Noita Has Numbers

The smaller the integers, the better

At a friend’s recommendation, I've been playing more Noita the past few days. I think I'd group it together with Dark Souls as the pinnacle of games that I deeply respect, but that don't click with me. They're so close to what I love about games, with their world design and bold emergent gameplay, but in practice I just don't enjoy comparing precise numbers enough to get into the mandatory character building systems, and I find that the action itself isn't quite tuned to carry the game on its own (like it is in Sekiro).

I like small integers in games. Paper Mario nails this. You do 1 damage by default, maybe 2 or 3 if you get tricky, and if you absolutely break the game you can maybe do over 10. The opposite of this is the boss in Noita that has over 100 billion HP and can only be damaged at all if your DPS is high enough for the data type conversion to not round your attacks down to 0. One of the coolest things I've ever heard, and also way beyond my endurance.

Even better than small integers, though, are qualitatively different abilities. Noita has a lot of this! I think I'd really enjoy a mod or mode that rearranged the game to be more Zelda-like in structure and expose these systemic interactions via puzzles and handcrafted challenges. That's the interesting part of the game to me, not so much the high-stakes roguelike challenge (whereas, for instance, Spelunky's mechanics feel uniquely suited to a roguelike structure).

Thinking about this made me return to Cinco Paus.