An Indie Backlog curated overview. We round up the best indie roguelikes and how professional critics and players received each one — the scores below are theirs, linked to the source.
A roguelite where every single pixel is physically simulated — and your own reckless spells are usually what kill you.
At a Glance
| Developer | Nolla Games |
| Release year | 2020 |
| Platforms | PC |
| Subgenre | Roguelite (pixel-sim) |
| Length | ~25 hours (main story) |
| Steam rating | Overwhelmingly Positive (~95%, 86,000+ reviews) |
| Steam Deck | Verified |
| Languages | 11 |
About the Game
Noita, from Nolla Games (a trio of veteran indie devs), is a roguelite action-platformer built on an extraordinary technical foundation: every pixel of the world is individually simulated. Sand falls, water flows, oil burns, gases spread, acid dissolves — and all of it reacts in real time, so the cave you’re descending is a volatile chemistry set waiting to go wrong.
The wand system is the heart of it. You craft and modify wands by slotting spells in sequences, and the combinations are deep enough to produce both elegant tools and catastrophic, self-destructive misfires. Many a promising run ends because your own perfectly-engineered wand set the whole cave — and you — on fire.
It’s brutally hard, gloriously chaotic, and packed with secrets so obscure the community is still uncovering them years later. For players who love systems-driven emergence and don’t mind dying to their own hubris, it’s one of the most fascinating roguelites ever made.
Screenshots
Screenshots: official Steam media for Noita.
Why It Made the List
Noita makes the list as the most technically audacious roguelite around. Its every-pixel-simulated world creates emergent chaos no other game can match — and a depth of secrets that rewards obsession. Nothing else plays quite like it.
What the Critics Say
Noita launched with limited traditional critic coverage and has no aggregated Metacritic score on its Steam page, so we’ve led with verified player data below, where its devoted following took shape.
What Players Say
On Steam it’s rated Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 86,000 reviews — about 95% positive. Players are captivated by the pixel simulation and the depth of its secrets, while acknowledging its punishing difficulty.
Praise & Criticism
Praise
- Astonishing every-pixel physics simulation
- Deep, emergent wand-crafting
- A staggering amount of secrets
- Endlessly chaotic runs
Criticism
- Brutally, sometimes unfairly hard
- Obtuse — hides almost everything
- Chaos can feel random
Games Like This
- Spelunky 2 — emergent, everything-interacts chaos
- The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth — deep, deadly run-based design
- Risk of Rain 2 — systems-driven escalation
Where to Buy
Plain store links for now — swap in your affiliate-tagged URLs once you’ve joined Amazon Associates and the eBay Partner Network. (Steam has no affiliate program; that link is for convenience.)
← Back to Top 20 Indie Roguelikes