Indie Roundup: Carto, I Am Dead, and Noita

Carto gets a lot of brain-bending mileage from its central mechanic.

Carto
Photo: Humble Games

The layout of the world in Carto (Humble Games) is subjective, but only up to a point. The latest from Taiwanese developer Sunhead Games finds the title character collecting pieces of her magic map to make terrain appear in the world. Place, say, a patch of forest to her east and what was once a blank void transforms into a very real forest for Carto to explore. If you pick up that same map piece and place it to her north, the forest moves to the north instead. As long as the edges match up—forest to forest, grassland to grassland—the beautiful, storybook-esque world of the game is totally within Carto’s power.

Other people also live in Carto’s world. In addition to the grandmother who she’s been separated from, there are the various tribes that have settled in different environments according to their own customs. And they’re already familiar with the land; if one character says that his hut is by the sea to the east of another hut, his home won’t appear until the player sets the map piece down in the proper place. And even if the map piece fits just fine to the north, south, or west, he knows where his home is.

Though the more complex, and occasionally obtuse, puzzles can make your constant opening and closing of the map feel a little tedious, Carto gets a lot of brain-bending mileage from its central mechanic. Each area introduces some pleasant new wrinkle, like moving big chunks of the map at once, connecting the path of an earthworm, or rotating a map tile to open a safe before moving on again, one more stop on a lovely journey about getting to know different cultures and how they survive in so many different conditions.


Death, as it turns out, isn’t the end. Deceased museum curator Morris Lupton is now a rather nosy ghost, capable of supernaturally peeking inside objects around the small island of Shelmerston in I Am Dead (Annapurna Interactive), the latest from the creators of Hohokum and Wilmot’s Warehous. The outsides melt away on command, letting him look inside of a grapefruit, the circuits of a walkie talkie, or the gears of a clock. But Morris finds himself without purpose, until the ghost of his dog informs him that they need to find a replacement spirit for the island to keep its long-dormant volcano from exploding.

What follows is a rather simple game where you seek out mementos of the dead that tend to be hidden in unexpected containers like a fox hole in a sculpture park or an armchair at the lighthouse turned yoga retreat. I Am Dead places its objects among scenes of such vibrant life and history, bursting with strange details and memories tackling a range of emotions that’s all the more surprising for the cutesy exterior. There’s pleasure, charm, and sadness here, rummaging through mementos seeing how our touch on the world persists, however brief it may seem, through the people and objects we leave behind.


Though so many games call themselves sandboxes, few can claim the depth and variety of the pixelated playground of Noita, the latest from the self-proclaimed nerds at the Finland-based Nolla Games. The simple art style belies an enormous spiderweb of systems upon systems, actions and reactions. When your magician character lights something on fire, the fire spreads and takes the terrain with it, pieces of it crumbling off into the cave network below. Smoke rises, collecting in pockets of the cavern to drain oxygen from you or the hostile creatures lurking in the dark. You can douse the fire in water or blood, or you can feed it with oil or alcohol and watch from a distance as it consumes the monsters in your way.

And fire is just one of the many potential variables on your journey, something that might crop up because you knock over a lantern or manifest it as an unexpected side effect of your spells. Acid melts terrain, electricity surges through water, and parasitic plants block your path as they grow unchecked. Even with just a handful of basic spells, Noita is an astonishing, reactive, and chaotic achievement. But as you progress, starting from scratch upon death, as it is customary in roguelikes, even the spells grow in complexity. You can bolt on additional effects, change trajectories, and tweak their potency until, say, you’re obliterating ground as far as the eye can see in a flash of red fireworks, probably killing yourself by accident in the process.

Death will come often in Noita as you puzzle out the secrets of its merciless systems, and to the game’s occasional detriment. Without a safe, reliable place to experiment, you’ll often find yourself dealing with powers and enemies that you’re unaccustomed to, scrambling for footholds and bottlenecks that might crumble at any moment. The desperation can be exciting to be sure, but Noita’s systems are so fascinating on their own that it’s difficult not to long for an option to make its wondrous sandbox just a little less dangerous.

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.