Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk

I went in expecting a competent but forgettable DRPG and came out the other side having spent close to a hundred hours thinking about Reinforcement budgets between dungeon dives. That alone tells you something. Labyrinth of Refrain is a first-person, grid-based dungeon crawler in the Wizardry/Etrian Odyssey mold, but the Disgaea pedigree bleeds through immediately in how it buries you in interlocking systems that look intimidating on paper and click satisfyingly once you stop fighting the terminology. The central hook is the puppet brigade. You are not a hero; you are a sentient book named Tractatus de Monstrum, directed by Dusk Witch Dronya to command up to 40 puppet soldiers organized into groups called Covens. Each Coven is bound by a Pact that determines which Donum skills the group can use in turn-based combat, so party building is a two-layer problem: you pick the Facet (class) for each puppet from six options including Aster Knights, Shinobushi, Theatrical Stars, Peer Fortresses, Marginal Mazes, and Mad Raptors, then you decide which Pact wraps the Coven they sit in. Change the Pact, change the available magic and the bonuses. Every excursion draws from a shared pool of 100 Reinforcement points that simultaneously funds experience stockpiling, mid-battle buffs, wall-breaking traversal, and Fog Veil hazard mitigation, so you are always making tradeoffs just to enter a dungeon. Stack on top of that an alchemy system where you fuse up to eight items to craft and inherit stat properties, plus a mana risk-reward loop where carrying more mana raises item drop rates but also increases the chance of a powerful ambush enemy spawning. The numbers are relentless and I mean that as a compliment. For newcomers to the DRPG sub-genre, the learning curve is real but not unfair. The game gates its systems gradually, only handing you Coven slots and Pact options as Dronya's witch petitions unlock them. A basic tank-damage-healer triangle carries you through the first several hours without any deep optimization, and by the time the build decisions get complex, you have enough context to make them deliberately. The dungeon layout itself is a network of interconnected zones linked by antechambers, so progress is non-linear in a good way: if enemies in one corridor are wiping your party, you route elsewhere and come back stronger. That back-and-forth structure disguises a lot of the grinding. The weaknesses are real and worth naming. Combat repetition is the main one. Each dungeon zone reuses the same handful of enemy types across many floors, and with a roughly hundred-hour runtime you will notice the music looping long before the credits. The story runs cold for the first half, serving up unfocused vignettes between Dronya and the town of Refrain with a pacing that rewards patience more than it earns it. Fully voiced cutscenes help, and the voice cast does good work, but a few story scenes contain uncomfortable content that a portion of players will find off-putting rather than edgy. The PC version has also had reported black-screen bugs, which community guides have workarounds for, but they should not exist in a shipped product. What redeems the back half is genuine narrative payoff. Dronya's motives and the secrets buried under Refrain converge in ways the opening hours quietly foreshadow, and the final dungeon gauntlet is the kind of boss-rush that actually tests every system you have been building toward. The true ending requires hunting down optional content, and the final boss is tuned hard enough that sloppy Pact composition will get punished. If that sounds frustrating, know that creative solutions exist: magic-reflecting Coven configurations that make bosses defeat themselves are entirely legal and feel earned when you find them. That is the kind of depth that separates a system with real breadth from one that just looks complex.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

Be the first to comment on Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk.