I eventually looked up on the wiki on how to get the wheel and it said I need to drop Slink down by the fish to activate a button and make it to the little room up top... but why would anybody ever try and do that? Was there a hint somewhere that I missed?
I've only ever gotten a win streak of two. On my last run I made it to the Temple of the Art with explosion immunity, copy trail, spark bolt with trigger, and giant magic missile. It made everything I hit explode until reduced to individual atoms. I also had a nice luminous drill wand for digging and was progressing down swiftly until a master of polymorph came from off screen and shot me just after I had fired my wand and was navigating around the explosions.
Like, what are you supposed to do in the Temple to avoid instadeath? Just dig all the way around if you don't have invisibility or a shield?
I've been playing Noita for years, and I think the main run down to Kolmi is a lot of fun and pretty well balanced, both in difficulty and time. Like, at first it seems impossible and runs seem to always end with some BS enemy attack cutting your health, or making you blind, or just making you explode. But once you have some basic understanding of wand building and the mechanics of the game, and how the enemy health health scales and that your own damage needs to keep up or you need to focus on avoiding later encounters the difficulty becomes a lot more reasonable. A run straight down can be around an hour if you take your time or under 15m if you rush. If you die, it's not that big of an investment loss.
However, this main run is only around 10-20% of the content in the game. There are so many other areas to see and bosses to fight, and the fact that it's there is one of the coolest parts of Noita. To spends hundreds of deaths just managing to beat the game and then realize that you've only been standing on the tip of the iceberg is an amazing feeling. The only problem is that actually engaging with that content in a way that is challenging and fun is so incredibly difficult.
The first problem is that a lot of the difficulty is scaled beyond the Temple of the Art so you need to first have a successful main run before you can even begin to engage with much side content. It would be fantastic if you could take alternate paths to beat the game. Instead of going down into the mines, being able to use your starting potion of mud or bombs to hop over the mountain or tree and enter the sand caves or whatever and follow a different string of biomes that's more difficult and has different challenges, but still balanced for a new run would be a lot of fun, and make learning the new enemies and bosses a lot more tolerable. As it is, if you run into something you've never seen and die in two seconds to it, you've lost all the time it took to set up your run to the point it was feasible to start exploring the side content. This strongly incentivizes breaking the game to become pretty much invincible before even touching much of the side stuff.
This leads to problem 2: god runs are boring. Since you don't want to waste your time re-doing hours and hours of set up you need to make good and sure you are unkillable before you even begin. So you tunnel your way to 7 different parallel worlds and break the re-roll machines and give yourself a million HP, every immunity, 5 permanent shields, 9 extra lives, and permanent circle of vigor. While you are doing this you fight with the minuscule inventory for wands, spells, and items and build yourself several wands that do obscene amounts of damage and will clear screens at the push of a button. Now it's finally time to explore the side content that you've been waiting so long to see... and it's boring. Normal enemies can't hurt you or outpace your healing, and die as soon as you click on them. You aren't really seeing what these enemies or areas have to offer because you are just thoughtlessly zooming around deleting everything. And then you get polymorphed and die instantly and it doesn't even matter because collecting 33 orbs was beginning to look like a massive dull chore. (I know you can farm poly immunity through another long tedious process, but I didn't and I'm glad because being OP is a fun way to play Noita.)
Problem 3 is that the mechanics of end game enemies are too obscure. After losing my god run, eventually I returned to Noita and thought maybe the way to make the end game content fun would be to limit myself to the main world and only collect 11 orbs. I'd see most of the content, turn the world to gold and be able to remain alive to enjoy the world made perfect. I had made it through the main branch and came out with around 1000HP a couple immunities and a wand with damage buffed ping-pong shot luminous drill that was melting everything. I decided to enter the Ancient Laboratory and see what I could do. The first enemy I ran into was one of the living statues and it was completely immune to my laser, and here we begin to see the problem. I have an extremely limited inventory and this thing is immune to a weapon that otherwise melts solid rock. I could go back through the world collecting spells that do every damage type and try them out one by one to figure out a way to kill this thing, but since that sounds like the most tedious thing I could do in the world, I don't. Instead, since the Ancient Laboratory also appeared to be filled with magical pools of polymorph, I go around and dig into the orb chamber from the snowy wastes. Now I run into High Alchemist. I remember killing him on previous runs years ago and not having too many problems, so I think my drill should make short work of him. As it turns out he's completely invincible. My drill is nullified by his shield and he takes no damage, except as I move a little closer he takes a bit just as I have to reposition to avoid his projectiles. Now I think that I just need to be pretty close to penetrate his shield so I hide around a corner and let him have it as he gets close, and it doesn't work, he's still immune. Then I get stuck on a wall and he seems to instantly kill me with contact damage from his shield. Afterwards I see that his shield is turning off and on periodically, so that's probably what I needed to wait for, but run over anyway, 6 hours down the drain. Now I could have looked up these enemies in advance on the wiki, and learned all about their abilities in advance and crafted wands to counter them and kill them instantly, but at that point, why am I even playing the game? If I have to follow a guide to do anything, why not just watch a playthrough on Youtube. On the other hand, you really have very little ability to experiment and figure something out for yourself because the penalty for failure to a late game run is so high.
I really don't know how I'm supposed to approach this content to keep it fun and engaging. It just doesn't seem to be possible to me.