Noreya: The Gold Project is a metroidvania where you play as a warrior who pledges allegiance to a god she’s trying to defeat. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Noreya: The Gold Project Review Overview
What is Noreya: The Gold Project?
Play as Kali, a fighter who once suffered the malice of a god and lost everything. She heads to the City of Gold where she will face off against the God of Greed everyone knows today as the "God of Gold." She is backed by the Goddess of Light, who blessed her with power to face the corruption tainting the land and defeat the God of Gold.
Noreya: The Gold Project features:
⚫︎ Beautiful handcrafted pixel art
⚫︎ Easy-to-learn gameplay
⚫︎ Wicked fast combat
⚫︎ Engaging sound effects and music
⚫︎ Simple, but satisfying skill progression
⚫︎ Boatloads of secrets to discover
⚫︎ Multiple endings
 Steam |
$24.99 |
Noreya: The Gold Project Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Simple Combat Mechanics Satisfying Power Ramp Investment Matters |
Confusing Progression Unfinished Details Here and There |
Noreya: The Gold Project Overall Score - 80/100
Noreya: The Gold Project is a high-quality metroidvania that’s simple to pick up and easy to get lost in. However, that goes both figuratively and literally, as the early stages of the game makes it easy to find dead ends due to its excessively open nature. Overall, though, the game’s intuitive and rewarding combat system, its wide berth of secret rooms and treasures, and it’s amazing pixel-art visuals, make it a title worth considering for anybody interested in the genre.
Noreya: The Gold Project Story - 6/10
While the game does have a lot of lore to collect and multiple endings to witness, the game’s almost complete disconnect with a narrative-driven progression does mean that players’ engagement with the story can be wildly different from each other. Collecting lore material can also be skipped for the most part in favor of just playing the game.
Noreya: The Gold Project Gameplay - 9/10
Gameplay-wise, Noreya opted to rely on simplicity and commitment. But in exchange, it satisfies the common zero-to-hero desire of many players. This is shown through the progress of Kali, the game’s protagonist, from someone who can only jump and swing her sword, to a goddess of the battlefield capable of repelling a screen full of enemies with ease.
Noreya: The Gold Project Visuals - 8/10
Noreya: The Gold Project’s pixel artwork is incredibly beautiful. The background blends well with the protagonist and her enemies, accentuating the combat visuals without making all the details clump together and look cluttered. However, the zoomed out view and fine detailing of each area can make navigation a bit of a pain.
Noreya: The Gold Project Audio - 9/10
With punchy sound effects, helpful sound cues, and great background music, Noreya: The Gold Project can certainly boast about its well-rounded and proper sound design. Sure, it does lack any voice acting, but considering that the game isn’t narratively-driven in the first place, that’s a very forgivable minor offense.
Noreya: The Gold Project Value for Money - 8/10
The game’s "routes" and multiple endings mean that its replayability is all but set in stone. There’s also a lot of secrets to uncover with varying rewards, which makes exploration quite fun and gratifying. However, the lack of customization options for builds and whatnot does hurt the overall feel of doing multiple playthroughs.
Noreya: The Gold Project Review: Get Lost In Its Beauty — and Its Maps
Metroidvanias are great games to play when you just want to kick back and have some fast-paced fun. Noreya: The Gold Project is no exception. The feeling of styling on your enemies as they grow in both size and numbers really does a number on power fantasists.
However, things are quite different as you start.
Much like a zero-to-hero story, the protagonist, Kali, starts out incredibly weak. All she can do at the very beginning is to swing her sword and jump away from trouble. But once you start getting the ball rolling via unlocking skills and upgrades, things soon change.
The game is incredibly easy to pick up. While it does have a plethora of buttons to keep in mind mid-combat, the main combat loop mainly revolves around your sword. In other words, you can be as flashy as you can be by unleashing multiple skills to deal with your enemies in quick order, or you can just turn off half of your brain and rely on brute force to solve your problems.
Surprisingly, the game manages to do this with little customizability. It can’t brag about having a hundred possible builds or a few dozen weapons to change your playstyle. Instead, its relatively wide range of strategies are possible with just a sword and three skill trees to balance.
That skill tree, for some reason, is reliant on a currency that your healing also uses. While some may find this troublesome, I think it’s quite genius. Early on in the game when gold nuggets, the currency in question, is scarce, using it requires both thoughtfulness and prudence. After all, you can’t become stronger if you waste it all on heals.
Later on, however, once you can easily earn enough gold to maintain a relatively healthy state of being, it stops becoming a problem and more like an inconsequential investment. This plays into the aforementioned zero-to-hero trope where your abilities will eventually reach a level where even your own safety is at a lower priority than turning your enemies into a stain on your blade.
The game is by no means perfect, though. For one, it lacks a better onboarding process, which can hurt first-timers of the genre. Gamepad support also feels incomplete, as confirming selections with a controller doesn’t work (or maybe that’s just me). I can also see the lack of a health bar for bosses becoming a contentious point since it doesn’t provide immediate rewards for players mid-fight.
Navigating can also be a problem, particularly in the early game when you don’t have access to all of the puzzle and navigation gimmicks. This is especially true if you opt to invest in combat skills rather than reliable conveniences such as fast travel. Yes, you heard that right. Fast travel is a skill, not an unlockable feature.
