REVIEW / Mists of Noyah (PS5)

There are an unfortunate amount of games out there where the premise is far better than the execution. I’m aware that you should never judge a book by its cover but in the gaming world, it’s important to keep your word. We’ve seen way too many times what happens when a dev team promises us perfection and just doesn’t deliver. I’m going to use No Man’s Sky as a prime example of this. Now, before you come at me with comments about it being an excellent game I fully agree with you. It’s an excellent game now. I played it on day one because I fell for the hype and was hugely disappointed. Now, I’m not using this as a way to bash Hello Games, they powered through and did something remarkable and they deserve all the praise for it. I’m using this as a cautionary tale for all the other teams that don’t come good. This also brings us to the game we’re playing on PS5 today. On paper Mists of Noyah sounds like something that should be genre-breaking, unfortunately, we’ll see a case of the result not meeting expectations as we go.

Who wouldn’t love a game that mixed crafting concepts, (like Terraria,) with a roguelike Metroidvania? A game where exploration is the key, that’s different every time you play and has awesome crafting sounds like something many of us would be chomping at the bit to get involved in. If Mists of Noyah felt at all finished it probably would be. Sadly, we have a game that could have been wonderful, but it just feels a little bit abandoned.

When I started Mists of Noyah up and was taken to the character select I was really excited to jump in and see what my chosen warrior could do. This was a game about protecting your village from the creatures of the night. A game where foraging and building in the daylight hours would create the only bulwark against the hideous creatures that lurked in the shadows. This was a game where I was expecting to be watching the clock knowing exploring that bit too far or gathering that bit too much could mean the end of not only me but a bunch of villagers I was protecting. Then I got dumped in a forest.

Mists of Noyah has absolutely no tutorial. I think it’s supposed to drop you into the thick of it and expect you to work things out on your own and I don’t have an issue with this in theory. If I’m given a basic control scheme and a rudimentary idea of what I’m doing and just allowed to work the rest out as I go I’m pretty happy. I’m not even really expecting a ton of story from the beginning. Sometimes it’s nice to piece the world together from scraps you find on your adventure. This is a really good way of building mystery and intrigue and adding suspense. Unfortunately, in this case, it just felt like somebody couldn’t be bothered writing a tutorial.

I worked out the basic controls quite quickly and started leaping from platform to platform killing enemies and harvesting anything I could. I worked out that chopping trees down and mining rocks was part of the point on my own. I was even able to complete the first quest I was given which was to make a set of wooden armor. I did all this, though, by fumbling about with menus. I felt like I was just hitting buttons to see what happened and this isn’t really what we want from a game. Then I died and got dumped back at the start of the level and had to go again, still not knowing what I was doing properly only at night time.

At night the enemies are a lot tougher and my flimsy little bow was barely scratching them. I ended up adopting an approach of just jumping over them and running ahead because the damage they were putting out was far exceeding anything I was prepared for. This made any real exploration pointless because I just wanted to find the village that I was pretty sure I should have started in. Having been killed a couple of times after this and rerunning the same area I finally found the village and the next level of confusion.

The village felt just as half finished as the beginning of the game. There were a bunch of vendors but none of them had any dialogue. I had to work out what each of them sold and a lot of the items in their itineraries meant nothing to me because I didn’t know what they did. This made spending the gold I’d accumulated a bit frustrating because I didn’t know whether I was buying anything useful to me at that point in time. There was also a fairy who gave me the option to do a dungeon run. Not knowing what I was expecting I chose an easy run and just jumped in. The first creature I encountered ate me in about one hit. I wanted to give Mists of Noyah a bit of a chance I pressed on into some of the different biomes on offer.

The first thing I noticed about the biomes was that they were really just reskins of the woodlands I’d started in but with a desert and arctic twist. They didn’t feel different enough to really stand out as special in any way. It was weird navigating these too. After about three areas of woodland, I was suddenly on a frozen tundra, then three screens later I was in the desert, then back to woodland. All of this with still no solid idea of what I was supposed to be doing. The combat was okay, and the level design was fine but I just didn’t feel the drive to want to keep going. The day and night cycles, though a cool idea just made my job harder when I didn’t quite get what my job was.

There’s a clock ticking in the corner of the screen and this is great in essence because it’s your way of measuring how long you have until night falls and ultimately how long you have until your village is raided. You expect things to get dangerous after a certain time and if everything worked this would be fine. This clock, however, never stops. In a game that tells you nothing; where you’re going to spend a lot of time reading menus and working out what does what you shouldn’t have at a timer that just keeps running. I was able to buy a scroll in the village that gave me the first part of the story. Again, in a game where finding the plot as you go seems to be the point this isn’t the issue. The problem is that this scroll was twelve pages long and I didn’t realize until I had read to page ten that the clock was still ticking. So, in a game where I have to find and read the story, I can potentially be killed in the process of doing this, or actually anything else for that matter. This could have potentially been a deliberate choice by the devs but I feel like it was something else that was overlooked. Mists of Noyah is screaming for an auto-pause and it just doesn’t exist.

Mists of Noyah feels like a shell of what could have been a good game. What we have is a story that’s pretty non-existent in a world that you don’t care about because you’ve got no idea what you’re doing. I ended up feeling like the devs just let it out into release long before it was ready because they wanted to do something else. It just doesn’t feel like any real love went into this title and ultimately, if they can’t be bothered finishing it, why should we be bothered spending our money and playing it? This is a shame because what’s visible on the screen looks pretty enticing. To use a very British saying, it’s all fur coat and no knickers. If they’d gotten the fundamentals right and given this title real depth we’d be having a very different review.

If Mists of Noyah was in Early Access I’d be expecting to play something that was still a work in progress and this review would be entirely different. The fact that they want us to spend £8.00 on something that just isn’t there is a bit insulting. That’s the PS4/5 version, by the way, I had a look at this title on Steam and they’re asking almost double for it. What’s even more annoying is there are a couple of years between that Steam release and the console ports. Considering it’s the same game and there’s been two years of it clearly not being finished over there, (or it wouldn’t be a port,) it feels like a little bit of a cash grab.

All in all Mists of Noyah is a game that you can quite happily miss. This is a game that had a lot of potential if it had been finished to a high standard. As it is you’re paying for a confusing shell of a game that while having a good deal of promise just doesn’t hit the mark. It doesn’t feel ready to be a final release on any platform let alone a port from a PC release that’s already several years old. If I were you, I would save the eight quid and spend it on something else, it would be far more economical.