Noita is a wonderful one-of-a-kind game that I will never play again. This isn’t because it is unfun, nor is this because of some outside constraint, and neither is this because of some personal vendetta or grudge I could have. No, I will never play Noita again because I don’t want to know.
Noita, to me, is an entirely special beast. In the age of modern gaming – where AAA, AA, and even indie debuts have maps released, wikis established, guides published, and videos recorded all within a span of hours – there truly seems to be little left to not know. If you engage in any community whatsoever you will find that a majority of all obtainable knowledge can be distilled into you within only a few conversations. The only “knowledge” left to be learnt is that of skill; of what to do, how to do it, when to do it, all for the sake of being better. Easter eggs, when they do exist anymore, are more and more left as funny one-off tour-de-forces for those who are willing. ARGs do exist, yes, but they seldom exist outside of a background-context that only a true fan can ogle at and appreciate. Occasionally, there is that rare moment where a game truly seems to revel in its own unknowableness. Unfortunately, however, this is almost always masturbatory and superficial, as these games tend to advertise themselves as such, and the discoveries are left not as oddities but as expectation. Take, for example, Lucid Blocks. While I do find Lucid Blocks to be an ok game – and a better-than-ok piece of art – rarely ever did I feel as if I found the truly unknown, feeling more like I was detached, far-away, discovering in a game meant for discovery, like some child explorer guided by an invisible parent.
Noita, however, is not this. Noita is, first and foremost, a game. This may sound obvious, but as I’ve stated before, many of these pseudo-unknowable games market themselves on their exploration of the unknowable, not on being an actual game-game. To differentiate Noita from this – which does, in fact, market itself on exploration – I want to say that these pseudo-unknowable games focus on exploration of the unknowable impersonal to you while Noita, and other similar game-games like Minecraft, focus on exploration of the knowable personal to you – e.g., Minecraft’s unknowability is solely incidental to the inherent unknowability of exploration, while the unknowability of, say, Lucid Blocks is intentionally hand-crafted and exaggerated above that which would be inherent to its own matter. This is an important distinction, because only do I think the truly unknowable games can exist by, first and foremost, being actual game-games. There must be a contrast; a stark “What?” or “Aha!” that makes the player feel as if they stumbled upon some dusted corner left unintentionally (even if truly intentionally) disturbed in an otherwise clean and refined playspace. That moment of player-felt superiority where one feels not as if they found something left by the developers, but something somehow intentionally left by the chaotic and accidental world – that is the high I am talking about.
To apply this to Noita – you can play and beat Noita without knowing anything. You can spend dozens of hours rerunning through the same few vertical layers, perfecting your wand, honing your skill, and killing thousands while never, ever stumbling upon one single secret left there. You can obtain the Sampo – the divine tool of wealth and, by Hermetic and alchemical extensions, knowledge – knowing nothing. This is, in fact, likely how thousands – if not more – have played this game. They picked up the controller, pressed the funny buttons, received their due hit of dopamine and turned the TV off. This is the basis of Noita that endears me so much; that feeling that I can only describe as being on uneven ground. That odd feeling knowing that some wild unknowable monster is, somewhere, lurking, waiting, for you to find them and be consumed, yet that similarly odd feeling knowing that you are safe – that this world you know, however small, will remain itself forever lest you step out of the shallow end.
When I was young I would watch GTA easter egg showcases. These videos would go through theory after theory, screen capture after screen capture, however absurd, and treat it with such sincerity and seriousness that you nearly felt catalyzed towards their belief. Why, yes, Mount Chiliad is haunted! Why, yes, the Statue of Liberty has a human heart for its own! Why, yes, Cthulhu lurks in the deep! – This in particular, I think, is what gave young me such a deep fear of thalassophobia. Oh, thalassophobia, thalassophobia… When I was young, I was hardly scared of insects, and only was ever scared of the dark for a short period. I blame this on my over-indulgence of early-internet horror videos, like Salad Fingers and SCP (to be mentioned later). One could easily know the spider, 8-limbed and all. One could easily know the monster in the corner; the black flaky skin, tall-lanky appendages, with its wide-eyed smile above a keyboard of knives for a mouth and the spine laced with black needles. One could know heights, however instinctual the fear is, and eventually overcome it. But – for some odd reason that I could never place – I could not with thalassophobia. There was no knowing it, rather the fear came from the uncertainty. The dread built up from your self-aware unknowingness. Tell me, what am I afraid of? The water – the same water I drink? No, am I afraid of drowning – drowning behind a computer monitor? No – then what, oh what, am I so desperately afraid of? Was I afraid of that long-grimaced shark lurking in wait? Was I afraid of the many-limbed Lovecraftian nightmare, ready to blow my neurons at any periphery notice? Was I afraid of the endless tumbling fall – imagining the forever breathless wait, only to never receive ground? No? Then what?
