YMMV / Noita

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Are the Hiisi mindlessly aggressive to anyone not a member of their race? Are they simply trying to defend their homes from interlopers such as the Noita? Or are they aware of what will happen if the Work is completed and the Noita turns the world to gold and trying to prevent that?
• Breather Level: The Underground Jungle is noted for being substantially easier than both the preceding Hiisi Base and the following Vault, as well as often being substantially more profitable, as it is chock-full of wands and health upgrades. The most dangerous things in it are the spiders, not because they can do all that much to you, but because they can vandalize the Holy Mountain and anger the gods.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: One of the simplest and most desirable wand combos in the early game is a Luminous Drill with a Ping-Pong modifier. It serves both as a medium range weapon capable of quickly killing most early to mid-game enemies and as a digging tool that can handle almost every material with ease.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Mato family, from the small Pikkumato to the massive Helvetinmato. They have a ton of HP, hurt a lot when they manage to bite you, can appear on any floor, and worst of all tunnel through materials with great ease including the Holy Mountains' bricks. This can anger the gods even if you didn't mean it.
  • The jetpack-wearing Hiisi in the Hiisi Base (and to a lesser extent the Snowy Depths.) They pursue the player quickly and relentlessly (unlike enemies on earlier levels, which can generally be escaped or evaded if you get in trouble), they travel in large packs, they have dangerous ranged attacks, and they're heavily-armored with beefy hit points, so if you're still using starter weapons or comparably weak spells you may find yourself almost unable to damage them. More than one run has been ended by a Kranuhiisi's grenade. Also, due to their nature as Hiisi, they can also use all wands.
  • The bright purple mages (Muodonmuutosmestari/Masters of Polymorphing) in the Temple of the Art are extremely dangerous regardless the amount of your HP, because they fire polymorphing magic bolts that transform you into a flying sheep.
  • Sky Gazers (Taivaankatse) are some of the most nightmarish things you can encounter in The Work (Sky). Not because they're particularly strong or durable, or difficult to hit or avoid. But because they are entirely themed around creating Chaotic Polymorphine which will leak through the clouds that form the region. They attack by spitting globs of Polymorphine, which will leave permanent puddles of the stuff, and when attacked or killed, they will bleed Polymorphine.
  • Any enemy that can wield a wand can potentially turn to this trope, thanks to the randomness of wands. If you were lucky, they would shoot pathetically weak spark bolts. If you were unlucky, they would launch a NUKE at you...
  • Kummitus is a special mob that can spawn in any biome and has more health than some of the mini-bosses. While there's only one per run, what makes it especially dangerous is that it spawns with a wand from one of your previous runs. Maybe that means it has a basic beginner wand, or maybe it has a wand capable of killing you in one hit from off-screen. While it is especially weak to physics damage (an Emerald Tablet to the head will generally one-shot it) and can be disarmed by kicking it, both options still require getting close in the first place, which can be downright suicidal based on the wand it comes with.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • While the first two levels aren't easy, the game's difficulty increases sharply at the Snowy Depths, the third level, introducing flying Hiisi enemies that pursue you relentlessly, Snipuhiisi with accurate and damaging long-ranged attacks, powerful Hiidenkivi super-enemies, and so on. Additionally, many enemies from here on out are heavily-armored, so if you haven't upgraded your offensive capabilities you may not be able to meaningfully damage them at all. The devs have smoothed this spike a bit over time, but it's still very noticeable.
  • The jungle represents another spike primarily due to the increased health of enemies. Previously encountered Hiisi all have their health doubled while Lukki have health equivalent to the strongest enemies of the last zone. Wands which previously carried a playthrough will often struggle to kill one enemy before the player takes damage. New variations on the larger Hiisi are also introduced, spraying poison and firing off landmines.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Almost all endings are some variation on this.
  • The "default" ending, where you complete The Work in the obvious place after beating the final boss, gives the “victory” achievement despite killing the player by turning them into gold.
  • Completing the Work at the mountain altar but with too few or too many orbs turns the entire world into toxic gold which kills you when you touch it.
  • Completing The Work with precisely eleven orbs (all the ones in the "normal" world, without visiting parallel worlds) transforms the entire world into gold except for the Noita, who can now collect limitless wealth for no reason.
