izigame.me

Imagine if Spelunky, instead of ending on level 7-99, actually continued until 30-5 with a bunch more bosses with hundreds of different items and modifiers and perks. And if you figure out the trick, you could pickaxe between the levels, revisit them - dive under olmec's lair, past the lava, wind your way back up through the intermission screen, and use your jetpack to finally hop that cliff off to the side of the intro screen because there's a whole other game over there now. Noita invites you to break the game mechanics, even encourages it, and hides the bulk of its content behind these opaque goals that aren't made evident, only discovered out of your pure curiosity of seeing what lies over the horizon. I beat the main boss after 50 hours but there is 80% more left for me to discover. I try not to read the spoilers in the wiki but apparently there's an entire alchemy system that I've never discovered for starters.
There's hundreds of different spells and modifiers and perks. They combine in different ways that will kill you as easily as the enemy. Sometimes the game gives you a wand with a spell or configuration you've never seen before and it's a trap - it spawns an explosion right in your face, or electrocutes you, or opens a portal to the tentacle-realm and beats you senseless. You ded. Next time read the spell descriptions more carefully! But take those wands to the intermission stages, the refuge between the levels and you get a chance to reprogram your wands. Take the spells from wand #1, combine them with some modifiers from wand #2, and stick them on a wand #3 with a huge mana pool and rapid fire capabilities. Create all new spells of mass destruction. And as you learn the mechanics over an excrutiatigly long time, spells and perks that initially seem worthless, become tremendously powerful when combined with others. For example, a spell to surround yourself in clouds of Whiskey is worthless. But wait, what if you modify it so that the whiskey cloud spawns at the end of a short-range projectile. And what if we attach a fire trail to the projectile and cause it to move in spiral pattern. Now you have a remotely detonated fire cloud that spins around the map widly setting everything on fire, including yourself. Then you remember you once saw a perk that gave you fire immunity. Aha. Spotting those amazing, absolutely game-breaking synergies is what keeps you retrying death after death.
Another example: I found a spell modifier that causes projectiles to spawn more copies of itself. So if I shot a fireball off to the left, it would spray more fireballs as it soared across the screen. Nice. Instead of the obvious application, I applied the spawning modifier to a TNT crate. TNT crates just kind of plop out of your wand and sit there. They don't despawn after impacting a wall. Therefore, combined with this modifier they just keep spawning more copies of themselves infinitely, filling up the level with dynamite like a virus. This wasn't an obvious combination at first, but it absolutely deletes an entire level and anything contained within it. Drop a crate out of the entrance hatch, wait 30 seconds and drop a match. The CPU pegs at 100% for a moment, you deal 500,000 explosive damage to anything below. It's a world ender. Also I blew myself up. Restart. Next time I'll modify it so it safely shoots crates from a projectile, and add tentacles for good measure.
Every time you die, your carefully engineered wands are thrown into a graveyard, some data file tucked away in the game's folder. The next time you play through, there's a % chance that your ghost will spawn wielding one of them. It's a mixed bag, on one hand you get an opportunity to reclaim a favorite wand. On the other hand, your ghost is using it against you. I did eventually run into my 'world ender' wand again and barely managed to get it off my ghost before everything went up in smoke, but there's been plenty of other times I've run into a ghost of a past run and recognized all too well the wand they were wielding.
Noita is fun. Not everyone will like Noita, it's pretty unforgiving and even flat out unfair at times. The first level becomes a chore. You can rush through it, the really interesting spells don't start in until snowland anyway. Enemies will snipe you from some darkened corner of the screen. Enemies will *steal* wands from their pedestals and use them against you. The game will hand you a wand sabotaged to blow your face off. A worm will anger the 'shopkeeper' out of your control, before you have any weapons capable of surviving the encounter. And you will end many promising runs by building weapons that are too simply too powerful and dangerous to exist in this world. You don't really start to feel like you have a handle on spellcrafting until dozens of hours in and many players will rightfully give up before then. But each run I see new spells or see new things. And the hope that, next run, I'll finally get a chance to try out a build I've been working up in my mind keeps me coming back.
4.3 out of -13e^2 stars