izigame.me

Absolutely amazing masterpiece. If the technology in this game was doable in a game 15-20 years earlier I think this could have been heralded as the greatest achievement of gaming. I like winning as much as the next guy, but after 100 hours and close to 420 deaths I have never seen the final boss. I still keep coming back. A good portion of the spells and enemies and perks I have yet to discover. Even as a fan of roguelikes and coming to appreciate difficulty, this game is another kind of animal. You think its just about killing stuff and going deeper, but getting only to the next level is not all. If you never discover anything and always die quickly I implore you to look up the magic wand mechanics and if you really wanna know just take a quick glance at one of the community created maps. I'm not gonna spoil anything, but there's a lot and I haven't seen half of it, there's more than the standard areas you see when going straight down. But it's not frustrating to stand infront of this madness. At least not to me. It's an exercise in avoiding death, a challenge to master. You find a new wand that helps you survive that one place you died within seconds last time. You discover a weird structure. You see an enemy that you've never seen before. You kill yourself with fire because you didn't bring water. You discover there's something inside that structure you saw before dying to a monster last time you got there. It keeps going and you keep understanding new aspects of the vast sandbox. But it's different to other roguelike/lites. For example one of my favorite games is Risk of Rain 2, you get items, the right one make you stronger, and time is pressing on. Or Dead Cells, where you keep looking for weapon effect synergies and unlock things metroidvania-like to reach the new difficulty. Noita is so much different to all of that. You still learn enemy attack patterns, but then things change. You get wands, but you can't keep all, you get spells, but some don't seem that useful, you keep recombining them, find a new great combination and that's where the power spikes come in. You have all the time in the world to explore and collect gold, but if you are too greedy and fight too many enemies you might run out of HP before getting to the next area. And you understanding how things work will let you get deeper. Better not stand in a puddle of water when using electric spells. Better get rid of those propane tanks from a distance. Better not stand close to that enemy when it dies. All these aspects make for an immense learning curve but also an incredible, alive, hostile world. A simulated physics sandbox mystery marvel. Bonus points if you have a Finnish friend to laugh at you when you die from "Minä's sawblade".
If you can get past the first hours of confusion and quick deaths, you have one hell of a great game to discover.