  • The only endings to avert this are entering New Game Plus, which requires completing The Work at the mountain with five to ten orbs, plus the ones that require New Game Plus to achieve, since you need more orbs than are available in the original world. Completing The Work at the mountain altar with 33 orbs (the maximum obtainable in New Game Plus under normal circumstances) will make the entire world peaceful. There's also an Easter Egg ending for if you find an orb in a Great Treasure Chest, which also makes you invincible - but the chance of that is 1 in 10,000,000.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Steve" for the Stevari, the divine lich-like servants of the gods sent to punish the Noita when they damage a Holy Mountain too much. Their stronger siblings, the Skoude are also known as "Scott".
  • Sauvojen Tuntija, or the Wand collector, is often nicknamed Squidward due to its appearance, and the fact that it stops people from collecting an easy orb.
  • "Kolmi" is used to refer to the Final Boss, Kolmisilmä.
  • The mini-boss Kolmisilmän silmä is often referred to as Mecha-Kolmi.
  • "Tiny" for Limatoukka, both because the associated code name is "maggot_tiny" and because it's the largest enemy in-game.
  • The race car in the hidden racing mini-game has been dubbed "Karl", short for "Karl the Mighty, First of Its Name, Mover of Suns and Friend to All".
  • "Wand Mart" is used for the large Overgrown Cavern biome under the Desert, as it typically contains a large amount of wands and is somewhat safer to navigate than other areas with similar wand quality.
  • The mini-boss Kolmisilmän sydän in the Meat Realm is nicknamed "Meatball" due to looking like a legged meatball.
  • "Wisp" or "Infiniwisp" is used for spell projectiles modified to have an infinite lifespan.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Perks:
    • Tinker With Wands Everywhere. It allows you to move spells from wands outside of the Holy Mountains, which is incredibly useful as it means you swap in advantageous spells without having to carry a wand back to an active Holy Mountain, nor do you have to bother keeping the areas active.
    • Explosion Immunity. You know how impractical nukes are because of their huge radius that you can easily get caught in? With this perk, you no longer have to worry about that; those exploding barrels that are everywhere are also much safer to play with.
    • Melee Immunity. A sizable number of non-Hisii enemies can only inflict melee damage. This perk essentially renders them harmless, which can be a great help in the later, busier levels. Most importantly, it grants immunity to Worms.
    • Glass Cannon. It sets your health at 50 HP and disables most sources that increase health, but it is so worth it, as your spells now deal 5x damage and your explosions are 5x as big. As if that wasn't enough, it stacks with Berserkium's effects. Combine that with the aforementioned Explosion Immunity and have fun destroying half the biome you're in with even just a mere Bomb spell.
    • Permanent Shield and Projectile Repulsion Field. The former generates a smaller version of the Energy Shield spell, except it is on at all times and not on one wand only, and the latter will cause projectiles to deviate from you when near you. The catch is that you take 26% more damage from projectiles when they do hit you, and faster projectiles are not as affected, but if you manage to get both perks in the same run, then you become nigh-unkillable, as any projectile that aren't affected by the field are just going to get blocked by the shield.
    • Plague Rats. In addition to making other Rats friendly, enemies that die near you spawn Plague Rats that will fight other enemies for you. The rats are surprisingly strong all things considered, and though it says "nearby", it is surprisingly lenient for spawning them in. This perk alone can potentially trivialize the Hiisi Base and the Vault.
    • Unlimited Spells. With this perk, you can use most spells with limited use infinitely, without any drawback. You can dig terrain with your bomb spell as much as you want, and you can repeatedly fire nukes to decimate enemies. It's as broken as it sounds.
    • Perk Lottery. You know how the downside of picking perks is that you can only pick one per Holy Mountain? Perk Lottery says screw that and gives the other two perks a 50% chance to stay when you pick one. This can happen when you pick Perk Lottery itself, and it can even happen when picking a second perk that stayed, allowing you to stockpile up on perks and become very powerful very quickly. And taking extra Perk Lottery perks increases the chance of the perks staying.
