound like something I’d want to do.
On top of all that, synthesizing multiple items is like trying to eat soup with chop sticks thanks to this game’s annoying UI.
UI/UX complaints
98% of Labyrinth of Refrain takes place in menus. For every minute you spend walking around a dungeon, you’ll spend five more fiddling with different text boxes. You’d think that, because of this, the game would have a smooth, optimized user interface, but that’s not the case. It has some good things, but there are a lot of constant little inconveniences that pile up over this game’s bloated run time.
Synthesizing is a smooth process, but finding what you want to upgrade isn’t. For example, if you want to upgrade Merlin’s armor, you can’t go into his character stats, select his armor and upgrade it from there. No, that’d be something a reasonable person would do. Instead, you first check what armor he’s wearing, and make note of the exact name if you have multiple copies. You notice he’s wearing a Bomboclaat Wizard’s Armor. Now you go into the synthesis menu, pick the main ingredient, scroll to the armor tab, then scroll through all your other armors until you find the Bomboclaat Wizard’s Armor. Wait, you have two of them. No problem, just check which one is marked as “equipped”, and you’ll pick the right one. Slight issue here. Both of your Bomboclaat Wizard’s Armor are equipped, and the game doesn’t tell you who’s wearing it in this menu.
Multiply this process by each piece of gear you want to upgrade. You have up to fifteen active puppets, each with six pieces of modifiable equipment, for a total of 90 pieces of gear. Looking for a needle in a haystack to find the item you want, then going through the whole rigmarole of actually doing the synthesis. It’s annoying.
When a puppet is injured, you can repair it from the puppet workbench menu. If you don’t have the pieces necessary for the repair, the game asks if you want to buy some, and if you pick yes, it automatically buys the piece and repairs the puppet in one go. Simple. That’s good.
What’s not good is that, if you want to do anything else in the puppet workbench and you don’t have the pieces, you can’t get them from that menu like you can with parts. If you want to create a new soldier, or transfer one, and you don’t have the parts for it, the two options are greyed out. It doesn’t tell you why they’re unavailable. If you try to use them, it says “Unavailable at this time”. You have to go to the market screen, buy the parts and then you can use the menu options.
While on the subject of equipment micromanaging, I should mention the stats screen. When you view an item, you see their stats in a little window to the right. This has all the item’s numbers. Each item has a lot of numbers, so the information is spread across multiple pages. If you’re comparing an item to one you have equipped, the game will show you the stat differences with plus or minus numbers. This is okay, but remember, there are pages of stats. If you want to see differences across multiple stats, you have to go back and forth through each page to see what changed. There’s no way to compare two unequipped items directly.
If one item has stats that the other doesn’t, they won’t show up. For example, if one piece of armor increases your fog resist, but another doesn’t, the second one won’t have a fog resist stat at all. Meaning you have to go through the pages looking to see if the stat is even there in the first place. There’s no fixed “fog resist” stat you can check.
When choosing items for synthesis, you can’t compare their stats to the item you’re upgrading.
You can buy a list of the treasure available in each dungeon, but you can’t view that list from the dungeon selection screen. You need to go into a dungeon, open the map then view the list. You can at least look at the list of the other dungeons while in one, so you don’t have to go to each level to check its drop table.
Miscellaneous Mechanics
There are a few more number modifiers to cover before getting on to the presentation, for the sake of being thorough. There’s an entire relationship system that, as your puppets fight with each other, they gain each other’s trust and become friends, which lets them do chain attacks more often. These give you slight attack boosts and seem to happen at random, much like everything else. I never played with this in mind, I just considered it a nice bonus when it happens.
Something similar happens to magic if you cast several in the same turn. It triggers a Donum Ressonance and causes your magic to deal more damage. You can chain off an enemy’s magic and an enemy can chain off your cast. It’s another inconsistent mechanic that seems to happen at random.
If anyone has any concrete info on these, please let me know. To me, they’re non-essential, and just some neat fluff.
Presentation
The game looks nice, at least. It has that signature Nippon Ichi look to it, drawn by Takehito Harada. Most of the characters look like edgy cats, with their big heads and massive, angry eyes. Their designs are memorable, and they look like they fit in the world of Refrain, which is a vague JRPG dark fantasy thing.
The stand outs, to me, are the monster designs. There are some truly disgusting things on display here. The type of foul creatures you want to gore hit to death. There’s a lot of creativity on display. You have your standard slimes and such, but they have their own style to them. They look less like the cutesy regular slimes from other rpgs, and more like decrepit monsters. Then there are the suspicious white slimes in the pleasure area of the Tower of Umbra. Almost every enemy encountered is some horrific eldritch thing that would be better off as a stain on your sword. Except for the gnomes in the second dungeon. Those little guys are alright, but you have to slaughter them anyways.
