Noita (2020)

Roll Credits?: Yes!

Surprised/Let Down/As Expected: Surprised

Favorite Mechanic or Narrative Moment: The sheer scale of Noita's world and the unfriendliness of its inhabitants can't be overstated. The wand building mechanics and insane secrets are super cool for sure, but I think they stand out so much because the game is so huge and brutal. Building an awesome wand and using it to shred enemies and terrain that was pounding you hours earlier is quite the high.

It also manages to work with the concept of progress through knowledge (think games like The Witness or Tunic) without being something that is ruined through spoilers or lacking replay value. Learning to build better wands and how you can interact with all the different types of environments is your progress, and the ceiling feels practically limitless considering how much there is to explore.

Least Favorite Thing: The difficulty and ease of death is an important part of the game even if it is frustrating. I think if I had to nail it down, my least favorite thing is that the game can just be a little mentally taxing and tough to play for more than one or two runs in a row. There's something to be said for a game that makes you hastily alt+f4 from a quick death only to come crawling back 30 minutes later, but having that urge to walk away in the first place surely accounts for some issue.

Noita is a fantastic and creative game. The game is a pixel based physics simulator, the basic objective is to get to the bottom of a series of interconnected levels. Key features of the game is a wand system which you can combine spells to create a myriad of effects using almost programming logic style. The potential of the wand system is one of the things that make each playthrough feel fresh and new along with the procedural generation of the map.

The game is full of secrets and tricks, which I am still discovering at a 100 hours of play. Each attempt can last anywhere between 30 seconds or an hour, depending if you succumb to the random chaos of standard gameplay. I am not the best player, and have yet to achieve the basic ending but I have enjoyed my time with it so far. I am confident even the best player would get at least a couple of dozen hours of engaging playtime out of Noita to experience everything.

I wholeheartedly recommend Noita, its a fun and creative game which always seems to have something new to discover after many hours of play.

I'm way more impressed by Noita than I expected. This game feels so ambitious; it's quite unlike anything I've played before. So you play as a little wizard dude going down deeper and deeper into this mountain, casting spells, facing enemies. It's all procedurally generated.

This emergent gameplay brought forward by the physics and AI of the game world; I haven't felt this since Rain World. Yet it also feels a bit like Terraria or Towerclimb or something. The way it's set up, there's clearly all this complex clever physics stuff going on under the hood (liquids, gases, powders, explosives, ice, slime, oil, and all the interactions between them) but then they've somehow combined it together to make a really fun experience.

I'm finding it a bit hard to put down actually. It's one of those games where you're like "hmm, just one more run" and then before you realise it, it's 2am. I reminds me of the first time I played Minecraft and I realise "wait, I can just go anywhere any break anything?". I'm not particularly good at the game, but it's so fiendishly exhilarating to go around breaking things and setting stuff on fire. Or cleverly causing a rock collapse on an enemy, or luring an enemy through a puddle of alcohol before dropping some fire on them. There are so many ways to fiddle around and experiment. Often I end up causing chain reactions and the entire level is on fire with smoke and fumes everywhere, distant rumbles as an explosive barrel 2 screens over has exploded somewhere.

Another source of experimentation is the spell system, of which I've barely scratched the surface. You can customise all your spells and wands to create basically an infinite amount of custom spells and effects. There's so much going on in this game, I hardly know where to begin. Really fun stuff though.

It's also very challenging, which I like. Kinda thought this game would be a gimmick or just another roguelike platformer, but it definitely feels like something quite special and different. I can't put it down; I want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.