Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk E3 Impression

Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk is a first-person dungeon crawler created by the Disgaea team, and it has the look and feel of a Disgaea game – it’s just missing the Prinnies. The premise of the game is fairly simple: there’s a dungeon nobody has ever returned from, so it’s now locked away.  The solution? Stop sending people; send dolls instead!

Dronya, the Dusk Witch, has arrived in town at the Well of Khalaza with her Tractatus de Monstrum, which allows her to control puppets, and she’s determined to plumb the Labyrinth for all its treasures. As a rogue-lite, you’re expected to go a little further in the dungeon each time, but not complete the trek all in one trip. Instead, you slowly build up the needed resources to go deeper. Exploration consists of first-person dungeon crawling; you can destroy objects in your path, open doors (though some require switches), open treasure chests for sweet loot, and read signs — some of which are very silly. Encounters with enemies are random and cannot be seen on screen.

At first, your party will only be comprised of individual party members, but eventually you will learn to build up the titular covens, and each of the five party slots will instead hold many different party members, which will let you survive the deepest parts of the labyrinth. Hopefully one day you’ll be able to find the poor lamb that Dronya rather carelessly punts into the well at the start of the game.

Those interesting in delving deeper into Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk will be pleased to know it is arriving on PC, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 4 on September 18 in North America, followed shortly in Europe on September 21. Poor Bah-Bah will just have to wait until then to be rescued!