Can t Stop Playing is our monthly celebration of a game we’re loving. This time we have been buried under the pixel avalanches of physicsy roguelike Noita. Watch out for more articles on it throughout the month.
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.