There’s something instinctual about a fear of spontaneity. If you want a fun – albeit dangerous experiment – find an animal, and lunge towards them. More likely than not they will bolt away immediately, or shit themself, or fall over, or attack you, or perhaps all of these things in random order. But why is spontaneity scary? Things happening fast aren’t inherently scary; I don’t shine a flashlight in the dark and become more afraid of the ~300,000km/s photons beaming the empty wood than the wood itself. I don’t watch the piano roll of a 500 BPM song and scream alongside the orchestra. No, I think spontaneity is scary because it implies unknowability. In spontaneity there is a pressure of knowledge; that you must know these things quick or not know them at all. Either know how to answer the trivia question or never know what it would’ve been like getting it correct. Either know the right rebuttal at a debate or be forever left empty, wondering if there was something better to be said. Either know the fall-off of a rifle-round or miss the deer’s head. Either know the warnings by the NORAD facility are incorrect or falsely condemn all of civilization to a nuclear hellscape. This is why spontaneity is scary; because it is actionable unknowingness, as opposed to the casual find-me-first nature of it.
Knowing this, spontaneity and unknowingness, in my opinion, feed into each other in a sort of endless feedback-loop. Why are we afraid of the unknown? Because the unknown may present us with spontaneous moments – I’m afraid of the exam because I don’t know the material, or I am afraid of the empty woods because of the horrors that may lurk there. Yet why are we afraid of spontaneity? Because with spontaneity there is actionable unknowingness – I don’t want to be pressured into ordering the wrong thing at the restaurant because I have no damn clue of Korean food, or I hate interviews because I don’t know what questions they might ask.
For all of these reasons above, this is why I find the truly unknowable videogames – like Noita – so compelling. To have everything that Noita could possibly be or do in only so many GBs – its world structure, metaphysics, laws and morality defined in binary so strongly – and still, somehow, not know it all, and, even worse, be afraid, despite being given, quite literally, everything it is and could be is miraculous. Even more bold-faced easter eggs, such as one-off still-images or messages, contain this sort of feeling of desecration to what videogames are that it is hard to not admire them. Knowledge is comfort. It is luxury and it is, generally, a great thing to have, as given in opposite by examples above, and part of the human condition can be explained in terms of it. Then, one may think, is it not completely absurd and lunatic that we handcraft fantasyworlds intentionally to deprive ourselves of knowing what could be in them? To present an experience porously whole? To waste our effort intentionally and create something that, perhaps, only a lucky few will find? Or to turn our waste into its own ritual, where the waste itself is then appreciated? Imagine if, magically, we had the entire real world in our palms, and still, somehow, didn’t know everything and were afraid. Isn’t this something amazing?
nd yet it is dying. It’s the year 2026 – not 2006, or even 2016 – and the age of discomfort seems to largely be over. If a secret is implemented, it is bound to be found in data-mining and decrypting. Even puzzles – things that are not secrets, but are instead public-facing obstacles – are cracked through technical means rather than through the intended exploratory ones. For a recent example, take Resident Evil Requiem. Inside Resident Evil Requiem was a complicated puzzle that, in a rather anti-climated fashion, was solved through data-mining before it was solved through legitimately piecing together the conclusion. This was, of course, met by the mild passive-aggressive annoyance signature of the internet. I remember being incredibly annoyed – not because of this aforementioned passive-aggressiveness – but because of what people said about the puzzle. Many, many people said something similar to – Oh, what an overcomplicated puzzle. How were we ever expected to solve that normally? – and that felt wrong. It felt wrong to expect a puzzle to be answerable; it felt wrong for a puzzle to have to conform to a standard of solvability; and it felt wrong to justify this practical defilement of the puzzle through a mindset of effort-and-reward. I already firmly believed that gamers don’t deserve anything, and this only reaffirmed that. In an age of videogaming where everything is made to be palatable – where good graphics is realism, good gameplay is enjoyable, and good story is but a narrative locomotive meant to deliver more – can we not reserve but the smallest thing to be left alone forever? Like natives of sentinel island, can there not be but one artifact undisturbed, unbroken, forever? Can we not have one single secret stand still, like some unfound terracotta warrior, eternally standing guard of an unknown quarter, waiting, watching, for that worthy adventurer? Or under the throes of content and the wider capitalistic venue must we eradicate the waste that is secrets? Secrets… Who has time for secrets? Why waste effort and money on the unappreciable when we can instead dedicate it to that which deserves none at all? This is the problem, I think. The destruction of secrets has coincided with the destruction of the broken and imperfect (a topic I will cover in another article) where those small personal flourishes common to games of ~10 years ago have been painted over by a bland gray coat of technical quality and consumable content. Secrets are now reserved for the dead – in a sort of pussyfooted way of saying we loved you without daring to dilute the artistic vision of the creators – or for hilarity – for when you want to seem more human and funny by adding a button that spawns 100 ducks.
