Lately I've been playing an indie game called Noita. I've bought it years ago and played it for a while, then lately I saw a video on Youtube of someone playing it, and I decided to try again. I'd like to write here why I think Noita is a bad game and why I don't feel like finishing it or discovering its many "secrets." This article contains a few spoilers, because, as you'll understand, I simply don't believe spoilers matter in this game at all.
If you are a new Noita player, you'll probably notice two things very quickly. The first is that there is a vast world to explore with lots of "secrets." The second is that you won't make it very far in your travels down the mines. Many players believe that this is a "skill issue" instead of a "game design issue." They'll watch a video of someone with a "god wand" (a powerful wand, with powerful stats and powerful spells), doing tricks that they would never imagine possible, and attribute this to the game being "deep" and having a "learning curve." I believe this is all wrong.
The problem is, simply, that the game doesn't teach you any of the stuff you need to get a "god run." In many games, not being taught things and having to figure it out through experimentation isn't a bad thing. One of my favorite games, Hollow Knight, does have a few techniques that you have to figure it out for yourself, and there are certain things that you would only figure out through exhaustive experimentation that most people simply won't do. If you can't figure them out yourself, and you reach a stage you feel you have "beaten" the game already, then you'll indulge yourself in spoilers because you simply don't think you can find all this other stuff by yourself in any reasonable timeframe. Noita is not like Hollow Knight. In Hollow Knight, the world is static and if you die you just respawn. Noita is a roguelike with permanent death. This means the world is slightly randomized every time you start a new game, and if you die you start from the beginning. Consequently, if there is a mechanic that you only get in contact 1 hour into a randomized run, you simply CAN NOT experiment with it. Because you have to play for a whole hour just to get to the point where you have a chance to try to figure out what something does.
You know what else I could be doing in 1 hour? Beating Slay the Spire on ascension 20.
Noita has over a hundred spells that you can collect and arrange in wands to cast. It's all customizable and players can get very creative with them. But many of these spells can actually kill the player by accident. This means that in order to figure out how to use them, you'll have to restart the game hundreds of times JUST to collect a given spell and test its effects. Keep in mind that you aren't guaranteed to find any given spell in a run. Which spells appear is completely random. Sometimes you start the run with spells and items you need to make it far into the game. Other times you lose a lot of health with a single mistake and you are forced to try to escape to the next area with almost no loot, which will make the next stage in the game much harder as you are not prepared, causing your run to be shorter.
There is no way to heal your health at the start of the game, by the way. The only heal is found in Holy Mountains, that are stops between one stage and the next of the game. There are some other ways to heal yourself, but they are ways that a player would almost never find by themselves. For example, there is an enemy that heals other enemies with shots. If you get hit, it heals you. The problem is that in order to make through the area, you'll probably be spamming spells all the time anytime something appears on the screen. You won't be able to watch what enemies are doing exactly. And it can take you a whole hour to get to this stage.
Many of the "secrets" and "mechanics" in Noita feel like that. For example, when you leave a Holy Mountain, it starts falling apart. You can only customize the spells in your wands inside the Holy Mountain. This means once you leave, you can't customize the spells anymore. Given this information, you would think that the only way to customize your wands elsewhere would be with a perk. Except that there are many ways to exit the Holy Mountain WITHOUT that happening. None of them are obvious if you play the game normally. In fact, you could probably play for hundreds of hours without learning about them, because nothing hints the fact that you could do that. This is an ability that could help you immensely at the start of the game, since you could just search for a better wand and then come back to customize your spells, or even leave the heal item intact so you can heal later. But you won't be able to discover how to do it. Even if you do discover how to leave the holy mountain, you may only discover one method, and you will think in some runs "I don't have X with me this time, so I can't leave the Holy Mountain without destroying it."
Essentially, the whole game of Noita is made of difficult obstacles that can be easily overcome with trivia that is absolutely unrealistic for any single player to learn by just playing the game.
