Mists of Noyah is an action platformer where you must prepare and strengthen yourself to face massive waves of enemies every seven days. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Mists of Noyah Review Overview
What is Mists of Noyah?
Mists of Noyah is a mishmash of various genres rolled into one. You have its core action platformer gameplay, a pseudo-tower defense mode relevant every several days, farming to maintain your health and hunger, and dungeon-crawling for high-level content.
Mists of Noyah features:
⚫︎ Five classes to choose from
⚫︎ Special tower defense-like gameplay every few days
⚫︎ Basic village management
⚫︎ Farming, crafting, and equipment enchanting systems
⚫︎ Dungeons to dive into
⚫︎ Diverse enemies with different attack patterns
 Nintendo eShop |
$9.99 |
 Steam |
$9.99 |
 PlayStation Store |
$9.99 |
 Microsoft Store |
$9.99 |
Mists of Noyah Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Solid Gameplay Loop |
Bugs Make It Nigh Unplayable Poor Onboarding Baffling Difficulty Spikes Useless Skill Trees |
Mists of Noyah Overall Score - 60/100
Mists of Noyah is a tedious, bug-filled title whose issues overshadow its unique, multifaceted gameplay. It’s hard to recommend the game given its current state since even the weekly tower defense rotation would sometimes break. However, given enough care, Mists of Noyah might eventually become an endearing competitor among its many excellent action platformer peers.
Mists of Noyah Story - 4/10
The game throws you into its world with nary a single line of explanation in sight. Heck, it doesn’t even have a proper tutorial. There is a story behind your grind, though, but you can spend a dozen hours playing the game without reading a single lore item and it won’t affect your gameplay experience whatsoever. The story isn’t even good.
Mists of Noyah Gameplay - 6/10
It’s hard to feel bored when playing Mists of Noyah considering the abundance of activities you can entertain yourself with. There’s crafting, exploration, combat, and even a bit of dungeon-diving. But unfortunately, none of those aspects are explored deeply. This makes the game feel hollow and half-hearted, especially considering the many game-breaking bugs it has.
Mists of Noyah Visuals - 7/10
Mists of Noyah’s visuals are nothing impressive. To be fair, it’s not bad either. The frame rates are stable and the interface and environment look clean enough. On the other hand, its use of pixel art is only good for aesthetic reasons as it doesn’t have the mystique to stimulate a player’s imagination.
Mists of Noyah Audio - 7/10
Like many of its peers, Mists of Noyah has one of the soundtracks of all time. In other words, it’s quite the standard fare; not too good, nor too shabby. Sure, it has "voice acting." That is, if you can call your character’s occasional grunts or moans of pain as such.
Mists of Noyah Value for Money - 6/10
At first glance, its price tag of 9.99 bucks may seem like a sweet deal for such a multifaceted game, that’s only actually true if there wasn’t a bug that forces a reset every ten or so minutes. While it is true that each world can technically be played for hundreds of hours, it’s doubtful you’ll get up to that point when none of its features age particularly well.
Mists of Noyah Review: It's Good. When It's Working, That Is.
If there’s ever a game this year that I wanted to succeed the most outside of the usual mobile games I like to sink my time into on the regular, it has to be this one. Mists of Noyah has such a great concept behind it; basically, you spend six days strengthening yourself with higher levels, better equipment, and nicer food in order to meet a giant horde of enemies that may come on the seventh of each cycle. I’ve always liked tower defense games, and a platformer having a pseudo-TD mode was something I couldn’t ignore.
Mists of Noyah had a plethora of bugs during its early days back then, but that was also the time when the developers were very active in patching them out. This ensured that little to none of them survived past a week of discovery. Hence, for what it was worth, I found the game to be pretty enjoyable back then, despite a lot of pretty terrible gameplay decisions such as the near-useless "skill trees" and the lack of QoL options like sorting recipes.
I stopped playing the game after a few days of toying with it a year or so ago. But now that it’s been released on consoles, I was curious if it was any different from where I left it. Did they develop the skill tree such that it finally deserved to be called as such? Was crafting an overall better experience now?
Well, the console release was certainly different. By that, I mean it was worse.
When I left Mists of Noyah on the PC, it was (relatively) bug-free. But now the console versions seem like they fully intend on making me relive an even more unpleasant experience by having them at practically every corner. Sure, you can entirely ignore some of them like enemy sprites persisting after death, but there are quite a few that actually break the game.
One such example is that dropping a hundred items will slow down your game to an unplayable crawl. Annoying, especially considering that inventory management is a rather large part of the game. On the other hand, you can entirely avoid this if you just manage your inventory more carefully than you would otherwise do so in other games. That would be fine, right?
You would be right. But the game does have another surprise for you. At least, if you’re a Ninn user like me. That’s because her Summon Water Elemental skill will also brick the game, guaranteed. I didn’t test if the other characters have this issue, but the results for Ninn were consistent. As long as you use it (it doesn’t work, by the way. That’s also a bug) and enter a loading screen, it will stall until probably when we get No Game No Life Season 2. In other words, you’ll have to reset.
Imagine having a bug that effectively closed off 1/4th of a character’s full potential. This is especially worse for Ninn because she’s a caster-type character; all of her skills are extremely important for her.
If those weren’t enough to make you shy away from getting the game, that’s not the end of it. The game also retains a lot of what made the original PC release questionable at the very least. It ranges from issues with its storytelling, which is bland and convoluted, to an agonizing grind for materials due to its randomly-spawning mobs.
Fortunately, it does have some good points. For one, the gameplay loop is pretty solid. Combat is responsive; sometimes brutally so with the attack button being so sensitive to input that you’ll continue your combo even after you’ve stopped pressing it. The equipment is also diverse and allows for a wide range of specialization.
