Recent reviews by Trooth

This game is great because for about 20 minutes at a time, I get to feel like I have 3 friends.

This game made me wish leaves were real.

The core gameplay of Noita is a blast. The destructible environments, liquid physics, and object physics never stop being fun to play with. But surprisingly, the most fun I have in the game is the wand customization. Figuring out which spells work best in which wands is really satisfying, and arranging the spells to give you favorable effects is like a primitive programming toy.

Honestly I think the game's biggest misstep is using permadeath. It does make for a lot of funny deaths to be captured in the game's built-in gif creator (another fantastic feature I forgot to mention) but the game world is so enormous that one unfair death can undo literal hours of progress.

And the game does have an enormous world. As you explore, you'll realize the main sort of "dungeon" of the game only accounts for about 20% of the actual game world, and it's full of amazing secrets to find. The only problem is that those secrets are really only fun to find once, again because the permadeath mechanic means your hours of exploration and progress can be undone in a blink. On top of the massive game world, there are also New Game+ loops, and infinite parallel universes (seriously), but these features are not fun to explore in a "die once and you're booted to the main menu" game, they're fun in a game where you know your 20-hour save file isn't going anywhere.

The usual response to a permadeath game being unforgiving with the deaths is "git gud" but there are so many reasons it doesn't work in Noita. Some deaths are objectively unfair, like random off-screen enemies finding a nuke wand and setting it off before you ever even see them appear, killing you instantly. The mechanic works in a game like Spelunky or Binding of Isaac because when you die in those games, you've lost minutes of progress, not hours. It might also work if it had a feature like Enter the Gungeon, where you only have to do the sidequest for the "true" ending once, and after that the game gives it to you basically for free.

But I still fully recommend Noita because it's got good modding support, so if you're like me and you want to change the permadeath function, or to add a lot more spells and items, you can! That benefit alone negates pretty much all of my complaints.

It's a pretty average action-platformer as far as gameplay is concerned, really just elevated by the cool artwork, themes, and pretty good level design.

The weapons in this game are just so much fun to use, but I do think it gets unreasonably hard as it goes on. I'd compare it to something like The Binding of Isaac, which was also incredibly hard and unforgiving for me in the beginning, but I eventually got the hang of. This one, I still haven't gotten the hang of. I feel like I've only seen maybe 5% of what the game has to offer, just because so much of it is hidden behind the extremely high difficulty. I'd probably have more fun if characters had about 80 HP instead of 8 (or if there was any kind of easy mode), but there's a lot of fun to have with mods too.

It's not that much fun singleplayer. If you have friends to play with, it'll either be a lot of fun as you try different strategies together and accidentally blow each other up a lot, or it'll be a hellish experience if you have one of those friends who just tries to kill you for the loot you're carrying.

It's a neverending cycle of gathering resources, producing items from those resources, automating the gathering or more resources, and automating even further item production to gather and automate even more, while dealing with crises like electricity consumption and enemy attacks. In a way, it's really relaxing, and in a way, it's also bizarrely stressful

It's a fun farming game, but for me it never quite reached the peaks that old Harvest Moon did because the characters are weaker. Unlike those games, they don't age or really change at all over time, and are just kind of stagnant NPCs. Their stories could all be a lot stronger if they actually changed over time. The game hints at wanting to do that in some ways, like setting up certain NPCs to fall in love over time, but they never actually progress at all in that way.

But that's my one complaint in an otherwise very satisfying casual farming game. It's the kind of game where a few minutes can easily turn into a few hours, that'll keep you going "Maybe I'll just play through ONE more day and then stop..." It's really good for wiling away the hours, but it's a lot more about gameplay than story.

Come for the beautifully animated artwork and fun combat, and stay for the surprisingly extensive customization options and lore. I put nearly 50 hours into this game in one playthrough, working toward 100% completion. A really great aspect of this game is that you can sort of choose how challenging you want the game to get. Getting to 100% was a big challenge for me, but there was still a lot more I could have taken on if I'd wanted an even more difficult experience. The game makes it worth it.

This game improved on a lot of what made the Diablo games so great, removing cumbersome mechanics like item identification and town portal scrolls, and making a generally very satisfying combat system. Be aware if you play multiplayer that players do not receive individual loot, and XP is not shared outside a certain range. Some people don't like the lack of randomly-generated environments, but the hand-crafted levels are very nice, and large enough that most people won't really be bothered.