Noita

Bewitched

Nolla Games, an indie game studio that gummikana, an old classmate of mine is a member of, got their project Noita in good enough condition to release it to Early Access in September. Being me I bought it as soon as it was available as I was already convinced by what I had seen and heard so far. I also trusted the game to be amusingly twisted to say the least.

The idea is that the player's a robe-wearing witch and the game begins on a mountain's slope, at the mouth of a cave. To begin with the witch has two magic wands, first one shoots magical bolts and the other one launches bombs, with a capacity of three. In addition to jumping the witch can also levitate/fly for a limited time and kick some random things around. Fun and easy. Especially the surprisingly useful kicking is way too easy to forget.

The best moments start happening when you shoot, kick or just accidentally blow up an oil lantern that's innocently hanging from the ceiling, which then spreads the more or less flaming oil all around (most likely all over you as well) and ignites said oil latest when the lantern smashes on the floor. How things proceed from this depends on where and how much the oil has gotten to spread around, how thickly/thinly, where it's gotten to - or if it's still falling through the air. Most often you're enjoying an uncontainable wildfire that also lights your poor witch annoyingly easily. At the same time as the upper ends of the current area are filling up with smoke that doesn't let you breathe at all anymore.

My very first run lasted an amazing length of eighteen and a half minutes, and as a massive surprise to myself I even reached the second level (or area). The death screen has become very familiar already since then, most of my deaths have been entertaining, while the few exceptions have been along the lines of "I slowly burned to death while running in an empty area while searching for a puddle of non-poisonous liquid that could douse the fires and I wasn't carrying any sort of a flask, either". Those weren't amusing nor show-worthy, just plain boring.

Collectables

Being a Roguelite every run starts from scratch, the only thing that accumulates is hopefully the player's own skill. The game itself is mostly procedurally generated with the exceptions being the occasional handcrafted bits, such as the first cave and the temples and whatnot, as you'd expect and hope. The main menu has a "Progress" menu that shows what sort of stuff you've collected and used and reached during your runs. I noticed that one after a few good rounds, also after the first patch or two Noita started to remember the high scores and related things (which could be guessed by the killed enemies list that in the screenshot below only had fish and the spider classes, while the spells and perks were unbalanced in comparison), so whatever has been saved is not the absolute truth.

Physics ftw

In case someone had a flashback to the nineties with games like  AUTS, V-Wing, Wings, Molez, Minebombers and Liero, you aren't the only ones and not without reason. Noita's physics simulation went a tiny bit further than what any cave flying games ever had with their snow or water, even though most of that awesomeness may escape the player's notice, until you start getting suffocated by the smoke from all those fires you lit along the way - or when all the water that you had gotten evaporated while blowing up this and that starts to rain down again - or when a good volume of gasified acid catches a spark and the whole airspace turns into a sea of fire in the blink of an eye.

Or when someone punctures a whiskey barrel and the flying liquid makes everyone drunk and finally everything catches fire again. Or when a pile of coal that has been harboring an ember suddendly starts burning brightly, just like the mobs that were innocently walking by it. Or when a flying happonuljaska thing gets punctured by a shot and the poisonous goo escapes its sacklike body in a rather disgusting manner. Of course all of this looks and sounds so much better live than in descriptions or screenshots.

I guess all of this was this "emergent gameplay" that is loads of fun. The caves were filled with different types of exploding boxes and barrels that one can kick and shoot around to their heart's content. Some of those benefit more caution than others, usually things end so that the player's running frantically away - typically in search of a non-harmful liquid.

In my silliness I thought that the freezing field was a marvellous idea until I couldn't put out my burning cape. So I died. Yet again.

Polymorphing (see screenshot below) is usually useless and less fun than you'd expect by your old NetHack memoris, but sometimes it turned an annoying Liekkiö or other bothersome mob to a sheep and therefore a hundred times easier to kill away. The teleportation fluid and magics are just as chaotic as they sound like, usually I ended up in a much worse situation than not. It also isn't too heartwarming to get your target warped behind and below you with a shotgun or a dynamite stick leveled at you.

Sometimes burning the coal piles open up handy routes to places you couldn't reach easily or at all. Very few of the better treasures have ever been that easy to open up but usually need explosives or digging spells. Still, uninhibited arsonism has been incredibly fun and also a sight to behold!

Aboveground

In the overworld I have adventured a few times up to now. On the first time I went left as far as I could and found a long and dangerous underwater tunnel, at the end of which a hermit's cave with an orb and a philosophical tablet. The second time I went that way I found an unclimbably tall tree with an egg on a branch, as soon as I picked that one up a good dozen happonuljaska things spawned around me and the result looked just as fun as it sounds like.

A couple of times I've managed to dig my way out of the mines to the right side of the mountain (with a bit of polymorph potion I also flew from the cave to the top of the mountain as well). After a very long trip to the right I found a pyramid that a: I didn't dare to try to enter and b: I had spent my bombs so I couldn't have opened the sealed door anyway. On top of that pyramid an orb and a tablet could be found. Who knows what other world variants there are.

