i really like Noita and while the game does throw some numbers and stats at you, they are relatively reasonable and kind of essential in what they are trying to do, i think? i don’t think the stats are really that inscrutable (something mentioned by OneSecondBefore in another thread):
shuffle is a boolean indicating whether the order of the spells cast is sequential or random
spells/cast is how many spells are fired off per left click
cast delay is how long between casts (on a spell it shows you how much that spells adds (or subtracts? sometimes? maybe?) from the cast delay)
recharge time is the cooldown after you’ve cycled through every spell slot in your wand
mana charge speed is how much mana the wand recovers per second
mana drain is how much the spell costs in mana
you get both the direct damage (dmg. expl) and splash damage (expl. radius) values for spells which have an explosive element
it seems very reasonable to grok with a few minutes of attention, i think? and the game graciously pauses when you press E on a new wand, so you have time to breathe and consider. i quite like it. it’s nothing like Nioh, which i think legitimately has a problem with stats, or… idk, i can’t think of anything else at the moment
I find the want UI a bit much, but it depends on the audience they’re going for. It says, “this might control like an action game but it can be pretty hardcore, too”. If they wanted to make it more approachable while keeping the same functions, they could have hidden the stats that are at default values - that would get a wand down to 3 or 4 details to read to grok. As a further step, they could bundle deviations into trait names. For example, an icon for “multi-shooter” could package all changes that increase the number of shots per click, with sub-icons expressing 2, 3, 4, or more shots as part of it.
I feel like the game is a bit too much about figuring out how to utterly break the wand system to advance, there feels like too much of a semi-hard wall that you will just never progress beyond until you achieve a certain level of mastery/good luck in terms of decent base wands and getting the right spells between levels.
I might just be bad at the game though, because I’ve never been able to get past the Hiisi Base, the enemies just become too high-health and the physical spaces too constrained to really allow you to run through the level the way you can with the earlier levels.
I have issues parsing the wand information but that leads to me getting a feel for shapes and colours of the wands I know tend to work particular ways. This means that I don’t have to figure out the entire wand configuration each time and lets me work out at a glance if a wand is worth going out of my way to pick up.
I really like floating around and lining up shots whilst everything around you is total chaos.
responding to things said in the games played today thread. @BustedAstromech wrote:
It really gives the impression of a cool fun engineering toy that was hammered into game-like shape. Luckily it escaped the fate of a rigid level-by-level action game it might have suffered before 2012, but I wonder if a softer building game structure, like Terraria , would have fit better.
i would say this game only appeals to me because while it looks kinda similar, it avoids the really unpleasant gamefeel and tepid progression of terraria. terraria appreciates and cares for its player too much. noita gives way less of a shit about you and is much better for it in my estimation. i’ll play some more noita with terraria on my mind today and see if i feel any differently
i’d definitely go for some UI upgrades, though, no doubt
I agree, it feels way better than Terraria, and has a much stronger-defined artstyle. I’m characteristically unable to love a platformer with mouse aiming, though, in the same way I can’t love MOBAs using RTS controls. It’s absolutely necessary to enable certain types of gameplay but mice are such an ever-present abstraction to me in a game about controlling a body.
Starbound is a variation of Terraria with better art. It still suffers from the cozy generosity that makes progress feel foreordained though.
For Noita, my main issue with the game is that it’s almost entirely missing my favorite element of roguelikes: the understanding the menegerie of enemies in increasing detail and developing a menu of reactions to their specific tricks depending on the tools I have available this run (and then at a meta level, also picking my tools to cover any lacuna I predict I’ll have against a future enemy type). In Noita most enemy types just spam projectiles at you and I got the impression there’s not that much to learn about them beyond their speed and range.
Looks like it’s simply very hard to design games with meaningful physics and aspire for conventional game design values at the same time. Right off the bat in Noita you can always fly and use ranged attacks whereas in other roguelikes an agile ranged build is only one of many options you can “solve” the game with. My desired experience is more compatible with core mechanics having very little flexibility, so that everything interesting goes into a enemy power or acquirable player tool.
