The Hidden Depths of Noita
Reading time: 8 mins
Noita is not bound by the rules of our reality. In our world ice is less dense than liquid water, allowing for things like whiskey on the rocks or icebergs. No, in Noita ice sinks below water. This isn’t the most striking thing in the game but with my training as a chemical scientist it strikes close to home, reinforcing that Noita is magical from the ground up. It is also the most chaotic game I’ve ever played, in the mathematical sense where from a given set of initial conditions you can’t meaningfully predict what will happen past a short time-frame. In the face of all that Noita contains, like realising your tiny flat is a castle in the sky, it can be hard to get a hook into the game to start discussing it.
I don’t normally focus on game mechanics, and Noita shows why. Dismantle Noita into its component parts and you will discover a charming, brutal roguelike with an unintrusive UI and charming pixel art. Gameplay is a 2D platformer built on top of pixel simulation and player-customisable magic wands, which combine to give light traversal and shallow combat mechanics. You fly up or fall down, you fire the wands. Taken at face value this builds a fun but eccentric experience about going down a mine to fight a final boss. More so than other games, this treatment is not sufficient to express Noita. The lens I use to examine Noita is its soundtrack. I highly encourage listening to the music mentioned as you read; much of the music can be found online, such as via Bandcamp.1
I like Noita a lot, but without hesitation the soundtrack outshines it like the moon to a spark. In what will become a running theme for this damn game, there is far more music than you would expect in both length and variety; just shy of three hours split over three volumes.2 The volumes come together into coherent albums by each track drawing from a shared pool of motifs, styles, and instruments that express certain aspects of the game. Unfortunately for me during gameplay the soundtrack has a subtle presence, reacting to environmental stimuli like combat or biomes to fade tracks in and out, so I didn’t realise how much I enjoyed the OST until I listened to it separately. Indeed, I’m in the habit of muting the soundtrack and listening to a podcast while I play.
Vol. 1 of the OST captures the core game-play loop of Noita; it contains the most jazzy and chaotic tracks, exemplified by “Audition of the Fungi King” which feels like it’s starting fresh every thirty seconds despite keeping up a steady progression throughout. This captures the new players’ experience of Noita as they first delve beneath the earth. Entering the first area, The Mines, for the first time you don’t know what to expect or how to react to the array of monsters, items, wands and spells the game throws at you with literally no explanation. Noita is silent on how to engage with it, expecting the player to learn from experience (more likely, consult the wiki). I expect a common experience is being set on fire, then learning to put yourself out by diving into one of the many pools of liquid scattered about. This also learns you which are flammable. The confusion and burgeoning interactivity is expressed in “Peace At Last” through layering of infrequent discordant elements over the main melody, intermittent bells ringing clear through distorted guitar riffs and shy castanets.
Of special note is “Holy Mountain Theme”. Holy Mountain is first found at the end of The Mines, and serves as a respite between biomes. It is also one of the few places the player can replenish their health, as well as tinker with their wands by swapping out spells to make new combinations. Holy Mountain is nigh-indestructible, enveloping the player like plate steel armour. This is reflected in the slow tempo and precise placement of each element in the theme; where before bells where erratic, now their ringing is predictable and harmonises with slow-plucked guitar strings. I feel that bells and chimes bring the magical sense of Noita to the forefront. In the background of “Holy Mountain Theme” are distorted, faint notes – they are not out of place, but they are not as welcoming as the rest of the track. These notes are to remind the player that Holy Mountain will collapse when they leave, denying a safe place to retreat and forcing them deeper below the earth.
The early areas of the game are built of rock and soil, with some wood and oil lamps to make a cave into a mine. As the player heads deeper they will encounter more machinery and great metal structures. This is one of the aspects of Noita I did not expect. There is a striving between the natural world and the cold wheels of industry, with the chaos of magic and alchemy suffusing it all. This tension is expressed in the soundtrack via Vol. 2. You feel as though you are in a ninteenth century machine shop listening to “Stop For a Brew”, where human hands wrangle temperamental lathes and drills that are almost more trouble than their worth. Drums pound like hammers and horns blow like the memory of a steam-whistle. It expresses mass-production, but not automation, which would explain the vast number of enemies Noita throws at you as you enter the Snowy Depths and the Hiisi Base. One of the key lessons for the player is how to make a powerful wand, as the difficulty curve of Noita does not care that you struggled to find any powerful spells from its randomly generated wand assortment. You have to learn to fight dirty, throwing potions and kicking rocks with your mighty legs, or working out that luring enemies to an explosive barrel will do them in shortly. Once the combat is over you can catch a breath; the music becomes psychedelic with “Out-take III – Lupaus paremmasta”. It invites you to chill out and be thankful for the moment.