No matter what, the overworld is clearly something that should be explored after finding a bit more powerful spells and other crap than what you start with. At least one digging spell with a drill, chainsaw or matter-dissolving bubbles (preferably unlimited in quantity) because otherwise you'd end up missing any treasures by "just one more" of anything.

Just before sending this post out I spend a life to get an egg from the East and immediately from the beginning of the mines a staff with a few digging sphere spells. Noticing my inventory looked good for adventures I dug my way out immediately and started jogging West. Finally I found the edge of the world, an apparently infinite vertical wall. Because it was shaped so that it could be climbed I started climbing.

I'm going to spoil it straight away: that perk is good only if you are suicidal, as it makes you explode every n seconds with bolts that hurt you if you're too close to a surface, such as the ground. So I had to jump all the time, which proved more bothersome than you'd think, as the timing vs levitation time and its regeneration mixed with uphills and downhills and the falling trees behaving funnily with these explosions meant that sometimes I just got hit no matter what. But these explosions also ate most of the materials I encountered, so I used that to enter the pyramid to see what it had. I died pretty much immediately but hey, now I know.

A life of infinite deaths

At the time of writing this I've played, due to my own scheduling issues, about ten hours. That translates into a few dozen runs. Some of those runs have been, as I said before, ended boringly or pointlessly, burning to death in a pretty much cleared area of enemies (I honestly can not claim that I've ever really cleared anything of enemies, due to the nature of the game), but you know what I mean. A handful of runs have ended very quickly, thanks to me doing something idiotic or the RNG being in a malevolent mood.

Most of the runs ended me kicking the bucket in a highly entertaining and/or visually amusing ways, sometimes in a spectacular fashion. Once I spun my mouse's wheel a tiny bit too much in my rush to kill of an enemy and the Thunderstone in my inventory electrified the water I was in and electrocuted me immediately. So it goes.

Usually when I had finally found a really cool wand with a powerful and impressive-looking spell, like the one in pic below, a staff that shot fiery explosions and whatnot into five directions at once - or a wand that shot Lighting Bolts with a very pleasing crrrack! sound. Whenever something has been awesome and effective against the enemies it's also been very good at killing me just as quickly, especially in the narrow tunnels.

It'd be smrat to first break the whiskey barrel on your enemies and then light it, instead of making yourself drunk and useless.

In the temple of calm before the storm

Luckily when you get deep enough in the area you're in the area is sliced horizontally by a temple area that has portals to the Holy Mountain placed at regular intervals. The fact that there are multiple portals is immensely useful when you're low on health and are also very typicall covered in flames. Or when you're covered in toxic sludge and the HP counter is slowly ticking to very low numbers (but won't directly kill you, apparently) and there are random enemies afoot.

The vault of the holy mountain has a couple of pools of water nearby, where you can douse off the flames and even fill up your water flask, in case you've been lucky enough to find one (and managed to keep it). Between the pools is a healing token and a spell refresher that loads up the count-limited spells you have (such as the "3 bombs" staff you start with). It's a good idea to fly over those and check the shop and the perks first, though.

I just call it a shop because the temple has a bit where you can buy new spells or wands, whatever the RNG has summoned for you, if you can afford anything, that is. Anywhere inside the Holy Mountain you can also edit your wands, which means you can finally tear off those bad spells from the otherwise good wand and place some more suitable ones in instead. Or whatever you have found or bought, if you happen to feel like it. So far my issue has been that I just haven't stayed alive long enough to drag my coolest findings to the next temple...

Now I could afford some spells but I hadn't found a single wand!

In the next and last corner of the resting area are three perks, of which you can choose one (once I chose the Perk Lottery that had a 50% chance of the other perks not disappearing when I picked one, and I got five perks from two temples (below, middle pic)) that remains yours for the remainder of your run. Sometimes you want them all (Better criticals, Fire immunity, Explosion immunity for example) and sometimes nothing appeals either with the loot you have or just in general.

In case you do something very stupid in the holy mountain, such as luring enemies there and fighting with them - or apparently if a massive Worm digs its way there (or maybe it's enough if your spells or if a worm just crosses a mysterious threshold) you get rewarded by an ominous "You have angered the gods" message and a magically shielded megablasty floating skeleton attacking you. This has happened to me a couple of times, when a Worm just had gone to one of those places while I was far away from the portals yet. Weird.

It wasn't me!

Thoughts

To be fair I haven't gotten practically anywhere in the game yet, at best I've seen the first glimpse of a portal at the bottom of the third area (Icy Depths) and then gotten destroyed by a bunch of Hiisi or their turrets. Three times I've reached the ices, the first one was maybe a classic panic-filled frantic rapid death, as I fell amidst icy skulls and hiisis, without any decent spells. Of the various secrets I've only found a few and haven't yet passed the lava lake or taken a single tablet to the thing above the mountain (saw that place, could not reach nor dig).

The sounds are just plain awesome, the space-rock / Kingston Wall-ish music works nicely in the world and visually Noita is just amazing. If you're into this sort of thing, that is. The difficulty level is cruel and as I said, I haven't even gotten anywhere, really, and the thought of a fourth, fifth or fifteenth level fills me with dread.

But what is important is that I've had an immense amount of good time with this game and I do recommend it out loud, warmly 8)