    • Eat Your Vegetables and Iron Stomach. Eat Your Vegetables grants a damage bonus at high satiation, but inflicts damage at low satiation. Since you explode from eating too much, viable food sources can be hard to come in some areas, and a full stomach lasts roughly eight minutes, the perk by itself is of limited usefulness. Iron Stomach removes the negative penalties of eating, allowing you to build up ridiculous amounts of satiation that will take hours to run dry and turn that into equally absurd damage. It also makes gaining satiation easier because you aren't poisoned by corpses and the like. Combined with critical boosters to create rivers of blood from the enemies you kill, you'll have that number in the thousands in no time flat. Even by itself, Iron Stomach allows you bypass the ten minute limit for beneficial potions like Worm Blood and Concentrated Mana, both of which have powerful effects only balanced by the amount you can consume.
    • Hungry Ghosts. The ghost will sometimes eat an enemy projectile, although they will also eat some of your spells as well. This gives a damage buff to your next spell, and the effect stacks with additional copies of the perk. While the game will usually only give you five copies of the perk, there are ways to get even more. With the right spell setup and enough Ghosts, it's entirely possible to one-shot any enemy in the game.
    • Concentrated Spells adds a 12.5 damage bonus to all your projectiles at the cost of slightly increasing cast delay and heavier recoil. That's four times damage on a basic Spark Bolt before criticals. While it does synergize poorly with digging and healing spells, turning the former into a jetpack and causing the latter to damage you, there are workarounds through the use of the Greek letter spells, which are exempt from the bonus.
  • Draught of Midas. The draught converts any solid material it touches to gold and is not consumed in the process. This means it can theoretically produce an infinite amount of gold with just one puddle, significantly mitigating the problem of perk reroll costs. This also serves as a means of digging through any material. The balance is that it never spawns naturally, only when Alchemic Precursor is mixed with meat, and Alchemic Precursor in turn is only created through an alchemical reaction between three specific materials which are randomly determined each game and never revealed by any in-game means, meaning that without resorting to external tools, most players will see it extremely rarely, on the order of once every few thousand games. However, if one is willing to use those external tools, Draught of Midas can break the game in half.
  • Always Cast wands can potentially be this. The spell is included in each cast but comes with no mana cost and, in the case of normally limited use spells, has unlimited uses. Explosive spells in particular are very overpowered as the spells are normally limited use and can only be refreshed in Holy Temples or with rare treasure drops. Having unlimited uses, paired with protective Perks, can easily create an explosive chaingun wand.
  • The Tentacle Spell is one when combined with the Freeze Charge modifier. Projectiles with this modifier will freeze everything in a small area around where they hit, including any enemies. A melee attack on frozen creatures will always deal 50% of the target's damage, making it a two-shot kill. Tentacle spells deal melee damage. Combine both spells, and you can instantly kill almost all living things in the game.
  • Some combinations of spells and upgrades can do this.
    • Boomerang (normally useless) coupled with Homing when attached to spells that don't harm you will cause them to swarm around you until an enemy gets close, at which point they'll dart out laser-fast and kill them. This becomes completely game-breaking when coupled with a damage aura and one of the field spells; field spells last several minutes and, when propelled by boomerang and homing, can pass through walls, meaning any enemy who gets anywhere near you dies before they can do anything.
    • Large numbers of Bouncing bolts and trail effects can often get severely out of hand, especially if you're immune to whatever the trail does - for instance, a fire-immune wizard can easily light the entire level on fire.
  • The Greek letter spells, rewarded by and unlocked after defeating the High Alchemist, are unlimited-use spells that copy other spells in the wand based on position (Gamma, for example, copies the last spell). Copy is the important word there: it doesn't cast the spell like a trigger, but makes its own copy of it. This gives you unlimited use of Black Holes, Circles of Vigour, Summon Taikasauva (Wands), and other enormously potent spells that are normally heavily restricted by a use limit even with the Unlimited Spells perk, even if those spells have no charges left. Pair it with Healing Bolt and you have unlimited healing for the entire game!
  • The Divide By X spells. These will divide the next spell in the cast order into multiple copies of itself, but with lower damage. ... Unless the next spell is a modifier, in which case you simply get additional copies of the modifier. Or additional copies of Divide by X. Which can then all be applied to a modifier. If you have a Heavy Shot and two copies of Divide by 10, you don't have a Heavy Shot - you have one hundred Heavy Shots.
