One of Noita’s best spells is her ability to call a torrential downpour from the air. A heavy and magical cloud bursts above you, extinguishing harmful flames or eliminating toxic virus. Having this ability on one of my many races has always reassured me that I could be a little more reckless in my navigation through noita’s harmful biomes – at least that was the matter until I discovered that I could just as easily drown in many of its procedurally generated mazes.
A big part of noita’s appeal is to observe how all its physics-based systems interact with each other. The dynamic world of this 2D Roguelike comes to life with vibrant pixels, each responding to the world and the circumstances that surround it. The fires will spread and engulf the nearby wooden structures, slowly burning them. These wooden structures could support a giant vat of toxic mud that flows quickly through the tunnels of a mine once its supports are gone. In turn, this mud can erode enemies, infect life-giving water basins and melt the soil. But it can kill you just as easily. The simple act of knocking over a lantern creates a deadly domino effect, and part of noita’s appeal is learning how to turn that into an advantage.
Noita does not give you the means to control this Chaos, but with a variety of wands and spells, you can learn to push it in advantageous directions. It is easier to think of the wands in Noita as weapons, while the spells are the ammunition loaded inside. Each wand has locations for spells, as well as allocate that determine spell speeds, delays, and whether spells are mixed when cast. Spells, on the other hand, determine your total damage output and their effects. This can range from the expected arcane fireballs and small electrical surges to more rude ones, such as combining certain spells to call terrain-devouring black holes that spew explosives or create large electrical storms that spew toxins.
Experimenting with the two wands and the spells they rate you with is one of the most exciting aspects of Noita. It is fascinating to come across a combination that seems rude on paper, but which creates synergies in an unexpected and effective way. If you find a wand with many locations, you can satisfy your curiosity and experiment by creating complex chains of spell commands. Spells are cast in order from left to right in the queue of a wand, so you can assign modifiers to them depending on their Position. For example, a wand can be configured to fire a large slow fireball before a propagation pattern is applied to a wind spell. The wind can be launched right after the fire, picking up the flames when they burst, igniting them and creating a long-range attack from an otherwise useless gust of wind.
You can just as easily create completely unnecessary combinations of wands and spells, as well as configurations that will eventually inflict more damage on you than the enemies. One of my first experiences with this was combining a Boomerang perk with a spell that casts blow, both equipped with a wand with a fast rate of fire. Instead of flying in front of and behind me as planned, the blow I threw instead flew right in front before turning around to explode in my face and finish my run there. Initial matters like this are hilarious when you sit perplexed by what just happened, but they can quickly turn into Frustration when you strive to understand why they happened so that you can learn from them.
Understanding the magic of noita is a slow process, mainly because the game poorly explains how it all works. The game’s tutorial is nothing more than a breakdown of the game’s controls at the starting of each race, forcing you to figure out the intricacies for yourself. As Noita has spent a lot of time in early access, it is now quite easy to play with a very detailed Wiki at her side. But without an in-game guide, it can take hours to discover some of Noita’s key mechanics, such as the strict spell casting order or the ability to refill potion vials with liquid. This makes the opening hours of the game frustrating because your options seem so limited before you understand their depth, which makes it all the more difficult to defeat the brutally harmful enemies.
expired comes quickly to Noita, whether by careless spells, by the chaotic nature of the physics of each biome or by its large number of enemies. Even the happiest races with the best spells and wands can stop due to negligence, because enemies imbued with elemental attacks can quickly knock you down. Understanding enemies and their weaknesses makes killing more satisfying, especially when you figure out how to tear apart particularly difficult enemies with the right elemental combinations. At the same time, their random distribution in each biome can sometimes seem unfair, especially when some of Noita’s most difficult enemies are ready to greet you at the starting of a stage.
Chance is at the heart of most Roguelikes, and Noita is no different. However, it has parameters that make successive races so radically different from each other that it is difficult to master the mechanics when you are constantly facing the new challenge s that accompany a new race. For most of my first hours with Noita, I barely progressed, I was busy understanding the fight, while also taking care of races that had no chance of lasting more than a few minutes. In Noita, there is no global progression to rely on for help; they return to the same point every time they restart. When you start to understand his systems, noita’s mechanical depth – and the haste to discover them – overcomes his initial frustrations. But it’s an abrasive start that’s far from inviting.