There’s a certain period of videogaming – early 2000s to mid 2000s – where the videogame easter egg was in full swing. Playing a game in this time period felt like cataloguing a new rare animal, watching carefully for any strange behaviors or oddities. It felt as if, at any moment's notice, like a wild bull, the game could buck you completely unexpectedly and throw you away. This period of time is marked by both a lack of standards, with us still figuring this entire “Game” thing out, and high output – despite us not knowing anything, full-sending it anyways. This is how we ended up with hundreds of XBOX and Playstation games that, essentially, were shovelware and garbage. Perhaps blinded by nostalgia, this period of videogames is so near and dear to me. I remember spending hundreds of hours in these games, wandering and wondering around their empty, gray, dull, low-fidelity landscapes, trying to find any oddity or artifact that would justify my waste of time. I would enter every corner; climb every hill; rummage through every house, and dig through every dungeon just to find that one hidden gem I was absolutely convinced existed somewhere. I was so convinced – so, so convinced – that these worlds, vacuous and dead, had hidden life stored underneath, waiting, comatose – like the last surviving surface-dwelling tardigrade of a silent nuclear holocaust. Sometimes I would wonder about the streets of empty cities – the digital environmental wind like the wail of a never-dead haunt – and stare. Stare, simply, at it all. The unenterable buildings. The cars that drove like trains. The endless wooded hills bounding the world. When these games did have NPCs, they were never really of interest, but more of an oddity. In the same way one would look at an ant-colony underneath the shadow of the Washington monument, I would not pay attention to the NPCs, save for being the occasional jackass and goofing around. There’s just something indescribable about these worlds. When we have these fantasies, we imagine them full, painting them by the details most important and unignorable. When I imagine fantasia, I imagine a land complete – with real royal families, with real goblins and orcs, with real angels and demons – but to see it empty? To not only see empty promise – but to inhabit it? This is likely why the liminal space movement is so popular, but, strangely enough, I could never jive with it. I think this is because liminal spaces in the real world feel more dignified. You see an abandoned concert hall and you think – Something beautiful has happened here before. You see an abandoned mall and you begin to hear the ghosts of those long-dead summer nights. You see an abandoned office and you can taste the mild bitter resentment of those who were once previously confined. But these spaces? These painted digital dead-shells, like baroque insect sheddings? You experience these places, and you can only think – Here were once dragons.
SCP-1762 is, by far, one of my favorites on the site. It’s a clear love letter to both creation and fantasy and fits extraordinarily well with the rest of the site due to it’s contrast. SCP-1762 also illustrates what I want to call a death-by-specification of SCP, similar to that experienced by videogaming, where the broad strokes have been made small in the wake of endless detail. To explain what I mean – SCP has a lot. A lot of characters. A lot of stories. A lot of settings and backgrounds and mannerisms and taskforces and sites and such and such and such… that you begin to forget what the original appeal of SCP was – the unknown. The conciseness of early SCP writing was not in the clerical tones, nor the science word-salad deployed, but of the hidden words in the margins. In SCP-1762’s case – fantasia hidden in a cardboard box. For all the shit early SCP gets – some fair, some not – many forget that much of the enjoyment of early SCP was not the SCP itself but of the being of it. If I were to stumble upon, say, an SCP that’s an endless refilling bowl of bananas which reappear in the most inconvenient places, I would enjoy the matter of the SCP, yes – but do you know what I would also enjoy in equal part? The imagination – the ramifications of such a thing existing in this society, and what we would do with it, and what it could do, and why we could contain it, and how we even had it, and how people would react to it, and how it would react to other SCPs, and, and… Yet in the endless march of content and being this has been lost. As if fitting a square post-modern shape in a round unknowable hole, many authors of SCP have taken the medium to be more about its specifics than its generalities. SCP is cool because it has MTFs! Because it has 682! 173! Because I can write about the death of the author! Because I can write narrative-transcendent stories, unlimited by any of the conventional mediums! Because I can write format screws, despite the format-screw now, practically, being the format! Because I can write the foundation being evil – pragmatically or otherwise! Because! I! Can! – To this, I say go for it; I can’t deny someone to write, nor can I suggest that someone shouldn’t. But what I can say is this – why write something hammered in when I can read something purpose-made? Why read any of these things for themselves when I can read, say, Gravity’s Rainbow? House of Leaves? Slaughterhouse 5? Hell, even Ulysses, considering that SCP has become increasingly personal with its characters? It’s around this point that I realized something heartbreaking; something that doesn’t pang that heart, but rather pangs some vague navel-gazing idea of soul. These people write these things, seemingly burdened by SCP, because they like SCP for what it is. They write these sprawling novel-sized stories because they simply enjoy the idea of what SCP specifically is. The tragedy? I, believe, enjoyed SCP not because of specifically what it is, but because of what, in a broad sense, it was – unknown. Did it matter to me that the MTFs be named the way they are? That SCP even be named “SCP”? That the format existed the way it did? Did any of these specifics matter to me, or was I simply, again, chasing that high of the unknown? Of that vast, seemingly unsurmountable catalogue hidden away behind fictitious steel doors – of those new unknowable horrors, which I wanted to so, so eagerly devour, because it is innate to man to want to conquer the unknown, despite the apparent self-destructure tragedy in the act?
