Nolla Games' crushingly difficult Noita is finally out of Early Access and players are able to bask in all of its explosive magical glory. Every single pixel of Noita is individually simulated, and the physics of fire, acid, and water all can combine for some amazing reactions. While fun to mess around with, however, Noita does suffer from being needlessly complicated and not giving players a concrete feeling of progression.
Players will begin each run of Noita by being dropped in front of a dark and dangerous mine with a random magical wand and potion. While things begin similarly every time, each run is completely randomized with new enemy, item, and exit placements. This gives each run its own identity, especially combined with the random items that players start with.
By far the most interesting aspect of Noita is the simulated physics of all of the pixels. This means that each piece of the environment is destructible, and things like sand and water will flow or trickle down with gravity. Things get a little chaotic with the introduction of fire in Noita. Fire works very similarly to how it does in the real world, and anything flammable in its path will become a part of the blaze. Players are able to use this mechanic to their advantage to destroy wooden barricades or difficult enemies, but fire can also be a very deadly obstacle as it consumes large portions of the map.
Players are tasked with navigating through each of Noita's stages while facing increasingly difficult enemies while acquiring stronger weapons and skills. Players are also given free reign to customize their wands with any spells that they acquire on their journey as well. All players have to do is drag and drop the spells from their inventory to an empty wand slot in order to create all kinds of different spell combinations. These spells can make for some very strong attacks or abilities, but some of them can also hinder a player's progress. For example, if an explosion spell is combined with the boomerang ability it can blow a player up rather than their enemies.
This is one of the largest problems with Noita for new players. The game is already brutally challenging, but on top of that Noita provides little instruction to follow. Most players will spend the majority of their time dying or being lost because they don't understand where to go or how to use a specific spell properly. This becomes even more challenging as players make their way into other stages, as the world becomes more difficult to traverse and spells increase their damaging abilities. It is far too easy for players to die at the hands of their own spells rather than their enemies.
There is also no progression system that carries over between runs in Noita either. In order to make the game easier, players will instead just have to get better at the game. This can be pretty frustrating for those who been playing more recent roguelike titles like Hades, which offer extensive ways to become stronger permanently. If there was a way to lower the difficulty in Noita this wouldn't be much of an issue, but players who find it too difficult will probably become frustrated rather than having fun.
The upside to Noita being in Early Access for so long is that there is already an extensive community available for it that has revealed many of the games secrets, which there are plenty of. These secrets are a lot of fun to seek out and discover, as many of them can be found in the overworld rather than inside the mines below. For adventurous types there is a mysterious pyramid to the east, an infinitely deep lake to the west, and even more difficult dungeons to explore above the player's head.
Noita is well-designed and offers players many secrets and strange environmental interactions to discover throughout a run. In both design and execution it is very similar to Terraria in that way. Unlike its more popular competitors, however, it suffers from a lack of quality of life features like a tutorial or difficulty settings. Noita is not a game for the faint of heart, and is a title that will be enjoyed by the most hardcore of gamers while frustrating most everyone else.
Noita can be played on PC. A Steam code was provided for the purposes of this review.