This never gets better. I haven't beat the game myself, nor do I intend to anymore, but I know that there is a way to wander around the entire world. There is only one problem: health. There are no stable ways to heal your health in the game except for the single heal item in each Holy Mountain. This means that if you go around wandering the whole world, eventually you'll simply run out of healing and die, and the run ends there. There are some spells that heal, but they have charges (limited use). So if you run out of those, you die. There is an item that resets the charges, but this too is found in the Holy Mountain. Once you have collected all of them, you die. Given this information, you would think you just end up dying a slow death no matter what you do. Except that there is a way to get infinite healing. You just have to kill a specific boss to get a specific spell that gives you infinite charges. But let's pause to think about what this means to an actual player.
If you play the whole game until you reach a level that you can freely wander around, and you manage to do so without losing lots of health otherwise you'd die very quickly, you STILL have to explore the entire world, find every single boss, manage to defeat each one of them, which could take multiple runs just for a single boss, and then it still depends on whether you were lucky enough to find a healing spell with charges otherwise this was all meaningless. But as you read this, stop and imagine you hadn't read this article at all. You don't know anything about Noita. You somehow managed to start exploring the world without being given any spoilers. You don't know the spell that gives you infinite charges exists. You don't even know that. You would have to explore the whole world and start fighting bosses just to try to find something, and you don't even know what that thing is, or if it exists at all. You would have to be doing this just for the completion.
Playing thousands and thousands of hours of this game, which can be extremely frustrating, when you could just be doing literally anything else. I don't think any reasonable developer expects their players to pour thousands of hours into their game, specially if it's an indie game.
In summary, this game embodies a real problem I have with software applications in general: the software requires an Internet connection to be usable. Not because the software itself needs some data online, but because you, the user, needs to access the Internet in order to use the software. The software lacks documentation within the software, so you are forced to Google it. The software isn't intuitive. It's so badly designed you need a tutorial to do something that should be very obvious and very easy to do.
In this case, it's a game, so we can pretend that this is just how the game is supposed to be. It's part of the Noita experience. But that doesn't mean we have to like it.
I don't want to play a game that pretty much requires me to be reading a wiki and watch gameplay videos online just to get a chance to get to the first boss. That's not fun. At that point I don't feel like I'm exploring and discovering anything. I just feel like I'm cheating. I want a game that I can get good at using only the information provided within the game. If the game is designed such that it assumes the player will look up things online in order to have fun with the game, then that's just not a game I want to play.
But let's analyze this game a bit further, since we are here anyway.
What is the fun thing about Noita? The cryptic "secrets" are, honestly, not fun. At least not for me. Maybe it's fun for someone who enjoys wandering a featureless desert without any destination or compass. Even though I like puzzle games, it doesn't even feel like there is a puzzle to solve. The thing about puzzles is that puzzles are a contract. You trust that the puzzle developer created something that is reasonably solvable, so you go along and try to solve it. If I don't trust a "puzzle" in Noita is reasonably solvable without Googling it, I'm not going to bother try solving it. As a player, I have no motivation to even try to explore and find secrets when I feel that task is insurmountable in the first place. So what is the fun instead? The wands.
If I remember correctly, Noita's trailer showed two interesting features of the game. It follows a trend of indie games favoring procedural generation over static world creation in order to create more content with less development. Whether that really works or it just ends up creating more work I don't know. Either way, the features were procedural terrain generation where every pixel is simulated with physics. You can burn everything, throw acid on everything, etc. The other were customizable wands. By combining spells together, you can create extremely complex effects.
I feel that the simulated terrain part seemed more important in the trailer than what it really turned out to be. You can dig in Noita with some spells, like in Terraria, and you can turn lava into obsidian with water, like you can in most games of the sort that have lava and water. But there isn't really anything else you can do. I don't think you can turn rock into wood or stone, or metal, and even if you could, there probably isn't any reason to do it. Perhaps if the game was slower paced, that could work, but when you can teleport across the screen in a fraction of a second it becomes more of an action game than a strategy game.