There’s a famous quote – “And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer”. So famous, in fact, that it has evolved a new sort of overly self-indulgent and narcissistic persona online, entirely separate of basically the same meaning in the original meaning. But, sincerely, can one not feel the same sometimes? When the internet – which promises so unknown – seems to run aground, the same new trends over and over? Everything new feels as if it was meant to last forever – meant to survive even nuclear armageddon. Worlds no longer age and mellow out. Entertainment is now made to be eternal, as is our worlds and writing. There is no time to not know anymore. Everything seems now to consume itself in the endless pursuit of being More. What do you do, then, when the unknown, previously promised to be unsurmountable, begins to finally show its summit? When you are finally led into that inescapable valley of self-confident comfort; given that false belief of knowing everything, despite being naught but a spec still, unfulfilled?
The Old World had stories for times like these. In Noita’s case, the Philosopher’s Stone. A sect of European alchemists believed sincerely that there was a definite, yet equally unknown ideal to ascend to. Because of this, they kept inventing these preposterous magical machines and objects that, surely, could’ve never existed? Yet to them they did and were waiting out there to be discovered. This wasn’t unique to them either; again, in Noita’s case, the mythological Sampo existed. For the Greeks it was the Cornucopia; the English, the Holy Grail; and to any critic, it can be more generally described as the MacGuffin – that seemingly forever far-away relic to grasp to save the day, unknown totally save for that it will save us. All of these are interesting on their own, yes, but there is one modern story that persisted all the way into the 17th century. The story of Prester John. The story of Prester John details a Christian king who, amidst a sea of foreign uncertainty in a given region, ruled a familiar Christian kingdom. The story is so old that it dates back to the 12th century, yet so standing that it lasted until the 17th. To imagine – Christian explorers, looking for a 500 year old Christian monarch among the Mongols – or the Ethiopians – or even the Americas! Yet despite this explorers went, looking for this Prester John for well over 500 years. They bore on their backs the blazing heat of the Middle-East; they made their way through the alien jungles of Africa; they traversed through the endless tempest-tossed waterways of the Atlantic and Pacific madly looking for this man who they were so sure existed, somewhere. People dedicated their entire lives to exploration – to find this Prester John, killing and dying for this idea of a man, who, for whatever reason, seemed to always be on the cusp of that frontier of knowledge. If only we could traverse another day on a ship south, we would find him… if only, if only… Yet as the 18th century rolled in, no Prester John was to be found. He didn’t die, surely – what’s another 100 years to a 500 year old holy Monarch? Yet the centuries rolled by and so did the invention of steampower and the riverboat; the rail and the train; gasoline and the car; the tank; the plane; electricity the wire; the internet. We explored the arctic; the root of every tree; every grain of desert; every bottomless cavern; every abyss of the ocean, void of great planes; our orbit, other orbits; our moon, other moons; mars; asteroids near and asteroids far; the stars bright and the stars dull; yet Prester John has been nowhere to be seen. Tell me, in this age where everything immediately tangible to us is known; where we can predict not just the planets but the stars and the galaxies themselves; where even the markets begin showing patterns; where the weather has been defeated by middle-aged meteologists; where I can talk to anyone anywhere and see anything anytime; where horror has been reserved for the horrorless in entertainment; where we cannot even add nor fathom unfamiliarity to the own worlds and stories we create; where every new frontier is created to be subsumed; Where has Prester John gone?