  • Spell Duplication, another spell which acts as a power multiplier by duplicating every single spell cast before it. Yes, this includes divided modifiers. Yes, this includes other duplicated spells. And yes, this is very likely to crash your game from the sheer levels of overkill.
  • One of the most simple ways to make a game-breaking wand is to combine the Luminous Drill spell with the Ping Pong Path modifier on a wand that has enough mana and mana recharge to handle the ridiculously fast mana drain of Luminous Drill. Compared to the type of fireworks display a typical world-ending wand tends to achieve, the combo is nowhere near as flashy, and yet its effectiveness is undeniable, as the amount of enemies that can withstand more than five seconds of sustained fire can be counted on one hand. The Luminous Drill's ability to dig through even Extremely Dense Rock also allows the player to explore the world freely, and the combo can be made even stronger by adding other modifiers.
  • Fungal Shifting converts all instances of a material with a different material. The process is randomized so it can have ruinous outcomes like turning all Water into Acid. However, it is appealing for the potential of both eliminating dangerous materials like Polymorphine and creating more sources of rare materials like Draught of Midas.
• Genius Bonus: The game contains allusions to The Kalevala beyond just name-dropping the Sampo. Most notably both include creation myths involving eggs laid by a great water fowl bird.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Frogs. They are small targets, they move fast, and they can easily blend in with grass. Due to how their leap attack works they can hit the Noita multiple times with a single jump, potentially one-shotting them.
  • Blobs. The smallest enemy in the game, they can be extremely hard to hit with more precise attacks. They can fly and will beeline for the Noita to attack in melee. Worse they are spawned by the larger Angry Blob meaning it's possible to face a constant stream of them.
  • Hiisi Snipers (Snipuhiisi). They have an accurate, fast attack which they can fire while still far off-screen which will knock the player out of the air. The only way to dodge is moving up and down immediately after the shot fires at long range; otherwise, the shot will probably hit you. It also goes through soft materials like snow, which also happen to block the red line-of-sight marker, making it even harder to dodge. Thus, getting targeted by a Sniper while dealing with other enemies makes the fight even more treacherous.
  • Slimeballs (Limanuljaska) aren't too dangerous, but their projectiles drip toxic sludge, and they also bleed the stuff when hurt or killed, which is a hassle to clean up, especially in the early game if you don't have a flask of water.
  • Damned Alchemists (Kadotettu alkemisti) aren't a threat by themselves, but they emit an invincibility field that protects other monsters, and if a second one with the field is close by, they'll buff each other and be completely unkillable. Your only choice at that point is to dig around them and hope they aren't sitting somewhere important, or possibly dig under them and drop one out of range. Safety Drones (Turvalennokki) are even worse because they can fly and have three layers of shielding.
  • Master of Exchange (Vaihdosmestari) is not especially dangerous on its own, with its sole attack being to swap positions with a target. However, this swap also triggers automatically when it takes damage. This will often result in the player taking damage from their own spell, something which can easily become lethal in late-game builds.
  • Glowing Creeps (Hohtava hyypiö) aren't aggressive, but they follow the player constantly. What makes it deadly is that it generates a penetrating, explosive attack for every tick of damage it takes. Players who are not aware of this mechanic and using either ticking damage or rapid-fire wands will often inadvertently kill themselves the first time they meet this enemy. Fortunately, a tablet will one-shot them, but this presents its own problem in the Cloudscape where objects fall right through the clouds.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Homing death clouds. Mist-type spells typically don't deal damage directly; instead, they soak anything in their area of effect with the relevant substance. Players discovered that adding a damage modifier to the spell caused the cloud to tick that amount of damage each frame, which can be further enhanced with modifiers such as Damage Field. By adding a homing modifier, the cloud automatically seeks out enemies. The result is a cloud that will fly across the screen until it reaches an enemy and proceed to deal 60+ ticks of damage per second. This eventually received a Nerf to reduce the damage to more reasonable levels, but is still a bit of a Game-Breaker due to the fast, reliable way the clouds will seek out and kill enemies.
  • Projectiles that have had their speed sufficiently boosted can phase through terrain because the game's collision system doesn't register them hitting the material.