The bosses have a great look to them, too. They go all out with the incomprehensible horrors. Eldritch monsters, masses of damned souls, disembodied heads, it’s all horrific, and really cool. These hideous beings contrast very well with the protagonists’ cutesy designs.
Each dungeon has its own unique look and feel to it. The first dungeon is green and decaying, covered in slime, giving it a sickly look. The Verdant Phenom is a strangely grassy and natural area inside the labyrinth, that looks nice and autumnal, with fairies and other mythical creatures. Then it turns out they all want to kill you. Even my most hated dungeon, the Three Towers of Umbra has a great visual identity. Each of the towers has their own look, color palette and ambient. It’s palatial and upscale, but full of creepy shadows and things hinted at going on in hidden rooms. Then you get to the third tower, and it’s a quiet, decaying version of the other two, full of flies and ruins. A lot darker and the weird details from the other towers look more ominious here, like the masks everywhere, now on the floor in piles of rubble.
The game looks great, even with its limitations. Characters aren’t really animated; they’re single images that hop around or squash and stretch to show their current state. It’s typical for this kind of game, but at least the illustrations look great. The dungeons also have a lot of personality, making exploration a treat, not knowing what kind of monstrosity you’ll run into next.
The music is very baroque and bombastic, to the game’s detriment in some cases. It sounds good, and it’s unique. If you’ve heard the music in Disgaea, you have an idea of what this sounds like. I know I just said it’s unique and compared it to something else, but these two games have similar sounding music, and their music is instantly recognizable and doesn’t sound like anything else. The compositions are catchy and fun to listen to, but the constant change from dungeon to battle to menu makes their unique qualities into sticking points. Like having a pebble in your shoe for the entire day.
Each song has a distinct, pronounced intro. Lots of flourishes and percussion, very grand as if to introduce a King or a story book character. This wouldn’t be a problem if you were listening to them on their own, but the game plays the song from the start every time you switch states, so you end up listening to the first five seconds of each track over and over and over and over again. You enter the level, hear it, get into a battle, the battle theme plays, you end the fight, go back to the level, the music restarts, you take two steps, battle, back into the level, the intro plays again. It’s a nightmare.
Take this video, and listen to the first ten seconds. Then skip back to the beginning, and listen to them again. Do this about ten times in a row, and tell me how you’d feel about that happening for over eight hours. It’s a shame, since the compositions themselves sound great. It’s just that I don’t want to listen to the first bit of it every time I exit a battle. I have the Verdant Phenom’s intro whistle burnt into my brain for all eternity.
The voice performances are good, too. I played the game in Japanese because I’m a massive weeb, and because when I played it in English the characters kept yelling “I’m coming!” when they attacked, and I couldn’t take the game seriously. The Japanese voice actors all embody their roles well. Dronya, the main character, has a wide range, going from a calm, almost motherly tone to a more sinister villainess at the drop of a hat (she is a wicked witch, after all), and they both sound convincing and like they fit the character. Luca sounds adorable and manages not to be grating. The little characters all have different voices you can assign to them, and they’re inoffensive. At least in Japanese.
Labyrinth’s presentation is great. I like how it looks and sounds, even if it has a few setbacks. The characters are appealing and memorable, the enemies look horrific and interesting, the environmental design gives each area its own unique look, and the music and visuals combine well to make a compelling atmosphere that’s both whimsical and creepy.
The only area I think is objectively bad is the second-to-last story dungeon, The Last Morgue. It’s a giant, boring crypt with copy-pasted rooms. The objectives there are about following a little girl and reading a story that you have no involvement in. Much like in the Towers of Umbra, you have to go back and forth through the whole place, up and down it, interacting with events that aren’t placed in any coherent way. The area is massive, and full of long hallways and winding paths meant to waste your time. There’s nothing good to say about this dungeon. It’s a slapped-together piece of filler meant to pad out an already long and bloated game.
Story
Discussing the story? In a Load Last Save review? Well, this is an RPG, and part visual novel, so I have to mention the story, at least in passing.
Starting off with how it doesn’t interact with the gameplay at all. One of the reasons why I don’t pay much attention to the story in a game, is because the gameplay and story live on separate continents and they never interact, so if I skip the story, I never miss out on anything. Labyrinth of Refrain is a terrible instance of this. The story and the gameplay are completely unrelated for 80% of the runtime.
