Worms Armageddon meets Dead Cells meets Enter the Gungeon, Noita is a procedurally generated pixel-based fluid engine 2D roguelike platformer that has all the trappings of roguelikes but none of the staying power. I got it on May 28, 2020 and spent a wonderful two days engrossed in its world. Unfortunately, it lacks the depth a roguelike should have to keep me hooked.
As a kid, I played a lot of Worms Armageddon, a 2D squad-based sandbox game where cute worms drowned and exploded each other and themselves to smithereens. Noita immediately evoked the same memory, especially because of the movement mechanics. In WA, just like in Noita, a character can stand on or be blocked by a single pixel, which can be hard to notice until the player bumps into it. Luckily, there's an innate levitation power in Noita, which is equivalent to the Jetpack item in WA.
In WA, terrain can be dug into using blowtorches, explosions and even melee weapons. After a while, what started out as a clean, nice map with themes such as carnival rides or medieval ship fleets looks like, well, worms dug into it. Noita follows the similar route and allows the player to tear up the terrain. However, whereas WA allowed complete overview of the map, Noita only allows a minute circle of view and keeps the rest of the map in the dark. I am guessing this is for performance reasons but makes it so I can hear the action happening somewhere out there; by the time I get there, the action is already over and I feel late to the party.
Dead Cells is something I was hooked on for quite a while. It is a 2D platformer a-la Dark Souls: punishing, devious and absolutely rewarding when you get it right. The main way Dead Cells ramps up its difficulty is that enemies become increasingly more capable of stunlocking the player character with their attacks that start from beyond the field of view, go through walls and stunlock the player character. There are 5 difficulties in Dead Cells and I got to the 3rd before calling it quits. The grind was simply unbearable and getting to the good gear meant replaying the same levels literally hundreds of times to pick up Cells, the in-game experience points, and deliver them to the in-game blacksmith. Died while carrying them? They're gone for good.
The same issue of slow, arduous grind and downright unfair difficulty is present in Noita too. Thanks to the miniscule field of view and the way darkness is slowly revealed, I had to gingerly progress through the level or I'd get mercilessly stunlocked, burned, slimed and destroyed by a swarm of enemies that sniped me from the dark, even as far as 10 screens away (Viking snipers on level 3). Even then, the level design leaves much to be desired, with plenty of sheer cliffs that require the full use of levitation.
Another fun romp, EtG kept me occupied for a couple months or so. It's an isometric cartoony roguelike with several playable characters and an emphasis on picking up guns, crossbows, cannons, assault rifles etc. The trick is that there are modifiers that make bullets swerve, home in, travel faster, slower and so on. The main issue with EtG? I always had to clear the very first level with my peashooter, and if I don't get anything insanely powerful within the first few levels, I might as well restart the game because there's no way I'll have the firewpower to be killing enemies before they spawn a bullet hell.
A similar problem exists in Noita and it's dire. The peashooter is good enough for goblins and spiders in the first level but later enemies are as tough as nails. Speaking of which, enemy design is all over the map. There are goblins, spiders, fire and slime demons on the very first level but also dynamite throwers and Doom-like zombie shotgunners (?). The third level is teeming with Viking snipers (?), jetpack-using shotgunners (?) and mobile rocket launcher robots (???). What the hell is going on in Noita? What's the story? Sadly, I have no idea because there's no story or lore or coherence behind Noita's design. It's a fun sandbox but it's not an actual game with solid game mechanics.
In theory, I should be able to overcome the peashooter problem with a clever use of the fluid engine, which the game developers dubbed Falling Everything Engine, with the emphasis on each individual pixel moving on its own, whether a gas, liquid or solid. I should be able to release a cloud of flammable fumes to go up to an enemy, set it on flame and twiddle my mustache as he slowly burns to death. In practice, that never happens because I have no way to manipulate the terrain except through spawned wands, and if none spawn, GG.
Add to that the fact that enemies can pick up and use weapons and potions the game spawned for me and what most often happens in Noita is that I start a new game, descend down the ramp into the first level and start hearing booms and screams as the enemies start tearing into one another. I descend further and find the level burning, slimed and bloodied, with entrances and exits collapsed and the items most often missing. An enemy grabbed an item, used it to nuke the level and then got killed somewhere inside the cave-in. I missed all the fun and still only got my peashooter. Thanks, Noita developers.
The player character dies extremely easily in Noita. Fire is the primary hazard, with the very first level teeming with flammable lanterns, coal piles and wooden support beams. One stray shot and all of a sudden I'm on fire. If I can't find a lake of water to dunk myself into, I'm toast. Hold on, it's actually oil or whiskey? Now even more of the level is on fire and I'm burning to a crisp. While fire does do a mere 1 damage per tick, it can do a total of ~40 before it snuffs itself out and there's no fine gradation; every single ember can do 40 damage.
Fire does the same amount of damage to the enemies, and with some of them in the later levels having thousands of HP, fire becomes an utterly useless weapon modifier that can set me on fire and kill me but most often does diddly squat to enemies (robots are even immune to it). I can't even set other things around me on fire as I'm burning, which makes negative million sense and would at least ease the pain and frustration of dying again.
Video games are arguably all about the power fantasy. Even if you start out weak, you learn to control your environment and become stronger to eventually exert power. That's not the way it works in Noita and the player character is one of the most pathetic ones I've ever had the displeasure of playing. You can't control the environment and you can't grow stronger in Noita, because all the power in the game comes from wands and perks given out at random, not your innate skills.
