Moving up the Konjak Kueue, Noitu Love holds up better than Mina.

First of all, it’s a finished game. Secondly, its stylised chibi designs are  appealing, and the enemy Darn faction’s consistent visual elements go well with the cartoony vibe. Thirdly, the basic gameplay is smooth and fun.

It’s a sort of beat-em-up but with lots of platforming too. The hero Noitu has a simple attack string and a spinning flourish kick, which in a pinch can be used to gain a little height or stall in the air. Apart from introducing new enemy types and a brief shmup stage, the game’s gimmick is its evolution chambers, which transform you into different states: monkey, bird, and psychic future egghead. These add some needed variety.

There’s six straightforward stages which don’t take too long. Unfortunately I couldn’t clear the game myself; a difficult antepenultimate boss left me with only two lives, which was permanently saved for any attempt at the penultimate boss, and it’s nigh-impossible to beat the latter in such a state, at least for me. Turning the game down to Easy required me to play it all the way through again from the start, which locks you out of said boss, giving you an early bad ending. Feh.

Despite this downer capping my playthrough, I enjoyed Noitu Love very much. It has genuinely creative ideas, a strong visual style and tone, plays well, and of course has a whole lot more polish than Mina (which again, was an abandoned project). And, it was actually followed up with a commercial sequel after Sandberg had gained a lot more experience working at WayForward. Stay tuned for that!