Chaos and comedy. Death and rebirth. Luck and, uh, running out of luck. A good roguelike doesn't treat the player like other games do. Roguelikes won't guide you helpfully along a path, or let you cinematically snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. They're more likely to dangle you deep between the jaws of defeat and fumble the rope until you go sliding down defeat's hungry gullet. This is their beauty, and it's a part of why we keep coming back for another go. Next time everything will go right. Next time you'll find the right pair of poison-proof loafers, the perfect co-pilot for your spaceship, a stash of stronger, better ropes. Next time.
Here's our list of the 19 best roguelikes on PC you can play in 2024.
]]>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.
]]>I am, generally speaking, a horror fan, but this year for Halloween I've niched down on a particular topic and it has sort of accidentally taken me away from horror. Hm. Too late now! Plus, witches are totally Halloween fodder - and they're one of my key trends for games at the moment. Video games are lousy with both current and upcoming witches these days.
It makes sense. They've already got brilliant marketing. Few Halloween-y sights are more iconic than a pointy hat, a black cat, and a sihouetted figure flying in front of the moon on a broomstick. The witches I've collected here are definitely going to get you in the pumpkin spirit, even if they manage to run through most other genres except horror... Look, Halloween is mostly about sweets and dressing up these days anyway (and by the way, I am livid that I've not got any parties to go to this year, because my hair is exactly the right length to do a perfect Carmy Berzatto costume).
]]>We need to make a pact. Let’s you and I never, everrrr download and play this Noita mod called Flesh Biome. We can’t be encouraging this sort of thing. Noita’s depths are already terrible as it is without adding the meat tunnels and digestive system gases that’ll consume your wands and dreams. Wizards shouldn't have to run their robes through a 'viscera' cycle.
]]>Perhaps we'll come to see these years as a golden age of destruction. Between the roguelikelike witchery of Noita and the heists of Teardown, it's a great time for games where simulated materials and physics come together for destruction that's so much more than decorative. Now, after leaving early access in October, Noita has released its final major update, and it's another big'un with more ways to destroy and be destroyed.
]]>Fast and loose, or tight and controlled? That's the question I ask myself at the start of any run in a game with permadeath - that is, a game that sends me back to the beginning upon death. On this particular life, am I going to try my hardest, and aim for deliberate progress toward a specific goal, or am I going to throw caution to the wind, leg it as fast and as far as I can, and see what I learn from the chaos?
When it comes to chaos, no game does it better than Noita.
]]>Come, one and all, to mess with every last lovely little pixel in the excellent action roguelite, Noita, which leaves early access today. Nolla Games' witchy adventure will take you through procedurally-generated levels in which every pixel is part of a simulation. It really is a wonder watching all your spells alter and, let's be honest, destroy the landscape. The full release comes with a big update, adding even more spells with which to demolish levels. Excellent.
]]>Ah, October, the spook month. What better time for the witchy roguelike, Noita, to leave early access? On October 15th, Nolla Games' spellcasting platformer in which every pixel is physically simulated will be released in full. It's getting a big update to go with it, too, adding new enemies, perks, music, and lotsa spells, as well as a bunch of quality of life improvements.
]]>Hubbish bubbish, rhymes are rubbish, eye of newt and blah blah blah. Gosh, magic is a chore. If only we had a catalyst to... Oh, hello reader, what are you doing here? Well, as it happens, yes, you can help me out. Just stand over here while I scratch these runes around you. I’m trying to summon the 9 best magic spells in PC games, you see. Stand still, please. You won’t feel a thing.
]]>Every pixel is simulated in Noita. That means it can be dull or deadly, and react like its real-world counterpart (or, you know, its unreal-world counterpart). Throw in the OTT spells of your wizard, and the burning, electrified, or weird counter-spells of the enemies, and you have a perfect platform for mods.
]]>Disappointingly, there's not too much munching going on in the trailer for Noita's Feast update. Unless, of course, developers Nolla Games are serving up a banquet of roast witch. But rather than sausages or salads, Noita's platter is a deadly one. Released this week, Feast adds a bounty of spells, artefacts, environmental overhauls and more to the procedurally destructive dungeon-delver.
]]>2019 was a great year for PC games - aren't they all? - but you might not yet know what the very best PC games of 2019 were. Let us help you.
]]>Noita's having a cold spell. Fifteen, in fact, all wrapped up in last night's update to the pixel-physics-powered roguelike. You can summon boxes of death now. Or cast a chain zap. Or chuck eggs with spells in them. Mucking about with new spells is one of the main draws of Noita so it's nice to have even more of them. Even if those eggs are a bit crap.
We've also got a coupla new monsters, new weather effects, new magic materials, and a new game plus mode. How any of you have reached the end of the normal game is beyond me.
]]>Are y'all ready for some deals? With Black Friday almost upon us and only a few weeks since the last big Steam sale, of course it's time for some deals. Steam's Autumn Sale kicked off today, dealing out discounts and delights until the shutters close next Tuesday. You can check out the full list of discounted games on Steam here. Blimey, there's a few of them. Over 13,000 of them.
Tell you what, I'll give you a couple of recommendations to get started.
]]>In Noita, you can destroy every pixel. Walls, lakes of blood, rock mass, bodies, piles of gold, wooden piles, minecarts - if it’s there, you can mess it up. But there’s one place where you probably shouldn’t do that.
