Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk Digital Limited Edition

I will be honest with you: when I first saw the setup, I assumed this would be a niche curiosity I'd bounce off in three hours. Playing as a magical book called the Tractatus de Monstrum, under the command of the witchy, morally ambiguous Madame Dronya, felt like a gimmick. It is not a gimmick. The choice to strip you of a hero identity and cast you as a bound, obedient instrument of someone else's greed is one of the more quietly bold narrative moves I have seen in a JRPG, and it sets the tone for a story that gets genuinely dark in places most NIS games would never touch. The core loop is first-person dungeon crawling in the Etrian Odyssey mold, but the brigade system reshuffles what that means in practice. Instead of managing a tight party of five named heroes, you are building covens - groups of puppet soldiers organized into five squads - and assigning them formations, roles, and gear. The six puppet classes, called Facets, include Aster Knights, Shinobushi, Theatrical Stars, Peer Fortresses, Marginal Mazes, and Mad Raptors, and the combinations you can construct across a full fifteen-puppet brigade give the build-theory crowd a lot to work with. Frontline Peer Fortresses soaking hits while Theatrical Stars chain-cast from the rear is satisfying to engineer; finding the right squad composition for a boss that keeps dismembering your back row is the kind of problem-solving I actually enjoy. The Wall Breaker move, which lets you spend Reinforcement points to smash through certain dungeon walls, opens shortcuts and secret rooms in ways that reward thorough, methodical exploration rather than speed-running. The mana stockpile system adds genuine tension to longer runs. You accumulate mana to boost item drop rates, and separately stockpile experience to multiply it at the end of a run - but dying wipes both. At higher difficulty, the risk calculus around those systems is the most alive the combat ever feels, because standard random encounters do eventually settle into a repetitive rhythm. The dungeons themselves are a network of interconnected zones linked by Antechambers, and the back-and-forth between areas as your brigade grows stronger is genuinely satisfying as a progression structure. The writing across story scenes is fully voiced, and the voice performances carry a lot of weight through the slower stretches. Where the game earns its criticism is also worth naming plainly. The runtime, which can clear 100 hours for completionists chasing the true ending, has real padding in it. There are filler combat loops that outstay their welcome, and the main narrative loses focus in the middle chapters. A portion of the fan service content involving younger-looking character designs is uncomfortable enough that it deterred some players entirely, and that is a fair response. The game's bespoke terminology also has a steep learning curve upfront - if you try to internalize every system simultaneously in the first few hours, you will likely bounce off hard. Lean into the dungeon first; the numbers start making sense on their own. For DRPG fans who want a game that takes its own story seriously, runs a deep puppet-building system, and rewards patience, this is one of the more distinctive entries in the genre. If you are looking for tight narrative pacing or polished presentation at a modern standard, adjust expectations accordingly.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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