I’ve Died Again.

There is no better video game tutorial, than death. 

Give me as many key-binding walkthroughs, premise-explaining montages, and non-threatening test dummies as you want. I’ll soak up that information, and spit it back at you when you ask. 

But I won’t learn a lick about how to play the game, until I’ve died trying.

This is true for any game I can think of. First-person shooters, turn-based strategy, side scrollers and bullet hells and auto battlers, all these genres may need tutorials. But you won’t know how hard a Covenant Elite hits for, or how to survive a missile barrage from an enemy space cruiser, until you’ve died trying.

It’s part of the reason that my favorite games don’t have tutorials, or rather that the game is the tutorial. I come back to Portal, a puzzle platformer that introduces its titular weapon with only a terse “Right trigger to use.” You spend the rest of the game playing with the mechanics, trying and failing and trying again to understand how to think with portals. And that’s why I can play the game again and again, watch friends experience it for the first time or Twitch streamers speedrun it. I wasn’t taught the game; I only played it.

Even horror games harbor this behavior. I can be spooked by shadows on walls, monsters waiting in the dark or rustling swiftly around my feet. The snuffed-out candle, the ghastly wailing, even a crime report on a well-placed radio can raise the hairs on my neck. But it’s not until I have been apprehended, hunted and chased down and butchered alive, that I can truly understand the nature of my assailant. And if the point of a horror game is to be afraid, I’m not sure surviving is actually the point in the first place. But enough on that.

I’ve found a new game recently. It’s called ‘Noita’, the Finnish word for witch. In it you wake at the mouth of a cave,  beneath grand stone towers and a clear sky. And on the face of the towers are listed: the WASD keys (standard to movement in most PC games), and an icon signifying the left mouse button. And that’s it. As you move into the cave a couple more keys are listed, also without explanation, and the floor drops off and falls into darkness. And there your journey begins.

Most players call Noita a roguelite, though I disparage the term. Essentially it is a side-scolling dungeon crawler, where you clear the way of enemies and obstructions to reach deeper floors and greater treasures. Along the way you may find potions to pour or throw or drink, and you may find wands, with disordered spells and carefully listed stats. And if you’re lucky you may find a safe haven, where you may reorder those spells and test those wands. But you must go on. You must make yourself more powerful. You must stay alive.

But you can’t of course. One way or another, by your hand or by the will of the gods, you will die. It’s fine! Even the best players of this game die regularly, painfully and without warning. These caves are remorseless; at times the very walls seem eager to eat you alive. And the learning curve is exceedingly steep: every creature and every dusty corner interacts differently with your potions, with your spells, with each other. You will not learn these interactions until you have died from them, and even then you will need to learn more.

And at this point you won’t even know your goal. What are you seeking? What could possibly be worth this pain? It’s hard to know even outside the game. The online wiki is of limited help, and constantly out of date: after all Noita is only a few months old, and the developers change items and game mechanics almost weekly. You can find some wonderful streamers online playing Noita, but watching how these veritable wizards fly around their worlds and craft their tools will feel like true witchcraft. You will quickly realize that the answers to your questions are seldom easy. The game is so very vast that learning even one facet, like the art of alchemy, could consume your every thought for days on end. So instead you will play your own game, risk life and limb in the caves, and experiment with any potion you can find. And whether you bathe in acid, or asphyxiate in freezing vapor, or polymorph into a sheep, you will die along the way.

And this is the nature of the game. Try, die, repeat. The game is as simple as the pursuit of gold, and as arcane and complicated as a cypher on the wall. Perhaps this is why the game has no tutorial: because the mechanics of the game would fill a textbook, and if you need an explanation to know where to begin, you might be lost already. 

I love difficult games. It seems to me, again and again, that these games have expectations of you. They demand your skill, your insight, your willingness to learn. (And perhaps this is why easy games have the longest tutorials. Food for thought.) And in the course of your efforts, they may demand your brutal end. But the expectation does not end with death. Games like Noita only kill you so that you may resurrect again, stand at the mouth of the cave, and leap once more, head over heels, down its throat. 

Don’t mind the stone towers: you will learn on your way. And you will die, again.