Fire is all sorts of fun to play with.  Get a nice staff, shoot a fireball, things go Boom nicely.  It’s all very simple and direct until a spark lights up a wooden beam, spreading to an explosive barrel that tears open a hole into a reservoir of oil that’s now not only burning but spreading, taking out anything below including, of course, you.  On the one hand breaking everything is a terrible idea, but it’s just so much fun to watch it all interact that it can be hard to focus on the goal.  The object of Noita is to survive its caves and dungeons, but when there’s a giant vat of acid it’s hard to resist seeing what kind of trouble it can cause.

Noita is a 2D side-view action roguelike where a wizard drops into the mysterious depths of a series of random caverns, and every pixel on screen is simulated in at least a couple of ways.  Water, for example, puts out fire but also turns into steam.  Steam rises and can then condense and rain back down.  Ice shatters, wood burns, fluids get on the wizard’s robe and make them resistant or susceptible to effects, etc.  There’s a lot going on at any one time, and that’s before finding an overpowered wand that can cause as much damage to you as it does to the enemies.  It’s very easy to get sidetracked by playing with the physics, but deep underground are a good number of mysteries for a wizard who’s attentive and careful enough to survive.

After a year in Early Access Noita is just about done a very successful run, and today announced its release date of October 15.  In addition to the final round of pre-release polish the game gets a huge content-drop, with new enemies, spells, perks, and other as-yet unspecified content.  For a peek at some of the new goodies there’s a launch trailer available, showing off just how chaotic full environmental simulation can get.  The trick to survival may be to reign it in a bit but really, what fun is that?