If you are here after seeing my Dead Cells review or have not played this, do it immediately before reading anything else. There's not too many spoilers in this, but you should play this knowing very little and learning a hell of a lot.

Noita is hard. Really hard. Nothing will make sense for the first few runs. But the first time you climb over the mountain or go left instead of entering the mines, you may realise just how much you are in for. The game switches genres entirely. It is in fact, a metroidvania with permadeath and one with a palpable sense of intriguement for its world and locations that draws you back in time and time again.
Wands also make no sense at first, which is exactly why you are given an aptly named holy mountain to experiment to your hearts content before plunging back into the unknown abyss. Your spells function more as letters in algebra than they do simple power ups. The number of combinations, wand stat potentials and variety of incredible or harmful combinations that can be created is essentially infinite. There is a good chance you could craft a wand entirely unique to that playthrough and your own ingenuity, never to be seen again. Due to this, I believe Noita has the greatest combat (I struggle to even call it that with how much else you can do with it) of any videogame, let alone any roguelike/metroidvania.
More than anything though, the atmosphere evoked by its arstyle, sound design and general crafting of its world is unlike anything that I know exists. There is no story per-say, but it doesn't need one.
If I have any criticism, and frankly this does not even effect me anymore, the difficulty will put you off, especially at first, possibly for a while. It is a pixel physics based game so you can die (and this will happen a lot) very quickly to a few tiny pixel of lava, acid or frozen vapour. Sometimes you can get stuck in spaces it does not seem you should be stuck in due to a tiny pixel. You can call this bullshit. But you CAN learn from this and treat everything in the game as formidable. Play patiently, there is no time limit, and you will succeed. you may even find things far weirder than the typical final boss you were expecting if you take the time to break the game in half to explore, which is exactly what the devs want you to do to survive.

Noita is diabolically evil. But it is never impossible...

Also idk if you've seen the playtime but I STILL do not have every achievement and I have only finished the game THREE TIMES.

Reviewed on Jun 19, 2023


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