But that’s as far as the big positives really go. Everything else about Mists of Noyah that hasn’t been mentioned are simply acceptable or outright forgettable. Hopefully, though, the developers address its issues down the road.
Pros of Mists of Noyah
| Things Mists of Noyah Got Right |
|---|
|
Solid Gameplay Loop |
Solid Gameplay Loop
Perhaps the one saving grace of Mists of Noyah is its gameplay loop. Almost everything you do in this game serves to make you stronger for the trials to come. This is most prominently felt when you start farming for gears, as it will require you to do practically everything the game has to offer. It even rewards you for sustained effort with random tiers of equipment going from common to legendary.
Thankfully, the game has a very smooth combat with nary a frame drop to worry about as long as you don’t start dropping hundreds of loot to dispose of them outside the village.
Cons of Mists of Noyah
| Things That Mists of Noyah Can Improve |
|---|
|
Bugs Make It Nigh Unplayable Poor Onboarding Baffling Difficulty Spikes Useless Skill Trees |
Bugs Make It Nigh Unplayable
We’re starting off strong with perhaps the game’s worst problem: bugs. No, I don’t mean the multi-legged enemies you’ll often encounter in some biomes. Those can be dealt with easily. But the same cannot be said for the coding bugs which infest every prominent corner of the game.
To give you an idea of what I experienced during my playthrough, there was one stretch of the game where I had to reset three times within the span of fifteen minutes. That’s one reset every five minutes. Shocking. And you know what caused it? Ninn’s Water Elemental skill. Not only does it not work, it also causes something to break within the game such that when I exit the stage, it would stall the loading until probably the heat death of the universe.
There are many, many other bugs (or are they features by now?) that listing each one I’ve found would be an exercise in achieving my target word count for writing within the day via cheap bullet points. These include falling through floors, causing the game to freeze by dropping items, enemy sprites not disappearing, health bars becoming irrelevant, and many more.
How could you enjoy (or play) the game when you’re too busy trying to avoid these things?
Poor Onboarding
While I find it easy to appreciate extremely difficult games as long as they are fair, it’s hard to look fondly at a game that expects me to understand it without any effort on their part. Like, what is there to craft when the game has no explanation on what each stat does aside from what intuition can provide? And how would I know that I should eat food to stave off hunger every now and then when this game isn’t a survival title?
There is no tutorial at all. It doesn’t teach you how anything works aside from the most basic of fundamentals like jumping and attacking. If you want to craft, you’ll have to find out for yourself how it works. The same goes for everything else. Considering how tough certain materials are farmed, you can imagine how easy it is to waste them due to a misclick.
Baffling Difficulty Spikes
In any normal game, you would expect that enemies would progressively become stronger as you go deeper in each playthrough, yeah? Some of these may be sudden, but for the most part, these tend to follow a linear, almost predictable pattern. Just in case, a few of these games tend to warn you in advance, kind of like those carnival rides with signs that read "You must be this tall to ride."
Mists of Noyah has none of those warnings. But that’s fine as long as the difficulty curve is predictable, right? Sure, but the thing is, it isn’t. You might be leisurely committing unlawful deforestation one moment, fully confident in your ability to defeat any enemy that spawns, and then suddenly dying from a random mob after.
The difficulty curve isn’t even consistent between adjacent areas. This could take you by surprise as you get out of a stage where you can tank a few hits and enter the next place directly where enemies can almost instantly kill you.
Useless Skill Trees
When someone mentions "skill trees," what comes to your mind? Branches, right? In other words, specializations. Depending on the game, the mileage might vary. But skill trees usually allow you to spec into specific abilities that would shape your gameplay one way or another.
Not in Mists of Noyah, though. That’s because in this game, its skill "tree" is more like a vine; linear and restraining. Regardless of your preferences, you’ll end up with the same active skills and talents that someone else from the opposite end of the world would also have. So, why bother making a skill tree in the first place?
Is Mists of Noyah Worth It?
Not At This Moment
If you’re looking for a good action platformer, then, well… I really can’t recommend Mists of Noyah at its current state. The game has too many reset-inducing bugs that you’ll likely derive more frustration out of it than enjoyment. It’s a shame, really, since the game’s concept itself is very solid and pretty unique. Here's hoping the developers address Mists of Noyah’s many issues later down the road.
| Platform | Price |
|---|---|
| Nintendo eShop |
$9.99 |
| Steam |
$9.99 |
| PlayStation Store |
$9.99 |
| Microsoft Store |
$9.99 |
Mists of Noyah FAQ
Does Mists of Noyah support multiplayer?
The original Mists of Noyah on PC allowed for multiplayer co-op. You can see vestiges of that in a few heroes’ skills, such as Ninn’s Water Shield working on "allies" according to its tooltip. However, the Switch port doesn’t present a co-op mode from the main menu, and the product information on its store front indicates that it’s only a single system game.
Is it better to play Mists of Noyah on PC instead of on consoles?
There’s at least less bugs on the PC version, so I do recommend picking it up there if you’re interested in the title.
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Mists of Noyah Product Information
 |
|
| Title | MISTS OF NOYAH |
|---|---|
| Release Date | May 22, 2024 (PC), July 25, 2024 (Consoles) |
| Developer | Pyxeralia |
| Publisher | Pyxeralia |
| Supported Platforms | PC, Nintendo Switch |
| Genre | Action, Platformer |
| Number of Players | Multi-Player (PC), Single-Player (Console) |
| ESRB Rating | Teen |
| Official Website | Mists of Noyah Social Media |