No spoilers but, you play as a book. The main characters, Dronya and Luca, have their own little thing going on. Your goals are aligned. Dronya wants to find some magic keys inside the labyrinth, so she throws you, the book, in there to find them. That’s where the alignment stops. From that point on, all the way to the end, your goal is to roam the labyrinth and come back every now and then to get an upgrade or watch an unrelated cutscene. You might be exploring an underground cave, then you get an objective to come up to the surface, so you go back to base, only to watch a little scene about Luca cooking potatoes. Then you go back into the maze to continue what you were doing. Luca making potatoes is cute, but I don’t see how that has anything to do with me going through a troll-infested cave, and why I need to stop that to go see that scene.
This happens constantly. You get interrupted to watch something happen that’s completely unrelated to your current mission. The scenes themselves aren’t bad. The game’s story is alright, it’s a decent mystery and the relationship between Dronya and Luca evolves nicely, but it has nothing to do with the gameplay.
I have to reiterate that you play as a book. You’re a prop. It’s like if you played as Cloud’s Buster Sword in Final Fantasy 7. Even less personal, in fact. You’re a potion in Cloud’s inventory. Dronya doesn’t struggle through the Labyrinth, and with you being a book, you don’t experience any change or character growth since- well- you’re not a character. There is some mystery surrounding what the book is, but it’s ignored throughout the whole game and only gets semi-resolved in an exposition dump right before the final boss. If you want more info, you have to do the optional content, post-game dungeon and get the TRUE ending.
I always complain about how, in games, you’re watching a story play out coincidentally while you play the game, with no interactivity, but Labyrinth takes the cake on that one.
The game is supposedly part visual novel, too, but there isn’t much in that department other than the mucho texto and static character portraits. You don’t make any story decisions. Could be because you’re a book.
Overall, a decent story, but you don’t have anything to do with it. If you’re the type that likes stories in games, you might enjoy this one. It’s alright. Be warned that it does get pretty dark at points. There’s some sexual assault (of adult characters) and some abuse (of child characters), but it never crosses the line into explicit or tasteless territory.
It’s a bittersweet, tragic story full of mystery, twists, turns interesting reveals and a small cast of characters that are well developed and interesting. That’s my spoiler-free review of the story.
Now, on to the spoilers. You’ve been warned.
--SPOILER WARNING--
I will be discussing some specific plot points here, so skip to the conclusion if you don’t want to see them.
HERE GOES: The story’s big twist is dumb and revealed at the very end of the game, literally right before the final boss. The first big reveal, that Madam Dronya, the big bad witch, is actually a puppet is a pretty cool one. There are vague hints at first. She has a prosthetic leg that keeps breaking, but there’s a parallel story in the form of a puppet show she puts on (as a front for why she’s in the town, she says she’s a travelling puppeteer, hence all the puppets) and the show’s story is fairy tale of two brothers who get punished by an evil demon. The demon takes one of the brothers’ eyes and the others’ leg. The red herring here is that Dronya is the one missing the leg, and that Marietta is the one missing the eye. Turns out her fake leg was just part of her puppet body.
The real mastermind and puppeteer behind all this is the ultra-powerful witch Mezzaluca, a character that is revealed at the end, but was with you the whole time, because she’s just Luca… from the future. Yeah, there’s time travel here. I was disappointed when it happened. Luca from the future orchestrated the events of Labyrinth of Refrain by sending the souls of different important people through history back to the past to play the shitty games that suck ass- sorry, it’s a reflex- back to the past to stop Baba Yaga, the true antagonist of the story.
Baba Yaga is a god-like being who was a regular witch but transcended time and space in search of immortality, and now she’s basically an eldritch god. The only way to stop her was to send people back in time to before she gets her full power. The book you play as, the Tractatus de Monstrum, is a book written by Baba Yaga during her first expedition into the Labyrinth, but Luca got a hold of it in the future and sent back a soul into it to guide her past self to get the magical MacGuffins and stop Baba Yaga.
I don’t like time travel stories, nor ones where everything was planned and calculated from the start, nor do I like stories that have a huge exposition dump at the end. Labyrinth of Refrain does all three of these.
The story itself isn’t bad, except for that last bit. The characters are interesting. Dronya starts off as an irredeemable witch but slowly softens and shows some good. I like that evolution, but I knew it was going to happen. I kind of wanted Dronya to stay en evil bastard and embody being a true wicked witch. She could have kept her arc where she grows closer to Luca, but keep her as a wretched schemer.
