Noita

The reasons why people love and hate this game are exactly the same.
The game won't offer you a goal, guide or quest - but it will offer you countless hours of exploring and experimenting with whatever you want.
If you start playing with the mindset of this being your usual roguelike (or rougelite), you'll probably come out frustrated. The game never boxes you in, in fact, it wants you to use its own mechanics against it. Every wall is crossable, every enemy is defeatable, the game feels difficult, because an unbreakable material or a boss with a million health feels like a roadblock you're not meant to cross. But in Noita, you are meant to do it.
The game's seemingly ridiculous difficulty stems from how non-conventional the combat is. You might not be able to take that eldritch monster straight on, but you can turn it into a sheep and teleport it into lava. Or you can dig a tunnel and just never have to deal with it.
On a slightly different note, as a completionist, this game has felt incredibly satisfying to play. I'm the type of person who checks every bookshelf in a game just to read "There are some books here" fifty times, so I wasn't expecting anything big when I tried to go "out of bounds". Let me tell you, there are no bounds. Every time I tried to throw the game a curveball, it threw one right back at me.
In conclision, Noita is best played if you enjoy learning the game's mechanics through trial and error. The game is more rewarding than it seems, and it encourages creative problem solving. It won't be easy, but every accomplishment will be yours.

Honestly, this is one of those times where I really wish there was a "middle thumb" option for reviews. I love this game, but Noita is definitely the kind of game that you'll either absolutely love or completely despise.
PROS:
- Awesome physics, between all the ways you can interact with the world, mess with terrain, and even perform genuine alchemy, it's definitely the biggest selling point of the game. It's just super cool!
- The wand-building! There's a huge variety of spells at your disposal at any given time, and there's quite a few spells you can unlock through various secret shenanigans. Having the ability to concoct any handheld death machine you want (and subsequently die to improperly-crafted ones) gives the game such a fantastic extra layer of creativity, and encourages the player to A: experiment often and B: learn from any deadly mistakes!
- HUGE world. The main progression is pretty linear, but there is an absolutely absurd amount of secrets and hidden biomes for you to explore. Like, holy crap, I don't think I've ever played a game with this sheer amount of secret side stuff before. A couple biomes are really lackluster (looking at you, Snow Chasm and Desert Chasm), but 95% of the time, discovering any of these new, out-of-the-way areas and solving the obscure puzzles is just a joy that I haven't felt since first playing the original Spelunky! It's wonderful.
- Neat story. It's told mostly through out-of-the-way lore snippets and through the environment, and it paints a cool picture of what you're doing, why you're here, how the world came to be, etcetera, while letting you fill in the blanks.
- Super moddable! Is there anything you don't like? Use mods, and the game's more fun, ta-da.
SUBJECTIVE:
- The difficulty. Oh boy, Noita is HARD, and everyone on the internet has already probably told you that. For the most part, I like the challenge, but far too often have I succumbed to something completely out of my control. You can learn from deaths from enemies, or your own spell mishaps, or from environmental shenanigans... But sometimes the cards are stacked against you, and you just get instakilled by an explosive buried in snow, or dunked in to a sea of lava by a few pixels of teleportation liquid.
The problem is, this is Spelunky-tier difficulty in a game where any run that's not a speedrun will almost always take SEVERAL HOURS. You die, it's back to square one, and you'll have to go back to ALL those secret areas all over again if you want to take advantage of their spoils. This will really be the deciding factor in whether or not you like this game. Are you okay with the risk of losing HOURS of progress, to little avail? Personally, I think Noita offers just enough for me to be cool with that, but I wouldn't blame you for hating the hell out of it...
CONS:
- Not a huge amount of unlockable content. There's plenty of wonderful secret sights to behold, sure, but outside of the eleven Orbs, there are only a measly seven or so challenges that actually unlock permanent rewards (Two secret bosses, three super-secret puzzles, and two huge challenge runs).
This probably sounds like a decent amount, but remember, each run takes many, many hours. You'll only unlock this stuff if you're going for all the super secret hidden side stuff. If you're just doing a normal, go-straight-down run, there is precisely nothing to unlock. There are actually plenty of "achievements," but they mostly don't unlock anything. Without many achievements that provide tangible rewards, it often just feels completely pointless and frustrating to continue when you just suddenly die to some random X-factor.
- There's sort of a "wand meta..." If you want a god run, you're going to have two wands; a rapid-fire homing death laser that kills everything instantly, and an infinite black hole wand. You're basically shooting yourself in the foot if you're not trying to build for that - and oftentimes, the game will be the one shooting you in the foot by not giving you any good wands.
- Some weird perks. Some of them just feel like they should be features, and some of them are one-time bonuses that scale horrendously. Tinker with Wands Everywhere is so necessary that I feel like you should just start with it (cough cough get the mod that lets you start with it), and all of the "wand upgrade" perks are so profoundly dumb unless you get them while you already have the godliest wands.
- Some VERY questionable enemy design. The game largely has some actually pretty cool enemies, but there's just a fewww too many enemies that are massive, run-ending terrors. Got hit by a blinding wizard? Good luck. Fighting a bulky guy with a poison gun? Have fun getting your health drained for 30 years if you don't fight him from 30 miles away. Fighting a scrawny robot assassin? Haha oops, he's actually the tankiest enemy in the game.
This extends to the two of the bosses. The Lava Lake boss is probably the most nonsensically hard enemy in the game - everything is fine except for that POLYMORPH ATTACK. WHY. Almost guaranteed to end your run. It just turns the fight in to "oops, do you not have any way to deflect projectiles or hide? guess you die :)" And the final boss is... weird. He's mostly super cool, but if you're going for a high-Orb run, the fight is going to take CENTURIES. Have fun eating through several billion health. That's not an exaggeration. Even the godliest of god runs will literally take over half an hour to kill it.
CONCLUSION:
Noita is an absolutely magical experience wrapped in a layer of barbed wire. The game's still in active development, so hopefully, it gets even better. Play with your own selection of mods for the ideal experience, because JEEZ there's a lot of wonky stuff. If you can vibe with the brutally punishing difficulty, I can't recommend this game enough! However, if you don't want to deal with that difficulty combined with the huge run length, give it a pass, or buy it when it's on sale.