The Holy Mountain is a moment of respite on your journey downwards in this very physical take on the dungeon-delver. It’s somewhere where you can recoup your health, buy new wands and spells, and prepare yourself for the next area on your journey into the depths. But if this sanctified place should become damaged, you’ve just angered the gods.
“I’d point out that angering the gods is probably one of the things that people don’t like about the game,” developer Petri Purho tells me. The problem, you see, is the worms. But there are many reasons why angering the gods exists in Noita, reasons which tap into the very bedrock of how the game works.
]]>The usually remote and mysterious Nate visited the RPS treehouse on Monday, and almost immediately work ground to a halt. Why? Because Nate challenged us with a question: what bits of modern technology could a person from the past figure out the workings of, just by observing and having a good think for a while? This immediately led to the counter-question "when and where in the past?", which gobbled up another fifteen minutes. And then he asked how far back in history we, as modern people, would have to be sent before we could be confident of reaching the same understanding of all the technology that was around at the time. He asks a lot of questions, does Nate.
In terms of my own limits, I reckon most things invented after the late 1700s, when electricity and complex engines began creeping into play, would be beyond my capacity to intuit. Nate suggested his cut-off was around the mid-16th century, when most technology still worked via chunky mechanisms that human pattern recognition can decipher. Astrid initially suggested anything post-nuclear, but then climbed back as far as Nate, citing the barometer as a particular baffler. Matt thought a stone age knife would be beyond his ability to reproduce, slightly misunderstanding the exercise and dropping him to the bottom of the RPS post-apocalypse pecking order in the process (a knife, Matt? A bit of knapped stone? Bloody hell. Don't give Matt the rifle). All this of course led me to the inevitable PC games angle: which games have technology systems complex enough to confound new players who, let's face it, might as well be time travellers?
]]>Castle Shotgun has been ringing with the sound of spells, explosions, and squelching purple monsters thank to the chaotic mountain-delving nightmare that is Noita
It is, of course, a game that we Can't Stop Playing this month. It's also a roguelike. You get one save, and once you're dead, that's it and you start again from the beginning with a new level. Well, you do. Me, though? I have saved games. I will always have saved games. I will copy and paste the entire game if necessary. I will never be stopped.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>"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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>I am in no way prepared to say that Noita is as good as Spelunky. They're both platforming roguelikes that fizz with the emergent problems and solutions of physics-driven cavern-exploring, but Noita only released on early access last week. This is exciting, because the main reason I'm not prepared to declare even this early form of Noita on par with one of the best roguelikes ever made is simply that I haven't yet played enough of it.
Instead of judgements, then, here are five lessons I've extracted from the depths so far. I've exploded so you don't have to, but you definitely still should. And will.
]]>As planet Earth continues its inexorable trajectory toward the encroaching black hole, and ever more aspects of our daily lives are being affected, even the weekly Steam Charts are feeling its affliction.
This may seem a more trivial aspect of our final months, but I believe it's vital to recognise the severity of the impact here to better understand the wider implications for how deeply calamitous this situation really is.
]]>When things go wrong in Noita, they generally go wrong in all the right ways. The wizard sim will kill you in a cascade of calamities that begs for an easy way to show them off. But unless you're recording the game at that moment, you'll be left to reenact the death using stray cats and burning oil, and I'm not a fan of that. So here's a tiny tweak that popped up on the game’s Reddit that lets you save your death and then edit it into a neat gif. For whatever reason, the game shipped with it disabled, but it's such an easy fix that undoing it is not a problem.
]]>Blimey, it's a good day for destruction, isn't it? Now that we've spent all morning tossing bricks at towers, it's time to dig a little deeper. Underground, perhaps, into a cavern full of goblins and wizards and plenty of flammable barrels just waiting to explode. Pick up your wand and don your witchiest robe, physics-simulated dungeon crawler Noita entered early access today.
]]>Oh man, how did I miss Noita? It looks like someone took that Powder Game everyone was well into back in school, gave it a colour palette and made a Spelunky out of it. Brilliant! There's so much physical goodness going on, I'd love it if one of the developers, say, released a 10-and-a-bit minute YouTube video explaining how Noita's meticulously simulated materials come together to create chaos.
Wait, they did what?
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>Noita is how Spelunky looks in my dreams. It's a game in which the world is simulated down to each individual pixel, so that liquids drip, flow, splash and stain. You're tasked with travelling ever downward through a series of caverns, collecting new magical weapons and slaying beasties.
That wasn't always the case though. As I learned when I sat down with the developers at GDC, Noita was once more Dwarf Fortress than Spelunky, but changes had to be made when the wildlife kept drowning in pools of their own urine. Now, Noita is a real-time roguelite, and a beautiful cocktail of fire and fluids.
]]>Just the other day, I was complaining that there aren't enough games with awesome fluid physics. Imagine, I shouted to a pub full of strangers, imagine if somebody took all the lovely fluid physics from Pixeljunk Shooter and stuffed them into a procedurally generated roguelike.
Well, Olli Harjola the creator of clever clone-wrangler The Swapper must have been in that pub because today he sent along news of Noita [official site], a procedurally generated roguelike in which "every pixel is physically simulated". It looks absolutely fantastic, as you'll see below.
]]>
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