Noita calls itself “The Falling Sand Roguelite”, a description which will probably only make sense to people who spent a lot of time playing flash games. For those of you who didn’t, “Falling Sand” refers to a genre of simulation sandboxes where you spread around particles of various substances, like water, oil, or sand, and play with their interaction. You watch as oil separates itself from water, which you can then set alight, and then smother with sand. There isn’t a goal to accomplish, the reason to play is simply for the joy of experimentation. Noita builds its worlds around this concept, with every pixel of the environment having simulated physical properties, which you can manipulate using the random magical abilities you find along your journey. Your goal is to traverse a series of biomes, fighting increasingly stronger enemies until you reach a tough-as-nails final boss. Even in this small summary though, you may have noticed the disagreement between each of its genre halves. If progression is done by defeating a linear set of enemies, why is it mixed with a genre about freeform experimentation? Not only does the linear difficulty structure incentivize players to only create wands that kill enemies as quickly as possible, the randomness of the magic means the map generation always has to include a freely accessible exit that doesn’t require magic at all. Most of the time, you’re just quick-firing boring magic missiles or arrows, leaving all the fun interactivity essentially as window dressing. Not only that, but taking risks with more complex wands is actively disincentivized by how fragile your character is, when accidentally hitting yourself is often a one-shot kill, leaving you with no way of enjoying that wand you were so lucky to craft. Confusingly enough, this falling sand game not only lacks a sandbox for experimentation, but it actively discourages you from experimenting much at all. It’s no wonder that some of the top mods on the Steam workshop are the ones that add testing rooms and custom wand spawning, giving players a way of actually enjoying the potential of the robust simulation. This is one of the rare times I’m happy about a game being heavily modded, because the beauty of all the elemental interactions is something more people should experience, and I’m glad there’s a way to do so without sinking hours into mediocre roguelike randomness.

Imagine if your friends played the game you like: part 2.

I'm incapable of getting good at this game.

It's not a genre I like, but it's really impressive how much physics and interactions you can have with the environment.

As always, stay hydrated.

The deranged mechanical apex of the roguelite. The wham-line of "every pixel is simulated" kind of implies a gimmick game, but Noita's fusion of spellcraft and chemistry makes for a very compelling experience. The "spell programming" system is insanely opaque, but also incredibly powerful. The interactions between materials, attacks, and enemies are unpredictable and have to be carefully observed to be understood. The map is absolutely gargantuan and the game adamantly refuses to explain anything, relying 100% on the intuition of the player.

It's probably the most willfully obtuse game I've ever played. It has the highest "entry cost" for learning that I've seen in any roguelite. This is a tricky design space and many will hate it, but the reward for careful observation and reckless experimentation is one of the deepest, most surprising and just pure fun roguelites of all time.

i think i like thinking about playing this game way more than i like actually playing this game. it has such a cool base concept: a world where every individual pixel is simulated and a wand system with so many possible combinations of spells that things are still being discovered. the game throws bullshit at you constantly: worms eating through the temple spawning evil skeleton god to kill you every single level, random enemies picking up the most insanely overpowered wands in the world that instagib you, etc. i'm generally a big proponent of bullshit being thrown at the player in roguelites because i think it's fun, but this game takes so much time to learn its core mechanics to feel satisfied enough to continue in spite of its immense difficulty. figuring how to build effective wands and how to search for good wand stats or what the vast majority of spells even do is such a daunting task. a lot of the fun does come from this experimentation and exploration and discovery of how things work, but the game loop you are forced to learn these things in feels actively hostile to this goal at times. it's fun to get an "explosion" spell that literally just blows up your character, so you realize you have to attach it to another spell that will trigger the explosion so you stay out of harms way. that's fun! aggressively teaching mechanics through death is cool sometimes. the main problem for me is the time sink. you can't possibly have a stable enough run to explore and learn a satisfying amount when you see so many new spells each run with no context for what they do. i wish there was a sandbox mode where you could at least try out all of the spells you have already seen in a run before so there could still be the wonder of finding a new spell but not the fear of throwing away everything you have going just to learn about some of the properties of one spell.

i think i just don't have the drive to get really good at this game. with games like nuclear throne, there's a steep diffculty curve, but i could feel myself getting better at the game when i was first starting out. with this game, the sheer amount to learn before you can start getting good without relying on luck with excellent pre-made wands makes the climb of the difficulty "curve" feel more like you're pushing against a difficulty wall. i'm not saying difficult game = bad. that's untrue. all i am saying is that the game doesn't give me the same feeling of growth and learning at a satisfying rate that other difficult games offer me. it's not necessarily that those other games are easier and Noita is flat out harder, it's just that you can feel any amount of improvement with those games while it takes much longer to feel that for the first time with Noita.

this is a good game with large amount of time required to even start enjoying its best aspects. at the same time as all of this, i kinda can't see this game being designed any other way, and i'm sure that those that do put the time in are having a fucking blast.

