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.

Groundbreaking, sophisticated gameplay with an unparalleled emphasis on secrets and exploration. Deeply unforgiving without learning the mechanics from an online guide; even then, some runs just won't take off. Motivation to 100% declines sharply once the Greek letter spells are obtained, as enemies pose dramatically little challenge, making the endgame feel like busywork. Some areas feel like placeholders, and they might very well be. Noita is a flawed masterpiece with depth (and, unexpectedly, breadth) like few others.

Kicked a barrel, exploded, 10/10

In seriousness, it's a game with just... a lot. I feel like the more I play I become both more confused and yet learn more, a lot of this game is encouraging breaking it and I really enjoy that element of it a lot. The focus on just breaking each element apart one by one, making stupid as hell wand builds, and then getting killed by something you didn't understand is such a stupidly frustrating and fun game loop.

I would give it higher if I had half the brain to figure out half of what is going on, and didn't rage quite and uninstall every hour I played. Really stupid, ridiculously fun, and a game that makes no sense, in the best ways. Big props to the community too, they are saints.

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.