The wands customization on the other hand is pretty cool. The way it works is that wands have a capacity of spells and they cast the spells you place in the wands. Some wands are "shuffling" which means they cast any spells in any order. Some wands cast multiple spells at once. But the most important are non-shuffling wands. Because some "spells" can cast other spells. For example, if a projectile spell has a "trigger," it casts the next spell in the wand upon collision. This means if you have 10 spells with triggers one after the one, casting a single spells ends up casting 10 spells: when one collides, it casts the other, and then the other, and then the other, until all 10 have been cast. The spell is cast not from the wand but from where the projectile hit. This means that some spells like circle of acid, which would immediately cover you in acid as it casts a circle of acid from the wand, and you would only learn this when you tried to cast it the first time, can be placed after a trigger to be safely cast where the projectile hits, preferably far away from you (except if you make a mistake and then you die from the acid). Most importantly, some "spells" cast multiple spells, and some spells reduce the recharge time and cast delay of the wand. By combining these together, usually with the chainsaw spell that reduces recharge time, you can create a wand that casts all of its spells in one instant, instantly reloads, and casts all spells again. Essentially becoming a "machine gun" wand.
Here is another problem with Noita, by the way. Chainsaw is a pretty worthless spell by itself, because it's a melee spell. This is a game where every health point matters. No player is going to try this spell because nobody wants to be in melee range of an enemy when you could just cast spells from afar. However, chainsaw is also one of the few spells that reduces recharge time instead of increasing it. This is how many seconds you have to wait for the wand to "reload" after it has cast all of its spells. Wands also have their own mana pool and mana regeneration. In many cases, the mana regenerates faster than it takes to reload the spells. This means the bottleneck of many wands is the recharge time, not the mana. If you lower the recharge time enough, it will cast so many spells so fast the mana will run out first, becoming the bottleneck. It's easier to lower the recharge time than to increase the mana, so a simple strategy is to find a wand with a very high mana regeneration speed and bring the recharge time down with chainsaw and similar spells.
But let's think about this for a moment: WHY chainsaw? It's a spell that players wouldn't pick, because it's melee. Nobody who picks this actually cares for the chainsaw damage, they only care about lowering the recharge speed. This means it could have been just a modifier spell that lowers recharge time and does nothing else. Then new players would be more likely to try it. Making it a chainsaw that you have to combine with a double spell modifier to be able turn a wand into a machine gun almost feels like there is a malice in how the game is designed. As if the whole game is designed, on purpose, in a way that difficult obstacles can be easily overcome with trivia, instead of it just turning that way by accident. By the way, I probably don't need to say this, but turning a wand into a machine gun is a very easy way to get past many enemies in the game, even if the damage is low per projectile, because it's impossible to miss the shots.
The most fun and rewarding part of Noita is the wand-crafting, but crafting those wands the way you want is probably impossible. The spells you find are random. The stats of the wands are random. The location of the wands are random. And whether you'll be able to find wands or not depends on luck. You are also limited to only 4 wands, which sounds a lot at first glance, but you might want a wand with teleport for movement, and one wand with damage, and one wand for digging if the damage wand can't dig. Late game, your fourth wand becomes a "storage wand" because the capacity of a single wand is much larger than the amount of spells you can carry in your inventory.
But let's say you want to have fun wand-crafting anyway. You restart the game 3 times and spend 3 hours barely scraping by to find the wands and spells you need to build a machine gun or something that does damage. Now you can easily defeat enemies before they even appear on the screen. If you eventually get lots of health and immunity the only thing that can kill you is a single drop of polymorphine, which can turn you into a sheep and then you die to anything in a single hit. In other words:
- You aren't going to have much fun, because you can kill anything without much effort.
- Except when you just randomly die all of sudden in a way you can't prevent, also known as "getting Noita'd."
It's like the best part of the game is hindered by all the bad parts of the game. To put it in another way, crafting a "god wand" is the bait that attracts unsuspecting players into wasting hours upon hours crawling through a very frustrating experience. Then they get Noita'd by a random explosion and have to start it all over.
For the record, this isn't the same experience you would have in other indie roguelikes. For example, Slay the Spire is a deck-builder roguelike. Most cards in the game aren't very powerful by themselves, but by having two or three specific card sin a single deck you can practically become invincible. All other cards that you collect through the game you collect only to survive long enough to complete your perfect deck. If you manage it before the final boss, you win. The differences between Slay the Spire's deck-building and Noita's wand-crafting are many. First of all, in Slay the Spire you are GUARANTEED to get a card after every battle, and you have 3 cards to choose from every time. In Noita, whether you find a wand or not depends on luck. You can finish a battle in 10 seconds if you are strong enough, which means you can find 15 cards in 1 minute if you are quick. Meanwhile, in 1 minute you may not even find a single wand in Noita. The effects of the cards are written on the card. In Noita, you have to cast a spell to actually see what it does! As I mentioned before, some of these spells actually kill you if you cast them the wrong way, or they may make you lose your precious, limited health. There are some "tricks" in Slay the Spire that you have to figure it out yourself, but they are very few. For example, if a card says it gives you an extra turn, and another card says its effects lasts until your turn ends, or does something when your turn ends, do these apply when the current turn ends or when the second turn ends? You can easily test this yourself by having both cards in your hand. Since you get lots of cards, it's very easy for that to happen. In Noita, you don't actually find that many spells, just as you don't find that many wands.