While vibing, you can reflect that the great strength of Noita’s gameplay is the interactivity between systems. Alchemy is the best example – you can carry liquids in flasks, and mix them in puddles on the ground. From this you can learn accidentally that this can cause alchemical reactions, such as concentrated mana converting water to more concentrated mana. You might then learn that concentrated mana dissolves metals, as the oil drum that was previously sat in a puddle of water explodes violently and splatters you against the nearest wall. Suddenly dying due to ignorance is a feature of Noita, expressed by the incoherent screaming in the background of “Tormented Staff”.
Deep breaths. Being chill is a survival strategy for me, at least in the meta. I find Noita is much like Rain World, where you play a little guy in a dangerous world and as such die often and unexpectedly. Fortunately Noita is essentially empowering (one of the spells you can get is a black hole, another is a nuke) and I usually feel like deaths in Noita are my fault for not respecting how dangerous the game is. A little luck will give you the spells you need to become a god, but you’re always a few chaotic seconds away from being reduced to a pile of meat. To get good at Noita you have to die a lot, and the game is more than willing to oblige you.
Vol. 3 is the most industrial album of the OST. The first seconds of “Timing Chain” sound like the pump that pulled the vacuum on my old Schlenk line spinning up through a sludge of old oil and waste solvent, held together with rust and harsh language. The chugging and clanking of a dying conveyor belt continues in “Mindless Machine”. The nature themes of the previous volumes are all but swamped out by the presence of industry and the stench of ozone. The second half of Vol 3. moves fully into the realm of magic, but rather than the tame wands of the player it evokes the dark and raw forces from which your powers stem. To guess a genre I’d say doom rock; the tempo is way down with lingering riffs screeching warnings of what lies below the earth. The machines from earlier have finally gummed up and stalled, nature has fallen silent. “You Have Angered The Gods” dwells deep in Vol. 3, which plays when the player forgets their place and attempts to burrow through a Holy Mountain. This summons a very powerful enemy to destroy you, and if you survive they’ll be waiting in every Holy Mountain you visit. The dark heart of Noita has surfaced. You are now listening to what lives behind it. The game does not care about you, and every second you survive it will take back bloody. Listen to “Haunted Place” or “Triangular Structure” and be unnerved.
Vol. 3 is mysterious and magical, and therefore fitting to reveal that I’ve barely scratched the surface of Noita’s content. So far I have outlined the journey from the surface to the ~final boss~, but the world of Noita is much larger than this small sliver. A draft of Levitatium potion, or a digging spell, allows the player to travel left and right into new and more dangerous biomes. You’ll need to do this to shoot for the multiple endings and unlock some very fun spells, and it gives you new and exciting places to die like the Pyramid or Hell. If you travel far enough you will reach a vast wall of towering rock, and by now you should realise that Noita does not end here – find a way to dig through, and you will find a new, complete Noita map to explore. There are a few significant differences between the main world and the parallel worlds, but I will leave it to the player to uncover them. If you traverse a parallel world you can dig through another boundary wall to reach a brand new parallel world. Beyond this, another, and another...3
I am not good at Noita, nor will I ever plumb all of its secrets myself. It is a game for those who like surprises, and enjoy discovering weird and wonderful things. I’ve left so much of the game undiscussed, such as being able to eat things off of the floor, and I encourage new players to go find Weird Fungus and eat as much as they can. Though I will never finish Noita, I have gained a banging soundtrack to follow me on my future explorations of the weird.
Track Listing
Audition of the Fungi King (Noita Official Soundtrack Vol. 1)
Peace At Last (Noita Official Soundtrack Vol. 1)
Holy Mountain Theme (Noita Official Soundtrack Vol. 1)
Stop for a Brew (Noita Official Soundtrack Vol. 2)
Out-take III – Lupaus paremmasta (Noita Official Soundtrack Vol. 2)
Tormented Staff (Noita Official Soundtrack Vol. 2)
Timing Chain (Noita Official Soundtrack Vol. 3)
Mindless Machine (Noita Official Soundtrack Vol. 3)
You Have Angered The Gods (Noita Official Soundtrack Vol. 3)
Haunted Place (Noita Official Soundtrack Vol. 3)
Triangular Structure (Noita Official Soundtrack Vol. 3)
Further Reading
Noita Game Map (a map of Noita).
Noited: A Noita Death Visualiser (makes an image of all your deaths in Noita).
This work is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0
Some of it is also on YouTube and Spotify. We’re not getting paid to promote the music, so listen to it wherever you want.
It doesn’t fit into the main essay, but when I bought the Noita soundtrack on Steam it was taking a while to download so I checked and saw that it was 4GB. It is this large because it contains: 3 volumes each in .mp3, .wav, and .flac, and Vol. 1 as A-side and B-side LPs, in .mp3, .wav, and .flac. I’ve never been presented with music that is so high-fidelity and redundant all at once. I love it – this encapsulates Noita (I leave it to the reader to explain why in detail). Turns out that the Steam store page does warn you about this, so my bad I guess.
There is a practical limit to how many worlds you can visit, after which Noita becomes unstable.