A few things about this side-scrolling survival adventure are immediately obvious, such as the fantasy setting and its resource gathering/crafting elements. These two features alone are enough to draw early comparisons, with it resembling the 16-bit renditions of Castlevania – even having a vampire-esque character within its playable character pool – but playing more like Terraria and similar modern crafting-based survival games.
Weirdly, and much to the game’s detriment, at no point during its basic tutorial – or anywhere else, for that matter – is the actual premise outlined. It throws you into its fantasy world blind, forcing you to work things out for yourself.
You’re presented with a brief grace period to learn the controls, and then led into a village with forges and similar crafting equipment. The village also contains a ruined fort with portals, warping to segments of a sprawling interconnected platforming area spread across desert, jungle, and ice realms. Adjacent to the fort a stretch of empty land can be found, waiting to be filled with towers, houses, and mining rigs – but to reshape the landscape, you’ll need to go resource hunting.
The idea is to gather resources by trekking through platformer-like stages, slaying enemies, chopping trees, fishing, and smashing stones, and use these resources back at the village to construct items to repel an invasion. Unbelievably, and to reiterate, the only way to discover this firsthand is to either read the game’s product description – which is more helpful than the tutorial – or play it long enough for the penny to drop. The biggest give away, aside from the empty land outside the fort, is that the inventory contains a handful of blueprints for buildable structures, each requiring dozens upon dozens of items, some of which must be crafted individually first.
While busy gathering these, you’re able to construct new armour and weapons while levelling up through crafting and enemy slaying, gaining new abilities that are on a cooldown. Stage layouts aren’t randomised, which helps with progression, although enemies of all different sizes and strength will spawn randomly, and different loot appears in chests. Although the controls are responsive, it makes a few mistakes with its platforming elements. Death can come swiftly, usually at the hand of falling into spike pits – with no means of panning the camera by looking up and down. One dungeon location has spinning saw blades to avoid, where a single hit will chuck you back to the portal hub. Enemy AI is also crude, to the point where they’ll spawn in and then fall off a ledge mere seconds later, never to be seen again.
Despite featuring some glaring flaws, Mists of Noyah does get quite a bit right. It doesn’t look cheaply made or hastily cobbled together – the artwork is well drawn, while the music is on par with something blessed with a far bigger budget. The crafting elements are quite deep too, with the ability to enhance weapons/armour, brew potions, cook food, and grow crops. It’s possible to spend time simply grinding for gold to create the best tools and weapons available, which itself is an enjoyable enough pursuit. The same can be said for the quest elements, providing a constant flow of objectives, such as killing a certain number of enemies or collecting raw materials. Traditional boss battles can be stumbled upon too, usually within dungeons, which you’ll need decent stats to defeat.
But at the same time, Mists of Noyah also feels directionless. I thought the lack of text-based prompts might be down to reducing translation costs, but the fact that text-heavy scrolls detailing the backstory can be purchased scrubbed that notion. Checking the achievement ratios, it seems that other players are struggling to progress– ten days have passed since launch, yet the number of players to survive the village’s first invasion currently sits at a mere 2%. I put almost six hours in before writing this review, managing to see most of its interconnected world, reaching points where a single strike from an enemy wiped out a full health bar, but still hadn’t progressed a great deal.
Mists of Noyah presents a large fantasy world to explore, and most of its RPG tropes are integrated well – which may be enough to please those with a passing fancy – but if you’re expecting a traditional structured experience, be warned that most of your time here will doubtlessly be spent backtracking and wondering where to go next. A hazy experience for the hazy generation, it would benefit greatly from an update to strengthen its backbone.
QUByte Interactive’s Mists of Noyah is out now on consoles. Developed by Pyxeralia.