Noita is a big firework show, where the fireworks are heaps of gunpowder, exploding barrels of acid. The acid turns into steam in the heat of the blast and rises to condense on the cold cave roof, eventually falling back down as acid rain. Argh. This is a very dangerous firework show.

In this roguelike spellslinger where you play as a flying witch, every pixel is simulated, and can interact with every other pixel that ends up near it. Usually, these interactions result in spectacular death. They are, each of them, a tiny square of potential horror, and you help them along the road to disaster with spells that conjure many and varied effects. The game recently got experimental mod support, but I play the vanilla version and I am very bad at it. I’ve never even gotten past the fourth area. But Noita is so well designed that it’s mad fun even when you’re abjectly, embarrassingly awful at it. Here are some gifs to support that.

(more…)

As if Noita weren’t already deadly enough, a new update has added a dozen new spells that I don’t doubt will kill me as hard as my foes. And as if the delightful ‘all pixels are simulated materials which react with terrifying consequences’ shooty platformer weren’t chaotic enough, it now has official mod support. Yesterday’s update also added two new enemies, three new perks, a secret ending, “a secret wormy thing.” The phrase “a secret wormy thing” is mighty ominous in Noita.

(more…)

Noita is a game about searching for a good death. This is the conclusion I’ve come to after two weeks of playing it each day. I try and I die and I try again, and when I stop for the evening, it’s not because I’ve reached further than ever before. It’s because I have crafted a suitably satisfactory demise.

(more…)

“Ants. Cover them in ants.” The RPS treehouse is gathered around my screen, where several dozen stickmen are currently duking it out in a blank 2D void. This is not nearly violent enough for Sin, who has seen the Ant button. I obligingly sweep my mouse across the screen, summoning a haze of insects. Some of the stickmen jump into them, and get stuck there. “They’re suspended in the ants!”, I cry. “They’re suspended in the ants!”, cries Sin. Then she sees the button for Acid.

We’re poking at Powder Game, also known as Dust. It’s a ‘simple’ simulation where you conjure different elements and watch them interact, and I remember mucking about with it back in my school days. Little did I then know that such “falling sand” games would one day inspire Nolla Games to make Noita, their platforming roguelike where “every pixel is simulated” – but experiments have more serious consequences.

(more…)

Noita might have come from an alternate universe: one in which we harnessed the forward progress of computer power not to render 3D polygons and open worlds, but to apply greater degrees of simulation to the pixels of a Lemmings or Worms-style 2D world. It’s a roguelike in which ‘every pixel is simulated’, which in reality means that wood burns one pixel at a time, rivers of lava and slime re-route as you blast away the ground beneath them, and enemies spray the level with their toxic innards like they’re a waterbed stuck with a fork.

It’s a game in which you might get buried under a sticky, pink ooze, until you suffocate. Much as we are all being suffocated all the time by the foamy gush of new games. Can’t Stop Playing is our monthly attempt to pick out one particularly interesting game among the flotsam and raise it above the others, and this month it’s Noita.

(more…)

As you might have already surmised, Noita is a side-scrolling roguelike in which every pixel is meticulously simulated, from the fanciest molecule of glowing gas down to the lowliest granule of common dirt.

Each pebble, spark and drop of water interacts dynamically with everything else. Liquids slosh and flow and form pools, steam and smoke billow upwards and gather along the ceiling in suffocating clouds. Every part of the environment can be exploded, frozen, evaporated, set alight or extinguished in a deluge of toxic sludge and blood. Seams of coal smoulder like long fuses, ice melts into water and burning wooden beams break apart, sending lit splinters falling like matches into carelessly positioned vats of oil.

(more…)