During that time, you may find yourself backtracking a lot. That means fighting a lot of enemies that, at that point in the game, can still give you trouble. The game’s open map design plays a lot to exacerbate this problem, as you are often able to get deep into a certain area, only to be forced to turn around because you realize that progress becomes impossible without a certain unlockable.
Or you could just die and go back to the previous checkpoint. That’s way faster.
Overall, Noreya: The Gold Project is certainly a very good title to pick up. Its skill floor is quite low, but the ceiling is high, allowing players of any skill level to enjoy it. But most importantly, it’s just a really, really good metroidvania with an intuitive combat system and responsive controls.
Pros of Noreya: The Gold Project
| Things Noreya: The Gold Project Got Right |
|---|
|
Simple Combat Mechanics Satisfying Power Ramp Investment Matters |
Simple Combat Mechanics
If you have the habit of checking a game’s controls before starting a game like I do, you’ll notice that there’s quite a lot of buttons. Like, there’s a button for attacking, healing, using the ghost ability, separate Golden and Light spell keys, etc. All-in-all, there’s 16 buttons relevant to a normal playthrough, minus the interact button (which you should remap to E instead of its default M).
That’s more than the number of fingers on your hands. Probably.
Despite that, however, the game is surprisingly easy to pick up. After all, among the 16 buttons, four of those are for your character’s movements, and another four is for peeking around the map. And even with eight more buttons remaining, the combat loop mainly revolves around your basic attacks anyway, with the spells merely serving as complimentary additions.
Satisfying Power Ramp
Like many metroidvanias, your character starts out very weak and can barely get by through spamming her normal attacks. You can’t even dash to start with. At that point, you’ll be cautiously skirting around enemy encounters since even the slightest touch from them can put a large dent on your meager health.
It certainly doesn’t help that there are early game enemies that have no business being faster and more nimble than you.
However, things quickly change as you sink more and more skill points into your skill tree and unlock different abilities. You’ll find that the enemies you started out hesitant to engage with become mere stains on your blade after a hit or two. This is quite unlike many other metroidvania titles where the game attempts to scale the enemies to your level.
Sure, Noreya also does this to an extent. But for the most part, it seems to be much more interested in letting you style off of your enemies’ cold, dead bodies increasingly over the course of the game.
Investment Matters
Games with a ton of build variety invariably allows you to switch between them with little to no consequences. Noreya, on the other hand, doesn’t have the mechanics to support that kind of claim. The only things you have are the golden and light skills, your chakrams, and your sword.
Noreya has seemingly gone down the other route. Instead of allowing you free reign to customize your build whenever and wherever you want, its narrow investment options were optimized to make every attempt at expanding your skill tree a serious thing to consider.
Sure, you can refund the points per skill, but there are no take backsies when it comes to the gold offerings.
Cons of Noreya: The Gold Project
| Things That Noreya: The Gold Project Can Improve |
|---|
|
Confusing Progression Unfinished Details Here and There |
Confusing Progression
Noreya: The Gold Project isn’t a very narrative-driven game. It encourages its players to explore its world and progress in any which way they want. Thus, bosses can mostly be fought in any order as long as you have the right abilities to access their areas.
However, metroidvanias normally restrict access to certain parts of the game depending on the mobility options you’ve unlocked. Noreya also does this, but to a much lesser extent. Hence, it’s quite easy to feel unprepared when you enter an area full of mechanics you don’t have access to yet.
In my case, I was so used to the normal metroidvania progression that I immediately thought I was in the wrong neighborhood when I stepped into a place with inaccessible mechanics.
Predictably, I ended up backtracking a whole lot, not realizing that I could explore much further than I thought I could. This was made even worse by the fact that I prioritized my combat capabilities instead of the normal conveniences such as unlocking fast travel.
Yes, fast travel isn’t something you unlock through game progression, but through your skill tree.
Unfinished Details Here and There
While the game is still in its infancy, there are a number of placeholders and mistakes that seem to have been left over from its finalization. These range from relatively inoffensive typos to much more noticeable details that can affect the entire experience. One example of the latter is the lack of details for attack upgrades, leaving interpretations open from all of them being the same to otherwise.
Of course, you could always just check your character page to see how the values differ, but still.
Is Noreya: The Gold Project Worth It?
Worth The Leap of Faith
If you’re looking for a simple metroidvania to play, then Noreya: The Gold Project is definitely something worth considering. It has a solid gameplay that relies on time-tested fundamentals, allowing anybody from veterans of the genre to metroidvania first-timers to enjoy the game.
This is especially true if you’re a fan of pixel artwork, as Noreya shines particularly bright in that aspect.
| Platform | Price |
|---|---|
| Steam |
$24.99 |
Noreya: The Gold Project FAQ
Are there other weapons in Noreya: The Gold Project?
You’ll be relying on your sword for the entire game.
Do you reset when dying in Noreya: The Gold Project?
Dying simply makes you start the stage over. In the case of Hard Mode, though, you’ll have to start from the last checkpoint.
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Noreya: The Gold Project Product Information
 |
|
| Title | NOREYA: THE GOLD PROJECT |
|---|---|
| Release Date | June 21, 2024 |
| Developer | Dreamirl |
| Publisher | PixelHeart |
| Supported Platforms | PC |
| Genre | Action, Metroidvania |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | TBA |
| Official Website | Noreya: The Gold Project Website |