Muitas ideias boas. Gosto principalmente da forma dinâmica e realista que a física e as partículas funcionam.

O jogo acaba ficando meio chato por ser caótico demais (você morre sem nem entender o que diabos aconteceu) e ter uma gameplay meio problemática, com você se prendendo em cantos e sua mira sendo mais imprecisa que um sniper com glaucoma e parkinson.

Mas eu gostaria que esse jogo tivesse uma sequência. Essas ideias colocadas em um jogo mais polido e mais bem feitinho poderiam gerar algo realmente bem foda

Noita is probably the best roguelite ever made in my opinion. In a genre where games are often judged on their variety and replay value, Noita comes out on top every time. It's one thing to have a game built around chasing the heralded "god run" but fact of the matter is, a "god run" isn't godly forever. Once you've cracked the code and done it more than twice, you realize that, just like everything else at play, it's "just another run" that leaves you unsatisfied. That's the hallmark where usually you might find it time to give up on most roguelites, but Noita proposes a different idea. Extreme brutality and esoteric design go a long way in characterizing a different method. In Noita, the amount of variety at play comes from its sheer focus on simulation, details and secrets. No two runs will usually end the same and it's frequently possible to kill yourself solely from being curious about something, but that's okay, because it never was about winning.

Rather than sharing the "beat the arcade game" model and the "browse the wiki" model as separate elements, the two are fused. Death is entirely a learning experience and the bigger questions at hand while you play are less tied to survival (though that is a factor) and more about the limits of the simulation itself. While most of the game will see the simulated world and lively enemies beating you down in unique ways, the simple factor of getting that god-tier spell and thinking "wait, what if I do this that wasn't possible before?" leads to an entirely new facet of the game you never even knew existed beforehand, and that itself is a huge appeal. Discovery becomes so core to the experience that the "wiki game" element entirely dissolves as you open up a new avenue that is pure morbid curiosity manifested into an entire game, turning the knowledge you gain into the moment-to-moment gameplay with little to no downtime due to how many factors are constantly at play. All the most painful moments made worthwhile by the realization of "I'm probably gonna die doing this" and the comfort of "well, at least the runs don't take long in this game" bringing you back to skin yourself alive in an acid spell many a time.

This is the best roguelike In have ever played and I enjoy it every single time I pick it up; that being said I utterly despise this game and hate every second of it.

I have had runs where I feel more powerful than any game has ever made me feel, only to die to the single dumbest thing I have ever experienced. This game will straight up just kill you in like 80% of your runs, and it will feel terrible and you will be furious. Then you'll boot the game back up five minutes later because this game will put a strangle-hold on you like nothing else.

It's completely uncanny how something this dense and obtuse and infuriating can be so addictive and fun(?). It very much feels like a game that was not designed with the idea of being played in mind, and everything in it will act accordingly. It's a very impersonal kind of difficulty; Noita does not care if you beat it, shelve it, or rinse it for every secret it has. None of that has anything to do with how much you are rewarded or punished, it will simply act how it is irrespective of any sort of sense of progression or design, and that is fascinating.

It's one of those rare games that feels like it never stops getting bigger and deeper the more you play it, and the sense of discovery just never really slows down. The main path of this game seems to be a fraction of it's full world, but exploring that outer world is so difficult to pull off that any new thing you find there feels like a major discovery. It's the kind of design that inspires communities of secret hunters and lore gatherers to try to make sense of it all.

It almost feels like I haven't played enough of it to review it despite "beating" the game in a sense, but I get the feeling that I will always feel like that to some degree. I don't think I'll ever truly complete Noita, and that's really something special.

I don't really get it. I've played about 20 runs or so and I've given up on playing anymore. I think the aesthetic of the game puts a damper on my ability to enjoy it, for sure. I don't really like when games are THIS minimalistic with their visuals. As a Dark Souls fanatic, I can get down with a game not telling you things and over-tutorializing everything, but I felt nothing pulling me forward here. I felt no intrigue to find new items or wands, no reason to want to explore a new area. It wasn't really fun to move around. Honestly, I'm not sure I can come up with any redeeming qualities.

I love roguelikes and I love games that are mysterious in regards to how the systems work or what your goal is. For whatever reason, this one just didn't do it for me at all.