  • The Perk Reroll machine can be "broken" by raising its price high enough to trigger an overflow error. Whenever a Reroll machine is used, it doubles the global cost of the next Reroll, eventually reaching a point where the cost exceeds the cap on gold. However, the price for using an individual Reroll machine will be locked at the global cost at the moment it is loaded into the game and will only update when actually used. As such, a player can visit multiple Parallel Worlds and "lock" several dozen Reroll machines at a low cost by visiting the Holy Mountains and then not taking a Perk or using the machine. After maxing out a single Reroll machine, the player then uses each of the "locked" machines once, updating the global cost until it overflows and reduces the cost to near nothing. While this eventually fixes itself to an appropriately unaffordable level, it allows for nearly a thousand near-free rerolls until then.
  • The Nullifying Altar removes your perks from your character and makes new versions of them to pick up, so you can get rid of ones you don't want. Players discovered that being polymorphed when the altar activates spawns your perks to select but doesn't remove them from your character. This effectively allows for duplication of perks and a way to bypass limits on stacking certain perks. It's also possible to bring a Perk Reroll machine here to change any unwanted perks. This was later nerfed by spawning Stevari or Skoude if you polymorph at the altar, though there are ways around this.
  • The mountaintop altar allows the sacrifice of certain objects or creatures for a reward. Several of these include a rain event, such as a rain of chests when sacrificing a chest, which last for 5 seconds. The hidden timer for this rain can be reset either via exiting and reloading the game or transforming via Polymorphine. This allows the player to potentially spawn an infinite number of rewards from a single sacrifice.
  • Pacifist chests are rewarded in Holy Mountains for completing a biome without killing any enemies. However, the tracker for this only starts when the previous Holy Mountain collapses. Exiting the Holy Mountain without triggering a collapse allows the player to explore and kill to their heart content, then return and trigger the collapse to claim the next pacifist reward as well.
  • Tablet surfing is a technique which can grant essentially endless levitation. Tablets are physical items that can be stood on in-game, even when in motion. Players performing this glitch throw the tablet while levitating in a manner that allows their model to briefly register as "standing" on the object. Even though the player is mid-air, the game briefly allows their levitation to regenerate as though they were standing on the ground. The player can then pick up the tablet and resume levitating, chaining this glitch to fly as long as desired. Though hardly the most efficient means of infinite flight, it can allow access to certain secrets without the items or abilities that would ordinarily be required.
  • Flasks can be used for a more limited version of tablet surfing. Spraying a safe liquid upwards while levitating generates enough liquid pixels around the player model that they can register as "swimming". This vastly reduces the levitation consumption while ascending, allowing players to levitate much further so long as they have liquid in their flask.
  • The Heartache trick is a method of vastly increasing the health gained from a single health pickup. The Haavoittajamestari applies a "Heartache" debuff with each attack which temporarily reduces the player's health by half, stacking until the player's max health is reduced to a minimum of 10 HP. Collecting an Extra Health Max while under this debuff will increase the player's max HP to 35; as the debuffs wear off, the bonus will be double for each stack to grant potentially hundreds or thousands more HP than intended.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • You have angered the gods ^ExplanationThis message is displayed when the Holy Mountain area is destroyed. But this is often triggered by worm enemies instead of the player because they destroy Holy Mountain areas to attack the player, so it became a meme.
    • The gods have angered YOU ^ExplanationThe response whenever a player is able to easily kill a Stevari.
  • Noited/Noita'd^ExplanationThe player term for an embarrassing, silly, or unpredictable death that usually happens with no warning.
  • Completing the tutorial^ExplanationKilling the final boss and completing a run is jokingly referred to as the "tutorial" because so much of the game's content is optional and requires far more experience with the game to discover than just killing the boss
  • Minä is the hardest enemy^Explanation"Minä" is Finnish for "me" and is how the game refers to the Player Character, including an entry in the Progress screen for how many times you died at the hands of your own spellwork, same as it tracks dying to the various mobs. It's easy to accidentally kill yourself if you're careless, so players like to joke that, because of Minä's high killed-by score, they surely must be The Dreaded.
