World's best/worst wizard physics sim Noita gets terrifying update featuring white holes and... cheese?
09.04.2024 - 11:19
/ rockpapershotgun.com
Noita! A wizardly 2D dungeon crawler without compare, in both good and deranging ways. Man, it feels like only yesterday I equipped something without looking and suddenly everything that damaged me caused me to teleport at random. I flew through entire levels this way like a Tardis set to shuffle, bumbling into one enemy posse after another, granted a few seconds at a time to assess my surroundings before the sorcery swept me deeper.
Behind me, meanwhile, whole layouts exploded as lakes of pixelated lava, acid and other substances which I’d nudged in passing overflowed and combined and transformed. Noita! Heaven help us all, they’ve released a big new update, after all these years.
As detailed on Steam, it adds a whole bunch of magic with terrifying names like “giga white hole”, “sparkly bounce” and “amazing golden spell”. Further into the changelog, there are ambiguous promises/threats such as “A little surprise for the turophiles” and “Dupe around and find out”. What the hell is going on down there? If you’d like to find out, the game is 60% off on Steam to mark the update’s release.
The update kills old Noita save games, sadly, though you can still finish an existing run by accessing a new Steam beta branch called "update_20240214". In return for the heroic martyrdom of your save games, you’ll get eight modifier spells, six new enemies, three new secret spells, a new biome, a utility box, three new bosses, and more besides.
“When it comes to chaos, no game does it better than Noita,” our Graham wrote in his 2020 review. I heartily concur. “Noita is very good even if you are very bad at it,” our Alice B wrote of the early access build. I heartily concur again. This is the game’s second “final” update – the last one added “rage-fuelled levitation”.
Those patch notes, without further ado. Or at least, half of them. There’s also a tidal wave of bugfixes – excerpt: “Vaihdosmestari can no longer move cursed rock” – and a colossal quantity of new modding features that I don’t feel equipped to assess.
GENERAL
FEATURE: Spell - Sparkly bounce
FEATURE: Spell - Lightning bounce
FEATURE: Spell - Vacuum bounce
FEATURE: Spell - Null shot
FEATURE: Spell - Inner spell
FEATURE: Spell - Giga white hole
FEATURE: Spell - True orbit
FEATURE: Spell – Hookbolt
FEATURE: Spell - Anti homing
FEATURE: Spell - Holy lance
FEATURE: Added 8 modifier spells
FEATURE: Added 6 new enemies
FEATURE: Added 6 new spells
FEATURE: Added 3 new secret spells
FEATURE: Added new rare materials
FEATURE: Added chemical reactions
FEATURE: Added new small biome
FEATURE: Item - Utility box
FEATURE: Potion reactions
FEATURE: Audio is muted when unfocusing the game if "Pause the game when unfocused" is On