Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk

Genre: First-Person Dungeon-Crawler / Turn-Based JRPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Labyrinth of Refrain is a First-Person Dungeon-Crawler and Turn-Based JRPG much in the style of Atlus’s entries in the genre like the Etrian Odyssey games (minus the map-making) and the Persona Q series. Released in 2018 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch, Labyrinth of Refrain follows the story of veteran witch Dronya, who has been summoned to a remote town to assist in the exploration of a miasma-filled labyrinth underneath the town’s well.

While this game’s story and writing are interesting, I found myself quickly hating almost every character in the game. Dronya is an insufferable jerk to pretty much everyone, including her child apprentice Luca, who she regularly beats for the slightest of mistakes. The townsfolk here aren’t much better, with virtually everyone not even bothering to hide how they ogle Dronya, and some even going so far as to sexually assault her. Pretty much the only one who comes across well here is Luca, though she often gets very close to crossing the line from “adorable child” to “annoyingly overly-cute”.

I don’t think the rest of this game’s presentation is doing this game many favors, either. While the anime-style 2D character artwork is gorgeous, the 3D mazes you navigate are merely sufficient and in no way impressive, and can get repetitive extremely quickly. The voice acting here is good, but the music is being provided by Tenpei Sato, Nippon Ichi’s in-house composer, and as a result this game’s music sounds like it belongs in a Disgaea game (and music was never that series’ strong suit).

At the very least, this game’s First-Person Dungeon-Crawling and Turn-Based RPG elements offer some originality to keep things interesting. Because the labyrinth’s miasma is poisonous to humans, Dronya delegates the task instead to… you, a soul trapped within a magical book called the Tractatus de Monstrum (nicknamed “Tracty” by Luca). You go about this task by creating and controlling puppets imbued with souls of various warriors, who can then be organized into groups called covens that form the ranks of your party. What’s more, the actual dungeon exploration has some fun twists too, such as the ability, learned early into the game, to bash down walls and explore the labyrinth more freely.

Unfortunately, for everything Labyrinth of Refrain does well, it does some other elements poorly, or at least in a way that highly limits this game’s appeal. The “puppet” thing makes for excellent party customization, but the game takes things a bit too far by making it so enemies can break parts of your puppets with no ability to repair them until you return back to the town, basically meaning that from that point on any further exploration will have to be done with a party member with crippled health and attack power.

And while bashing your way through the dungeon’s walls sound promising, this promise is quickly subdued by the unfortunate reality – many of the dungeon’s halls are lined with bottomless pits, you cannot mark where these pits are on your map, and the walls return back to normal each time you leave the dungeon, meaning that not only does breaking down walls have limited use, but the game actually makes it harder to remember where it is useful.

To make things even more frustrating, the game enables players to run head-first into far too difficult battles early on, and apparently doesn’t even warn them when an enemy parading around the dungeon is too tough for players to handle at their current level. You can see floating orbs representing enemies move around and their are thankfully no random battles, but that hardly means anything if you can’t be sure whether the enemy you need to get past is an easy foe you can one-shot without breaking a sweat, or an absolute monster that will completely demolish your entire party before you can run away.

It is so very frustrating playing Labyrinth of Refrain, because I see plenty of great elements here that delight me, such as its great party creation tools, its fun approach to exploration, or its nice character art. Unfortunately, this game seems to go out of its way to try to make players hate it, inflicting wounds that can only be healed in towns, not letting players know when they’re walking face-first into an enemy that will completely destroy them, and filling the game with absolutely despicable characters. I suppose players who can tolerate these issues may find this game to have some fun ideas within this genre, but I think most players are better off going with other games in that genre.

tl;dr – Labyrinth of Refrain is a First-Person Dungeon-Crawler and Turn-Based JRPG where players follow the story of a witch who has been summoned to explore a labyrinth underneath a town well. This game brings some clever ideas to the genre, with some good party customization options and fun exploration elements. Unfortunately, it’s hard to enjoy these when the game is filled with elements that will unexpectedly demolish your party, and the game’s characters are all horribly unlikeable. Fans of the genre may be able to look past this game’s flaws to enjoy its better qualities, but most are better off sticking with other Dungeon-Crawlers.

Grade: C

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