• Nintendo Hard: Like other Roguelike games, Noita is very hard. This game has lots of deadly enemies, and sometimes you die to your own deadly spells if you were not careful. And then there's Nightmare mode which makes it even harder.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Wands with Shuffle. In a wand, the order of spells is incredibly important to maximizing the desired effect. However, the Shuffle attribute causes a wand to cast the spells in its inventory in a random order reach time, making all but the most basic combinations incredibly unreliable. Wands with Shuffle are largely relegated to basic projectile spam, simple digging spells, and certain support spells. Unless they have incredibly low delay and recharge modifiers, Shuffle wands quickly cease to be worth using in comparison to non-Shuffle wands. If you happen to luck upon the No More Shuffle perk, however, Shuffle wands become some of the best wands in the game, because Shuffle wands are typically generated with higher stats than Non-Shuffle wands and the perk sets all of them to the latter attribute.
  • Polymorphine. This liquid is extremely dangerous, not because of what it can transform enemies into but because of what it can turn the player into. The vast majority of transformations will leave the player without their perks or wands and usually a lot less health. Additionally, unlike most other serious threats, there is almost no way to become immune to it (the single source of immunity requires eating the corpse of a Polymorph master, and that doesn't last very long). Having a character capable of easily defeating the boss killed by a random Hiisi due to a puddle of liquid is not a fun experience.
  • The Holy Mountain has a No Fair Cheating mechanic which spawns a Stevari if the outer walls of the temple are damaged. It's a sensible precaution to prevent the player from exploiting digging tools to keep the temple active, except the failsafe isn't coded specifically to the player. Creatures like the Jättimato can easily damage a Holy Mountain before you even reach it, setting off the spawn. Having to fight off a mini-boss at the very start of a level is bad enough, but the fact that this can happen as early as the first Holy Mountain visit often makes this a death sentence. There is a repelling crystal inside the Mountain which is meant to drive off worm-type creatures, but it doesn't always work. And then the devs added Skoude, making it even worse.
• Squick: Drinking or eating inedible things makes you vomit... And you can drink your vomit too.
• That One Achievement: "100% Spell Progress", "100% Enemy Progress", and "100% Perk Progress" are extremely time-consuming collection achievements requiring exactly what their name implies. The game has 106 perks, 393 spells, and 171 enemies. Collecting, casting, and killing each of these takes a very long time and requires the player to delve deep into the extra zones of the game, as many of the spells and enemies can only be unlocked off the main path. At no point have any of these achievements been owned by more than 1.0% of Steam players.
• That One Boss: Sauvojen Tuntija is considered one of the most dangerous bosses. Its basic attacks include a spray of homing bolts that will polymorph you into a sheep on the first hit, at which point a second bolt hitting is a one-shot kill no matter how advanced your run. It also can blind or teleport the player, disable their wands, and copy the player's own spells. The boss is also highly aggressive and will pursue the player by burrowing through any substance. General recommendation is to avoid spawning it until late game, or entirely if possible.
• That One Disadvantage: No Wand Tinkering is the only perk in the game to be presented as flaw-with-upside (as opposed to several other perks being benefit-with-downside), and perhaps fittingly, it's also widely regarded as the single worst perk in the game. The flaw, as the name might hint, is that you can no longer edit the spells on any wands. This is, at best, locking your existing enemy-blasting doom wand at its current level, never to improve — and more likely, it's preventing you from getting a really good wand in the first place. The upside is that 20% of gold dropped by enemies is healing Blood Money, which might be the best benefit they could have offered, since healing is very hard to come by, but it just doesn't make up for the flaw.
• That One Level: The Hiisi Base, the fourth level below the surface, is a major roadblock for most runs. The level has hordes of ranged flying enemies capable of pursuing your relentlessly, many of which can snipe the Noita from off-screen; there are vast amounts of explosives to trigger a fiery death for enemy and player alike; and the map layout is more complicated with plenty of steel to discourage mining, plus narrow corridors that don't leave you much room to maneuver or escape. This is also still relatively early in a run so the player may still be lacking a suitable loadout.
• Viewer Name Confusion: The game interface occasionally refers to the Player Character as "Minä". Many players assume this is their name, but it's actually just the Finnish word for "me".

---