They market it with the pixel simulation, and it's certainly very cool and makes many other games feel horribly rigid, but the real draw is the wand/spell building system. It allows you to eventually build totally broken god-tier wands erasing anything in an instant. Nice power trip until you are polymorphed into a sheep with 1 hp.
The game is difficult, and sometimes death feels a bit unfair, but even then it still manages to pull me right back in for "just one more" run. The world is also bigger than it first seems, so there is plenty to explore. I just wish there were more in-game hints to secrets and lore, much of that stuff is very obscure and hard to discover organically without resorting to reading stuff from wiki.
According to Steam play time tracking, this might be my most played game ever. And although quantity does not equate quality, it is an indication of something here.

start the game
explore
find a cool wand
use it
die
11/10

"HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT WOULD KILL ME???"
This game in a nutshell.

From the 200hrs I've played so far, 150 were of me killing myself in the first stage though various methods.
Highly recommended.

This game is exceedingly hard for me to review properly, but I'm going to take a stab at it.
Firstly, I recommended this game because I love this game. It has the right amount of challenge, can be played at whatever pace you feel like, and when you get that itch to go exploring, well this game's got that covered, too. I personally have taken on the challenge of becoming consistent at the game, having held the early access world record for most consecutive wins with 11 (and, I did it by doing only 11 orb runs). But know before getting into it that there are some clear downsides to Noita, especially with the 1.0 release, that I would like to speak to first. These changes made it very difficult for a casual player to get into the world of Noita, unfortunately. However, if you are seeking out a challenge, Noita is definitely for you.
My main point of contention is that 1.0 added forced randomized starting loadouts (previously they were opt-in by way of doing the daily instead of a normal game) that sometimes give you different spells and a different flask to work with. These cause needless suffering for new players for 3 reasons:
1) You can get a primary wand with a single spitter bolt on it. This single spitter bolt wand will have low range, poor accuracy, and poor speed, and can leave players vulnerable to enemy attacks. Even veterans can become overwhelmed if they suddenly find themselves surrounded by enemies, but new players are especially susceptible because they won't know what the correct enemy prioritization is, resulting in heavy damage or death. There are other bad primary wands as well, but the spitter bolt is the worst, and my hope is that spitter bolt - and anything with short range, really - gets removed from the initial primary wand pool. Great alternatives are spark bolt, bouncing burst, summon arrow, or magic arrow.
2) You can get a secondary wand with no explosives on it. While a rain cloud has its use (see the next point), the ability to get out of potential soft locked situations with an explosion is invaluable for new players, and not having an explosive spell to do so hurts new player progression.
3) You can get a random flask. This is the most inexplicable decision to me, because water is EXCEEDINGLY valuable at all levels of play: it can be used to put out fires, neutralize toxic sludge, make the player not take fire damage while stained with water, and kill one of the more challenging first zone enemies, the stendari. My recommendation is to ditch whatever flask it gives you when you start - even if beneficial - and replace it immediately with water. Water can be found to the left of start under the tree (you may have to dig, and you may not have the tools necessary to do it, but sometimes it's free), to the right if you're willing to climb the mountain with an appropriate explosive in the wall (ie: anything but a bomb) and find the lake, or if you start with the rain cloud wand.