The reveal that Luca was behind it all from the future is pretty dumb, in my opinion. I know RPGs love doing this, this whole thing where the world ends so they send something into the past to prevent it, but I just don’t like it. Mezzaluca is from the future that Baba Yaga wins, becomes the eldritch being and eats the world, so she sends souls back in time to stop that from happening, but then she seals one of their memories so Baba Yaga doesn’t know, but she does, but- it’s a mess. I’m sure there’s sense to it if I read it through, but it’s still kind of dumb.
-SPOILER END-
Final verdict on the story: It’s fine. I would have liked this more as an anime than a story spread out through a 60-hour game.
Conclusion
After this long, drawn-out review, the question still stands: Do I recommend Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk? Hell, do I even like this game?
From all the complaints I have with this game, and how convoluted it is, you’d think I don’t. Sure, the game is bloated. It has systems on systems on top of systems with mechanics sprinkled on top. There’s a tutorial happening every few minutes explaining all the weird, esoteric ways you can increase numbers. It’s all a bit overwhelming.
It doesn’t help that most of these systems can be compressed down to “make number big”. The game doesn’t explain them much, and quite frankly, doesn’t expect you to use them for 99.9% of it. You can get past most of the game’s challenges by simply grinding and raising your characters’ levels. Sure, you’ll need to get better equipment, but you can get by with the stuff you find in the dungeons.
Most of the “challenge” in the game can be overcome by sheer brute force. Even the final boss- the regular one, not the TRUE last boss- can be beaten with numbers and a specific covenant. I saw discussions online saying how “nah man a squad of level 99 puppets isn’t enough, bro, the final boss is gonna wreck you and it’s really tough and yadda yadda”, but I beat it with a squad of regular level 99 puppets. I had two that were transferred, so they had better stats, but I transferred them before I researched that system, so their gains were minimal. It wasn’t a fully kitted out end-game party, it was a bunch of numbers in shiny armor.
I only had to really engage with the synthesis system and think about what I was doing near the end of the game, right before the final dungeon when you fight the pre-final boss. It was a huge difficulty spike and I needed to grind and get optimal equipment and form a decent team to take it on. There were other difficulty spikes before, but none as sharp as the second-to-last boss.
This lack of difficulty spikes could be due to the horrible Towers of Umbra dungeon. Much like that guy whose post I read on GameFAQs, I also spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find my way through that damned place, and ended up accidentally over leveling. When I got out of there, I thanked God for an hour straight and then turned into a human Killdozer and barreled my way through the rest of the game -up to the last bit. I went down into the secret area to beat the secret boss and get the secret covenant, which are not secret at all because they’re needed for the final boss, but the game never tells you, but I did all that like it was nothing. I auto-piloted my way there, turned the boss into a puddle of soup in a few turns and went for the final boss. Then I got spiked by the Second-to-last boss. I’ll call it Bob for now, since it’s a spoiler and writing the phrase second-to-last boss is annoying.
After defeating Bob and surviving its signature Spell That Kills You, I went in to the final area expecting a challenge, but again, I plowed through it like a joke. Then I came up against the final boss, which used its Spell That Kills You and I had to grind again. Then I killed it. The boss that’s supposedly ultra hard and recommended to kill on New Game Plus.
Then I went on to the optional bosses and got rocked by more Spells That Kill You.
Why am I telling you all this? For one, to tell you my experience with the game, but also to demonstrate that, for some reason, I decided to keep going with this game. I could have stopped at the final boss. Hell, I could have stopped at any point before, since the game doesn’t really evolve in any meaningful way, and my thoughts at hour 30 were the same at hour 60, but I chose to keep playing.
I wanted to do the optional content to see if it forced me to engage with all of the game’s bizarre and poorly explained mechanics. I wanted to get a real challenge, and I got it, but it came after 60 hours of playing.
This is why I can’t simply say if I like the game or not. It’s annoying, long, bloated, padded and horrifically paced, with confusing systems that don’t seem to do much covered in a thick layer of randomness, but it’s not bad.
I like how obtuse the game is. It lets you discover things on your own. Your objectives and goals are vague and confusing at times, but it doesn’t hold your hand. You’re dumped in the labyrinth, and other than a few too many recalls to the base, it lets you do what you want. You can make a sub-optimal party, as long as you can beat the checkpoint bosses. You can spend as much time as you want messing around the dungeons, getting as strong as you wish. You can play around with the optional systems and trivialize the game if you want. You can make an ultra-powerful level 400 puppet, then put it in a solo party and one-shot bosses for the fun of it. Sure, the game can be tedious and frustrating, but it’s a videogame first and foremost. It gives you a bunch of rules and tools and lets you figure them out.
