Moon Studios' CEO thinks No Rest for the Wicked could be a "forever game" with the foundations of one that "could rival Hades"

Despite a rocky launch back in 2024, No Rest for the Wicked, the ARPG from the team behind the Ori series of action platformers, has managed quite the comeback with its recent co-op update. Following on from that second wind, the studio’s CEO has taken to Twitter/X to talk shop about what it means for the game and the studio’s future, and there’s talk of bringing the fight to Hades and Elden Ring.

Since launching its co-op mode nearly 18 months after Early Access, No Rest for the Wicked has seemingly enjoyed a second coming. The soulslike action RPG launched with solid support, amassing around 15,000 players on Steam in April 2024, but was struggling to pull in more than 100 before the year was out. It got a little boost with the Breach update in the second half of 2025, but tapered off again soon after.

Since the Together update dropped alongside a solid sale in late January, though, the ARPG has managed to shift some serious numbers, going from one million sales to 1.5 million in a matter of weeks. In the last month alone, No Rest for the Wicked has (according to Steam Charts) surpassed its monthly average player numbers and doubled its peak player count. According to the game’s creative director, Thomas Mahler, at the start of February, the game was “making more money than it costs our humble studio to run for an entire month.”

Now, in March, Mahler has again taken to Twitter/X to speak at length about where the project is headed and what the team is looking to do with its learnings as it begins “gearing up for 1.0.”

“Big campaign expansions will always be looming up ahead,” he says, with “more areas to explore, more story to unravel, more cinematics to experience, in short: More of your traditional ARPG fare.”

But Mahler and the team appear to have more ambitious dreams for the ARPG game. “In-between those expansions, me and some of my design team will always keep trying to push new ways of play into Wicked in order to potentially create that ‘forever game’ that many of us have always been dreaming of.

“Because of the foundation we have, if we plan to fully commit to building a rogue-like that could rival Hades and other genre-references out there, we automatically have a huge leg-up by simply being able to already use our combat system and everything we’ve built so far.”

Mahler goes on to talk about survival games being “a bit stuck” because they lack “an insanely rich combat system.” And although he recognizes that the developers of said survival games likely “had to spend most of the development time on other stuff,” he reckons if Moon Studios took on the challenge of a survival game, it could make one with “combat as deep as Elden Ring” by leaning on the foundation of No Rest for the Wicked.

Is Mahler giving an early hint as to Moon Studios’ next game? Not exactly. Not yet, anyway. “That would only be possible if Wicked remains as one game that we’d keep expanding upon,” he said, before reiterating that it’s “currently still our intention.”

While it’s a little difficult to properly decipher what Mahler is getting at here, it seems that No Rest for the Wicked still has a rich future ahead of it. And as someone who fell in love with the first reveal but couldn’t commit to its apparent steep difficulty curve at launch, I’m glad to hear that it’s going well enough now to maybe become Moon Studios golden goose. That rough launch did have me thinking it wouldn’t live to see its first birthday.