I want it I want it I want it. Let me revel in chain reactions of dripping lava and exploding acid. Let me bask in quelling them through spell-summoned rain. Or at least die trying.

I kept forgetting Noita exists, because despite Noita being a fabulously-promising platforming roguelike that had Alec (RPS in peace) making favourable comparisons to Spelunky, it had also spent many years in development with no whisper of a release date. No more! The devs have announced it’s entering early access on September 24th, and there’s a trailer to celebrate. Quickly, come with me and fantasise about acid.

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Noita is a very giffable game. The official Twitter account for developer Nolla Games has a lot of cool gifs. Explosions. Acid. Ice. Rats. Noita is that game where every pixel in the word is animated. You can explode, burn, melt everything you see, as a little witchy character exploring a procedurally generated dungeon. I was sitting around a laptop on the floor with the devs, and people kept stopping to look, because the whole screen was a mass of destruction fireworks. In his preview, Alec (RPS In Peace) described it as “magical melting nightmare“.

Nolla Games is actually three very nice lads, Petri Purho, Olli Harjola and Arvi Teikari, who have all made games individually (the most famous are Crayon Physics Deluxe, The Swapper, and Baba Is You, respectively), but have also been working on Noita for six or seven years at this point. They only decided to make things more official as Nolla Games relatively recently.

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The finalists for the 2019 Independent Games Festival award ceremony on March 20th have been announced, and they remind me just how joyful a challenge it is to keep up with indie development. Every category is packed with exciting, creative endeavours both complete or still in development – a reminder that 2018 was a great year for games, and 2019 stands to be even better. Now I’ve just got to keep track of all of them.

Among the headliners for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize are RPS favourites like low-fi groundhog day adventure Minit, the excellent maritime mystery Return Of The Obra Dinn (which Andreas Inderwildi picked apart earlier today) and the bizarre Hypnospace Outlaw, a deep dive into a fictional 90s internet dream-world. Also in the running is virtual voyeur sim Do Not Feed The Monkeys, and the upcoming physics-driven platform roguelike Noita. Every category is full of exciting games, though – check out the full list on the IGF page here, or below.

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Now that the festival of bellowing that is E3 2018 has come to an end, we begin the arduous process of making sense of it all. This means sifting through mountains of press releases and trailers to find all the curious games that lurked outside the spotlight glare of the larger publishers. And we find such treats as Maneater (Jaws RPG where you play as Jaws), Rapture Rejects (battle royale where you fight for the last spot in heaven) and Neo Cab (Uber-sim meets Blade Runner). So many delightful things, in fact, that new video person Noa couldn’t resist gathering them together.

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I’ve always loved the concept of completely physics-driven worlds in games, but so few have gotten it right>. While others have tried and failed, I’ve got high hopes for upcoming platformy roguelike Noita, especially after its appearance at E3’s PC Gaming Show. Within, an exciting little trailer showing off enormously detailed environmental destruction, pixel-on-pixel violence, some impressive lighting effects and all silky smooth to boot, despite every single pixel being its own physically defined object.

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