The slime icing on top of Noita is that I can barely see anything outside my tiny field of view. I can't stress enough just how small it is: a circle with my thumbs and index fingers is the typical field of view in Noita. The Viking snipers have an infinite field of view and awoke some painful Xaero railgun memories but also made me wonder: why can't I play as the Viking sniper? I'm this supposedly powerful wizard that can't see the enemies, has a poor peashooter to fend them off when they swarm me and has barely any way to manipulate or damage the environment. Can I be a Viking sniper, please?
Slime is another typical example of an overtuned damage source. A quick dunk in the slime pool causes the effect "Toxic", which slowly drains 2 HP per tick down to 4-6 HP. How much damage does it do? In one instance, a quick slime dunk resulted in 62 damage (!) until I entered a body of water and washed it off. Click here for a video of it in action (24.78 MB, 1920x1080 @30 fps, 51 seconds in length).
Slime can't kill but can do most of the work and some enemies spray it liberally when damaged, covering most of the surfaces I can walk over. It looks exactly like moss, which is harmless, but a couple pixels of slime are enough to cause the Toxic effect, which does have a gradation shown in percentages but that doesn't seem to matter; every time I got slimed, I felt like I got a huge chunk of my HP taken out. Getting slimed at the start of the level in vanilla Noita meant rushing to the exit to replenish HP and avoid death, which isn't a fun way to play.
I did eventually find a workaround for both the fire and slime problems, and that is to carry a flask of water. If you find a flask, empty it of its typically useless meme liquid and fill it with water. Hold right mouse button to spray water and douse flames or create a pond where you can wash off slime. I would typically manage to get an intact flask every 10 runs or so.
Another workaround is to pick up the Invisibility perk, which makes it laughably easy to just avoid enemies altogether and reach the exit. I once got Invisibility and just scouted the level, seeing that it's absurdly crammed with explosives and enemies but barely anything else worth engagement. I get it now – developers aren't mean but just lazy when it comes to Noita design.
For those who still want to play Noita, here's a couple tips. Everything is done through wands, which have their own stats that affect how well they behave as weapons. Mana capacity and mana recharge speed are the two most important traits in a wand, with every other trait taking a back seat. Those two traits mean a wand acts as a machinegun, allowing you to quickly take down one enemy and move on to the next. Combine with high capacity and you've got a weapon that can snipe enemies at long range. At the bottom of each level is (nearly) indestructible brickwork with several portals leading to the safe room, where the player character can buy stuff, edit wands and choose a perk.
Some perks are outright meme-level noob traps. Freeze Field will turn liquids near the player character into ice, which can trap and suffocate (!). Vampirism restores HP when bloodied but reduces HP by 33%. However, Fire/Slime/Lightning/Explosion Immunity perks are amazing. They should be comboed with wands and their spells. Some spells and spell modifiers have obtuse mechanics that only work under certain conditions.
Terrain can be dug through using a wand with Drill or Chainsaw spells. Fireballs can also be used to burrow through the terrain to pick up gold, create safe spots and avoid enemies. I once ended up with 6-7k gold by the third level, all thanks to finding a Chainsaw spell in a wand. Some spells can also destroy terrain, I think Energy Ball.
Anything with a Lightning element is prone to exploding in the player character's face and killing him outright. Same goes for Death Cross, which leaves a plus-shaped mine that quickly detonates. The All-Seeing Eye spell is bonkers, as it reveals a huge chunk of the level. One or two wand slots should be left open to pick up juicy wands.
Once I get a few good wands, I don't experiment any further. The worst part of Noita is getting a good start but then killing myself by picking up a quirky wand that exploded me to smithereens. The game starts in front of Caves but there's an entire world to the right, as long as there's a wand or something to go through the mountain.
There's a Pyramid past the Desert to the right. All three bombs are needed to snag 3 powerful wands inside the vat of acid (changed in a later version to a boss). The entrance to the Pyramid can be opened with a bomb. I got killed once in there by an arrow trap. More to the right is a wall that can be scaled, with the ceiling having hangouts to replenish levitation energy. Other players reported the ceiling opens up to a whole another world, but I haven't been able to get there.
Explore as much of the map as you can before entering the portal. If you see something new, shoot it, it's probably going to explode for whatever reason when you try picking it up. Careful with electricity around water and on metal beams. Avoid saw blades as wand modifiers, they easily bounce back and hurt you. Don't rush and inch through the map. Kick sludge and explosive barrels as much as possible away from yourself.
Later Noita versions allowed mods to be installed, such as one that provided health containers from enemies and prevented polymorph spells working on you. The most useful one prevents the gold the enemies drop from despawning. Yep, you read it right – Noita developers actually made it so the gold you get from killing enemies despawns in 10-15 seconds, forcing you to rush in and risk death or not having enough gold to buy a useful wand. Use them by all means.
Using mods made Noita slightly more bearable but the same taste of unfair, unfun and utterly unplayable game remained in my mouth. This is a sandbox experience masquerading as a video game that literally counts on being so unfair that you get enraged and decide to play it for hundreds of hours until you beat it. I don't like being enraged when playing a game.
I don't recommend playing Noita. Perhaps after 20 or 120 iterations and updates, it becomes an actual game, with saving, story and a proper skill system instead of perks. Until then, watch the videos of it but don't play it.