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Published on July 29th, 2024 | by Nay Clark

Mists of Noyah Review (Switch)

Forces of darkness are slowly creeping their way into the land of the living and it’s up to you to conquer this overwhelming storm of evil! Mists of Noyah is a 2D survival RPG developed and published by Pyxeralia and released on Steam on May 22nd of 2022 and is now out on consoles as of July 25th of 2024. From the outside looking in, Mists of Noyah looks like a cross between Castlevania and Terraria, and you wouldn’t be completely wrong with your speculation. You run along your playing field slaying an endless amount of fiends while hacking away at trees and rocks to obtain materials to build your base and create equipment and items that will help you journey further in the world. It sounds good on paper, but Mists of Noyah’s execution is a bit underwhelming.

The story in Mists of Noyah takes a back seat. When you pick your character and create a world, you are abruptly dropped in the game. You will never see a tutorial, any sort of information box, or a hint of a hint. You are left to your own devices for the worse. The game is pretty confusing, especially with all of its menus, percentages, random factors, and just the purpose in general. The story of the game is hidden in scrolls that you can buy for each character and even then it’s still not incredibly clear. Short story short, without spoiling anything, there is a being that is plunging the world in darkness by corrupting the land with monsters. It’s pretty weak and never becomes satisfying, but it’s there for people who need something to keep pushing on.

Each of the five characters that you can choose have different base stats and they all have their own unique abilities. You can dash, double jump, learn different types of magic to cast, attack enemies, and use a pickaxe to farm materials to create more useful items. Wall jumping and sliding is also used for traversal. Destroying enemies nets you experience and you can use your ability and talent points to gain new abilities and level up old ones to become more viable. Eventually, you’ll be able to put different attributes on some of your items like your armor to fashion something more potent. There are also some dungeons in the game that will test your skill in every aspect of the gameplay as well as your patience with the mechanics.

There isn’t anything wrong with the gameplay overall, but it’s hard to find any motivation or strive to keep going. The world has many different areas to explore, but there’s no valuable engagement with it. It is void of anything interactable. There is the main village area and you can branch off to different biomes from there. The enemies randomly spawn in the world in sometimes haphazard ways, causing you to take damage unfairly. Some of the enemies or their attacks can go through walls so it’s aggravating when you get a bunch of loot and an enemy is able to land a hit on you in an unnatural way sending you back into a pit of spikes making you have to respawn back at base while causing you to lose some of your coins that you have gathered.

Getting around the world can be a hassle. There are some points at the main hub area that will warp you to another area on the map, but trying to activate them is moot because sometimes it simply won’t work. You will find yourself constantly dashing to make it back to a certain area to get a particular material after an unfair death. It’s understandable if the game wants you to be mindful of enemies and there being a risk-reward system about being too far out for your own good, but if you get attacked in a way that doesn’t feel fair and get sent all the way back to the start, then the game becomes arbitrarily boring. Slowdown occurs when a lot of things are happening on screen, which makes hairy situations even hairier with how treacherous a run through the world can be. There were also times when I would walk into an area and the game would freeze on the black loading screen, making me have to restart the game.

Mists of Noyah was clearly made to be played cooperatively with another player, but the Switch version doesn’t support that. Because of this, the sponginess of enemies and brutal elements of the gameplay make this adventure even more of a grind than it was designed to be. Being someone that enjoys grindy games, I had fun going through this in that regard. Leveling up and learning new techniques, finally being able to craft a weapon that allows you to take down your enemies with ease, and summoning creatures to help you fight is entertaining if you can shift through the downsides. 

There seems to be a lot of content here to enjoy, but it feels barebones the way that it has been handled. The game can’t make up its mind about what it wants to be exactly and doesn’t fully commit to one branch of design. You farm for materials to craft items, but you can find some equipment in dungeons that can carry you through the rest of the game. There is a base building mechanic where you can build some buildings and defend them when monsters attack, but that’s really all there is to it. There’s nothing laid out on that blueprint; it’s as if you are just out in the world fighting. You can fish in the game, but it doesn’t really serve a purpose except to restore health and complete goals; the way it is implemented feels like an afterthought. So while there are things to do while playing, it never feels worthwhile. You are constantly thinking if what you are doing is what you are supposed to be doing.

The game feels split into parts, it’s not cohesive. In the beginning you are rummaging the world to slowly get loot. Dashing and dying become a norm, but once you are strong enough to start dungeons then that is all you will end up doing. The game changes into a dungeon crawler. The loot is better, the challenge of the gameplay between traversing the layout of the levels and more purposefully placed enemies becomes fun and intense, and it feels like you are actually doing something that will help you in the long run. The randomness of the affixes you can place on different things and creating things through magic also doesn’t coordinate with the rest of the game. You’ll spend so much time wandering around to get precious stones and materials only for the random factor of constructing these things to never work in your favor. 

Mists of Noyah has a commendable artstyle. The scenery looks great and each area looks and feels different from the last. Characters are stylish and that’s expressed even more with their flashy attacks. There is a nice variety of enemies that are distinctive with the large boss enemies being pretty staggering. The water effects are noticeably beguiling. The music is actually quite nice and fits the mood of the different areas. When night rolls around though, the “night time music” plays and since that is just one track, that can be pretty annoying. Since stronger enemies come out at night and it’s worth your time to travel at night to gain more experience and better supplies, you will be listening to this track in particular a lot. I was impressed with the attack sounds and how good they are when you pull them off. The sounds of swinging your blade and casting elemental spells has a clean quality that makes actually playing the game feel adequate.

Final Thoughts?

Mists of Noyah seems to be confused on what it wants to be and not fully committing to anything creates a disorganized game that feels unsystematic when it doesn’t need to be. Actually playing the game is fun, but you are never sure if what you’re doing is what you should be doing and the lack of any kind of tutorial, hint system, or clear story makes this game feel like it was left in an early state of design. What is here though is enough to provide an enjoyable time of merely playing something for entertainment. The game looks great and the care for the audio work is noteworthy. Mists of Noyah feels like a watered down version of something greater. The ideas are clearly here, but the missing adhesive that would conjoin the overall idea of the game is holding itself back from being extraordinary. Mists of Noyah seems to be trapped in its own mechanic of finding different materials to craft something useful, just to be let down after its random factor creates something that was in a worse state than it was in before.

About the Author

Nay Clark Gaming holds a special place in my heart and I never stop talking about video games. I really love all types of games and have an interest in games that have complicated stories and lore because I enjoy untangling the mystery of it all. When I'm not gaming, I unsuccessfully try to control three amazing and incredibly bright kids.

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