Honestly, it is my opinion that Nolla should revert this change and make it opt-in for the daily only, or even enable it as an option for full runs. Why I find this important enough to bring up first is because there's literally a whole WORLD of things to explore and learn about this game to have to also deal with the frustrations of a randomized, and sometimes underwhelming starting loadout. Players are going to have their hands FULL tackling every challenge this game throws at it, and as you get deeper into the game those challenges grow bigger and more difficult. And THAT is what I LOVE about this game.
This game pulls no punches. You WILL get shot by the shotgunner. Repeatedly. You WILL die to enemies with a freeze wand, or a nuke wand, or machine gun concentrated light wand. You WILL kill yourself experimenting with wand building. You WILL find enemies you have absolutely no idea what they do, even after the 50th or 100th time you kill them, because, darn it, that enemy is going to die before you find out what kind of terror it will inflict on you! You WILL be running about panicked or scared because you know you can't deal with that one particular enemy, and now you're running headlong into a bunch of other enemies and... well, game over.
There's a REASON win streaks in this game are hard to come by, and that's because the game is HARD. It makes you stop and think about what you're about to do. Is going down this hallway without checking above and below a safe bet? Is there a propane tank lurking in the snow you're about to dig in that you can't see? Is that underwater chest going to have a thunderstone? Did I just hear Ukko or is that the wind? Often, second-guessing yourself and staying as safe as possible is the key to victory in Noita.
If you're a speedrunning type, Noita has got you covered. Runs of this game can be as short as 2 minutes, and involve absolute chaos, tight dodges, teleporting blindly into new territory, and trying to find that one boss-killing wand to finish the game as quickly as possible.
If you're an exploration type, ignore the usual seven zones and explore the world around you! Find out what's at the bottom of the pit to the right of the lava lake, what's outside to the left of the tree, or to the right of the mountain. Journey into the sky, or fight your way beneath the temple of the art to see what my lurk there. Traverse impossibly thick walls on either side of the map and see what might be on the other side. Fight optional bosses with unique mechanics and rewards. Discover strange quest items and try to figure out what to do with them. Learn the secrets of alchemy and be blessed with endless health and wealth.
If you're a completionist type, you'll be interested in what's at the top of the tree - pillars of meta-progress that grow as you unlock more endings, more spells, and more challenges. I myself plan on doing a NG+28 33-orb run at some point. I expect that run to take *weeks*, and to think that one drop of polymorphine can end that run is a scary but exciting prospect that will keep me on my toes the entire time!
If you're a mad scientist type, wand building is where it's at. There are so many spells with so many spell combinations in the game that you will be hard pressed to get a win with the same wand twice. Sure, there are repeating themes: homing mist wand, trigger chainsaw wands, speedy bouncing burst wands... but in the end, you get to craft your own tools of destruction from what you find in the game, and that's one of the most rewarding things about this game.
So overall, my recommendation for new players is to expect the game to be challenging and hard. If you're going into this blind you are going to die, quite possibly hundreds of times, before you get a win. If this is not your style, this game may not be for you. But if you're willing to learn everything the game has to offer, you will be rewarded with a rich world of mystery worth exploring, satisfying wands of mass destruction, fulfilling victories against challenging bosses, and the thrill of winning the game on your terms.
That is, in between bouts of stepping in polymorphine and getting one-shot.
Best of luck, noidat!