You are right, there’s some enemies with immunity to certain types of damage or they can be nearly one-shot with “this one chemical interaction you stumbled on” Concentrated mana will melt metal. But eventually your tool to every encounter is a monstrous wand of your own making that spits out hundred bajillity projectiles with 3 or 4 damage types, either as a shotgun or a constant stream. And you will be aiming from the edges of the playing field to avoid the worst of any enemy’s attacks. That is, until you break the game over your knee and ascend into god-witchhood of multiple immunities and damage shaving, careering recklessly through lava that stings instead of boiling you alive as your fire nukes in every which direction.
You do learn enough of the game environment to take whatever you got from the RNG and make something of it for the basic win every time, which is the dev’s goal for a procedural game like this. However, I feel like the game isn’t about you versus the enemy. It’s you against yourself. Your own tinkering will end up backfiring spectacularly in some fashion, whether that’s shooting off a newly picked up wand that looked neat or compiling some deadly wand that you forgot you don’t have an immunity against electricity and end up stunning yourself into a pit of acid.
I found a wand building guide on YouTube that is probably legit, the guy who made it seems like he knows his shit, and it’s two hours long! That’s as much time as Felix has spent playing this game!
noita continues to astound and amaze. it doesn’t give you anything for “free”. it doesn’t care about “balance” particularly. it doesn’t care whether you think it is “fair”. all of these things are assets to the game as a whole!
the more i play the more i think this might be my favorite action roguelite, maybe even above stuff like spelunky and binding of isaac: rebirth, previous claimants to the throne. it just holds so much energy and tension and mystery and intrigue. it withholds more from you more often than BoI ever did. i can’t say whether it has more scope than spelunky, but i appreciate the slightly more open-ended paths through the game than in spelunky hd.
i might get some lucky wands or combos and get deeper than usual, but it always feels like a pithy conversation, not like mere numerical oddities. and when i get sniped in the hiisi base for the 20th time in a row, it feels like a psychedelic certainty in a positive way, with elegance. i deserve to be punished! i dig that. the game is brutish in its elegance, candid in its emergent beauty. honestly unfair.
I played a ton of Noita last year and really, really liked it. The first few levels are wonderfully unforgiving but also feel totally fair. A handful of small screw-ups quickly cuts you down, or even a single dumb move can be enough to end you: a decent percentage of my early deaths were just testing out new wands in the “safe zone” before I understood the wand system (sometimes directly from the wand, at least once from me knowing to run from the wand while firing it, but the wand damaging the safe zone so badly that the lich showed up and absolutely wrecked me).
As the levels ramp up in difficulty though, it doesn’t stop feeling fair exactly, but rather that if you didn’t get a good wand setup going by Hiisi Base, you’re probably hosed. Which is a kind of unfairness, but more that the difficulty is being adjusted in a way that’s outside of your control? I dunno.
My one criticism of the game is that it feels like the visible screen real estate isn’t really compatible with the later levels? The encounter range gets farther and farther to the edge of the screen as everything – yourself included! – gets massively more dangerous. I suppose that’s compatible with the game’s general sense of claustrophobia and dread, but it also just encourages a policy of “Make scorched-earth wand, scorch earth, slowly move forward” which gets a little tedious when it feels like it’s the only sensible approach for the later game.
My favorite kind of wand build (and one that’s especially good for handling Hiisi Base) was a lightsaber-type wand (luminous drill(s) on a wand that basically let me just run it continuously) combined with a utility wand that had All-Seeing Eye. I’d just tunnel through walls and wait for an enemy to get close enough to the wall I was hiding in to gib them without ever exposing myself. I felt like horror movie Obi-Wan.
I don’t regret all the hours I sunk into it, but I kinda doubt I’d go back to playing it even if I suddenly had free time again.
i don’t know how many hours it takes before this game becomes evil but however many, i haven’t played that many yet. i may never play that many hours! i wonder if it will just consistently be great to me if i never put that much time into it. every time i play i am impressed again
i tripped last night and played some noita. despite compromised faculties, it went alright. the particle lighting was stunning. the enemies were savage and intimidating. melody actually got farther than she’s ever gotten before in one of her runs!
i absolutely love this game to a disgusting degree. it sure ain’t perfect but it sure is the best roguelite - or what the fuck ever you want to call it - i’ve played in a long time. hell, it’s the most recent game i like… in general? i think… so compelling from moment to moment and deep, rich, complex, and with the right affectations everywhere…
another thing we did while tripping was play Baba Is You since it shares a dev with this game - wow that’s a fucking game to play while on one lmao