All these seemingly disparate mechanics also work together surprisingly well. They manage to give you something to work towards and plan around. You have the tools to succeed, with enough randomness to trigger your gambling instinct and notable number increases to keep the dopamine flowing.
The exploration is also fun. Sure, the dungeons are very straightforward, there aren’t any cool puzzles to solve and navigation can be a bit of a headache, but it scratches that autistic dungeon crawling itch very well. It’s a lot like Wolverine: it’s good at what it does, but what it does ain’t pretty, and that is to give stat-minded players a very smooth, borderline cozy exploration game with a ton of numbers to wrap your head around and calculate.
I recommend Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk to a very specific niche of players. Those who like dungeon crawlers, and those who appreciate massive, systems-driven games full of numbers.
It’s a very tenuous recommendation, though. When compared to other dungeon crawlers I’ve played, which isn’t many if I admit, this game has a lot of the same pitfalls, some things it does worse and some things it does well.
Compared to something like Stranger of Sword City, it’s a lot more forgiving and fair, but this kind of game isn’t supposed to be fair, it’s supposed to be a constant knowledge check full of traps. Labyrinth has a lot of knowledge checks, but they’re not as brutal as the ones in Sword City, which can be a positive or a negative depending on how masochistic you are. The two games’ debuff system is night and day, too. In Sword City, your debuffs actually matter, and work on bosses. You can lower their accuracy, or their dodge rate, as if they were a regular enemy. In Labyrinth, bosses are pretty much immune to most of the useful debuffs… if you can find any covenants with debuffs in the first place.
This game is also a lot longer than most games. It’s JRPG length, if you just go through the regular story. If you do the additional content, you can expect another 20 hours on top. It’s a bit much, really. Too much.
I think the game would have been better if they trimmed some of the fat. Take out an entire third of the Towers of Umbra. Make it the Twin Towers of Umbra- wait no, that’s a terrible idea- but the thought still stands. There are only six dungeons (and one post-game) and one of them is a complete copy/paste job with boring aesthetics and nothing going on. They could have cut a lot of this up and added more interesting, shorter dungeons.
I don’t recommend this game to anyone who wants a simple game, or something more polished. This isn’t for the average gamer, or for people who like JRPGs. There aren’t any fancy cutscenes, the characters are off-putting to the regular viewer, there’s a ton of reading and the game is too dense and long.
If I were to answer if I liked it, I’d say I did. I went back and forth on it, but I guess I enjoyed it more than I disliked it, even if there is a lot to dislike here. The combat is smooth, it works, it’s fun to see it play out. I liked forming a party of weirdos and playing around with the different classes and planning builds, even if there are very simple “meta” builds that are more efficient. You can play this with a guide, or you can discover things for yourself, which is more fun, but you will need that guide for the optional content, since finding it is very cryptic.
I liked the exploration, since I’m a sucker for dungeon RPGs. You throw me in a dank cellar with a sword, limit my movement to a grid and I’m already having a blast. I think this game does a decent job of that, even if it’s a bit too forgiving. I didn’t like how you could go out of the dungeon at any point with the mud exits. I think the designers took advantage of this and made the dungeons more annoying than they needed to be knowing the player could go back to safety at any point. It makes resource management a lot less interesting, too.
In closing, Labyrinth of Refrain is a heavily flawed game that manages to be interesting even through its many missteps. As a dungeon crawler, I don’t think I’d recommend it over something like Stranger of Sword City or Zanki Zero, but it’s still worth playing. At least I think it is.
When it comes to this game, I’ll reject the binary and embrace the third option: both. Yes and no to Labyrinth of Refrain. Yes to the good parts, and yes to anyone who likes this kind of game. No to the bad parts, and no to anyone who thinks this looks off-putting. It’s simultaneously good and bad, but I choose to enjoy the good.
Everything else can fit neatly into the binary. Videogames are serious business.
i think you'd probably enjoy Demon Gaze more, as its shorter with a cooler anime-style story. Put at least 20 hours into coven but honestly its just too much pain in the ass to be worth it.
not sure if labrynth of gallelia fixed things, but coven really isnt worth it on a system with a lot of jrpgs.
The saying "Your problematic behavior isn't a problem if I like it." Is the definition of this essay, and your love for dungeon crawlers and Labyrinth is on full display. I had no idea this game/series even existed and honestly I'm glad you reviewed it, cause I doubt I'd be able to see it through to the credits. Excellent Piece!