Over the years, one of the things I’ve appreciated the most about many indie games is their typical level of ambition. Whether developers are making a genre mash-up, figuring out the latest way to spice up well-known gameplay with roguelike elements, or simply letting their freak flag of some kind fly, it’s hard not to be impressed by people swinging for the fences. Of course, that’s presuming the hit lands, because when it’s clear people had more ambition than they were able to pull off properly, the results can be quite painful.

Unfortunately, that seems to be the case with Mists of Noyah, a title that seems to have committed to far too many styles of play, including side-scrolling action, survival, and tower defense at a minimum, but struggling with doing any of them particularly well. The main problem, right out of the gate, is that considering the level of complexity in all of the game’s systems, menus, and submenus it does itself and the player absolutely no favors by promptly failing to explain or walk you through pretty well any of it at all. 

Sure, older gamers remember the days of needing to read the manual to understand how to play, but that all ended at least a generation ago, with the modern expectation being there’s at least in-game direction, and preferably contextually presented at that. Nope, even with all of its crafting, abundant resources to pick up, skill trees, and the rest it seems the developers were comfortable with you either stumbling through everything to work it out yourself, or look it up online. In fact, until I accidentally hit the right button while near a tree I initially didn’t even know that I was meant to collect resources at all in the first place.

But perhaps the style, depth, or excitement of play are enough to motivate you to dig through all of the menus and game systems? Not really, no. For all of its classes and complexity, there’s just not enough juice to be had here to justify the cost and effort of the squeeze. Even on a budget there are action, strategy, and even RPG titles that far eclipse the effort here, and that certainly give a better impression of being complete. This just feels like an effort where the team took on far more than they could chew, and someone in the food chain decided just to release it as is and hope for the best.