I guess part of it is that I have realized I like "roguelites" and not roguelikes. Not being able to clearly see you are progressing and getting better is a put off. I didn't feel as though I had made any progress despite playing for 5 hours or so.

TL;DR: 9 hp, on fire, hiisi father to the right, ukko to the left, currently crying

I will now talk way too much about my all-time favorite game: Noita. It's a physics-based roguelite by Nolla Games, a Finnish group consisting of the creators of Baba is You, Environmental Station Alpha, The Swapper, and Crayon Physics Deluxe, topped with a unique and well-fitting soundtrack by psychedelic rock band From Grotto. It is a roguelite with a custom physics engine reminiscent of old falling powder games; one where every pixel on screen has the capacity to fall, burn, melt, and explode, among other things. While such physics sound like they belong on some unblocked games site that you used to mess around with when bored at school, the roguelite elements completely change perspective on the engine. It takes your awe at the material reactions and transforms it into pure terror as you watch fire slowly burn away at the one wall separating you from 30 hiisi. Making the most of the materials you're given is a big part of this game. Another that I have failed to neglect until now is the wand-crafting mechanics. You discover wands and spells with different stats that you can edit during the interlude area between levels, which can range from a fast-firing wand that fires bouncy bolts to one that unleashes nuclear havoc before converting all of the rubble into solid gold (which is the game's currency, of which all forms are collectable). The third and final main part of the player's abilities in the game would be perks. The previously mentioned interlude area contains a rerollable set of three perks, which can improve your survival chances or teleport you directly into lava when you take the slightest bit of damage.

How the pillars of Physics, Wand-crafting, and Perks combine to create a satisfying experience is in the enemies and their AI, which is quite smart, and you can often watch enemies learn from their mistakes by making slight adjustments. All enemies can be cheesed in some way, some with toxic sludge, some with the metal-melting concentrated mana, and some by pouring water on them, but no enemy in this game is by any means a pushover. One hit from a weaker enemy could throw you directly into a pit full of ones who can three-shot you.

Being a roguelite, this game is difficult. Even masters of the game often see themselves die to the stupidest things, but in the end they always feel like the fault of the player: you fired the wrong wand, you didn't dodge well enough, you didn't see the glowing dot on a robot turret before jumping headfirst into that room. Noita encourages both the approach of pure skill and speed, and the approach of taking your time and thinking things through. There is no time penalty in this game. It's why the fastest runs are around three minutes while trying to collect all of the secrets in one run can and will take hours on end.

That brings me to the secrets. There is an insane amount of hidden content in the game. One that might become obvious within the first few hours is the fact that you don't have to go down at all, or the Connoisseur of Wands (a late game boss) guarding an orb just to the right of the first stage. In fact, roguelite is just the barest bones of this game. The usual playthrough area takes up a fraction of the world, with plenty of things to do both on the surface and deep underground. There are even looping parallel worlds on each side, though the game will experience issues or crash if you travel more than four or five worlds' worth in any direction. However, the vast majority of hidden content in the game is so difficult to figure out that it feels closer to a community effort than something you can just stumble across. They've been adding hints in recent betas, but it's going to take more than one person to figure out a lot of the secrets. If you're interested in experiencing any of these secrets once you've acquired a decent amount of skill, I would recommend FuryForged's youtube videos about the game. They're not the kind of things you can figure out more than two or three of on your own, sadly.

Noita has a lot of updates. The rate at which they add new features parallels or exceeds any other game that's out of early access. New spells, perks, enemies, or even items, bosses, and biomes are added all the time, with the beta branch having roughly weekly content updates. In fact, if these updates continue throughout 2021, I'll be nominating Noita for Steam's Labor of Love award, simply due to how much content they keep adding.

I wouldn't say this game has much of a story. It has lore if you look deep enough, and even a reference to Monty Python's Holy Grail. It feels like an experience by people who genuinely love working on the game, who value the journey far greater than the destination. There are various endings, some accessible earlier, and some hilariously difficult to achieve, and while they're decently satisfying conclusions, the true experience comes from everything that got you to that point. Everything about this game is fun. Dying can be painful or feel unfair, but simply starting another run is often enough to bring you right back into the fun again. Even if you get bored with one playstyle, you can always try something stupid or fun. I love every part of this game. Thank you, Nolla Games, for such an impeccable experience. I will continue to hold this game in my heart for as long as I walk this Earth.

10/10

(P.S. I set the status to "Mastered" but I still have a lot of endings to get and secrets to discover...)