Based on this we can conclude that an important lever on the difficult and fun factor of roguelikes is how many opportunities the player gets to become permanently stronger in a run. In both games, you are given plenty of opportunity to "choose," but what you can choose is merely which direction to go. Choosing a direction to avoid an enemy and survive a bit longer will not make you stronger, and it's not fun to spend the whole game running away. In other words, it's not merely choice that is important in a roguelike, but choices that give the player greater control of the run. The fewer randomized choices the player is given, the greater the importance that a single randomized batch of choices contains an item that player needs, which means it depends more and more on luck. To decrease the luck factor, it's important that the outcome of a run doesn't depend too much on getting a single specific item. In other words, given multiple random choices, it's always possible to select a few items that will make the player decidedly stronger, and the ability to make those choices correctly is what we call player skill. To gain that skill faster, it's important to be able to make those choices more often.
To put it in another way, the core gameplay loop of Noita and Slay the Spire both revolve around exploring areas filled with danger to find items that increase the player strength, but Noita takes too long on the "danger" part, which is what makes Noita harder than it should be. If there were more wands, more health upgrades, more opportunities to heal, or even spells around in the first areas, the game would be easier. The fact that you can only customize wands in the Holy Mountain also means that there is a huge delay between finding a wand with spells and the ability to significantly become stronger, specially if you don't know how to leave the Holy Mountain without destroying it.
I've seen Noita described as a "survival" game rather than an action roguelike. I find this description a bit odd. Every game you have a health bar is a survival game, because you die if the health bar becomes empty. I think it's more correct to say that you are forced to play extremely cautiously because any mistake costs you health and you have no way to heal. But the question is whether "playing extremely cautiously" is fun. I don't think it's fun.
Of course, mistakes can prove fatal. For example, I recently lost a run in Slay the Spire because I thought I could defeat the last boss in the next turn. He survived with 1 HP left. I died. Had I played more cautiously and waited another turn, I'd probably have won. But this is the last boss. This isn't some random enemy in the first area. If you have to play cautiously in the first area to try to find as many wands and health upgrades as possible, in order to survive longer the second area, in order to maybe have a wand to get through the next, and so on, that's not fun. That's just frustrating. Specially considering you aren't even guaranteed to be able to come up with anything that you can use to progress unless you have encyclopedic knowledge of the game.
In spite of my critiques there is still a community of Noita players whom I assume actually enjoy playing this game. Good for them, I guess, but if you are interested in game development I'd look at Noita as an example of what not to do. Keep in mind, for example, that on Noita's subreddit the most popular posts are either random accidental deaths (getting Noita'd), or extremely cool wands that are often not created within the main game but using a mod to be able to customize wands freely without the restriction of actually having to survive in the game. In other words, getting Noita'd is an experience that pretty much all Noita players share, while wand-crafting is something that players really like. If you could extract the wand-crafting experience and implement it in a game that is less Noita'ing, that could become very popular with such players.
Acknowledgements
I'd like to thank FuryForged for making the video The Ultimate Noita's New Player Guide. After watching it, I decided that this is just not a game I wanted to play, and I was so salty about it that I decided to write this article as well. The Holy Mountain trick was the thing that made me give up on it, but the channel also shows several other tricks, each of which is surely to make me think "this is why I don't like this game," e.g. how to instantly kill the skeleton that shows up when you anger the gods. That's right. You know that enemy you are going to struggle with? You can just insta-kill him if you know this piece of trivia that you're probably never going to figure out yourself! But wait, there is MORE trivia that you would never know about! At this point this feels like a game that I'd enjoy watching a video of someone playing it, but that I don't want to play it myself.