Noita
Noita is a roguelite magic video game where every pixel has physical properties that interact together for emergent chaos.
Water is wet and flows down. Steam is hot and floats up. Your avatar, a witch with a charming cloak moving with the wind, kicks up dirt when running around the procedurally generated 2D underworld.
The randomized nature of the game design keeps every playthrough interesting, like living multiple slightly different lives facing variations of biomes, enemies, talents (perks), potions, and the spells you find for your main weapon, a wand, which has slots that create a variety of effects including “machinegun” sticks that pour out rapid-fire pixel rays of death that make your avatar move back as if pushed or kicked by an enraged Newton.
HyperTextHero Noita videos originally streamed on twitch.tv
Arranging these spells is a sort of card game where order matters, almost like a recursive Lisp program. The chainsaw, for example, has a hidden property that reduces cast delay. The sheer number of spells and properties make for a rich metagame.
Noita is moddable and has a good community of helpful people around it, building things like Streamer Wands and Noita Together. Here are the wands my avatar is carrying into the depths in her current game.
The game lore is cryptic, more like a dream or a poem. It suggests instead of strongly stating, allowing space for forming your own story.
Is it about knowledge? Consciousness? Greed? Hubris? Power? Love? Luck? To me, all of these.
Enemy AI is inventive, with a good variety of creatures like jumpy skeletor dogs, acidic floaty blobs of doom, PUBG Level-3 helmet-sporting armed thugs, jetpacking Super Mario Koopas with guns, and fearsome “lobisomem” large-face things roaming the dark.
Bosses are tough, though like in Elden Ring there is often a way to beat them more easily, like cutting through a soft cheese.
As you go deeper you meet more enemies, find more spells, discover more secrets, and things get more challenging. The difficulty makes progress rewarding, and a win feels like a jump-up-yelling achievement.
Sound and music are works of art themselves that perfectly complement the animated magical action mystery vibe of the game.
Please, Nolla Games, bring Noita, this flowing poem of pixels to Mac and Linux so more people can play it.
Notes
- You can save GIFs of the action at any time (F11), not only after your inevitable death, and there is a built-in screenshot key (F2).
- =todo: List some good wand spell combinations in an HTML
<details>element with example GIFs.- Multicast + Chainsaw
- Spell with trigger (like spark bolt) + spell with timer
- Pingpoing + Lumidrill
- Homing + rocks or plasma beam
- Piercing shot + spores
- Modifiers, Horizontal Path, Linear Arc, Spiral Arc
- Throwing tablets to kill enemies
· ˖ ✦ . ˳
Possibly Related:
˳ · ˖
Prior entry: Combat Pilot
Next entry: ♫ Songs