Somewhere there’s a grimdark world of darkness where a broken hero fights hideous monstrosities in the gloomy halls and caverns of a land that’s slowly rotting away. At some point the hero has to stop and wonder what the point of all this is, because even with the great evil defeated, the kingdoms won’t be seeing the sun again any time soon. “Yay, the evil is defeated! How about doing it a century or so earlier next time while there’s still someone left to drain all these poison swamps?” This isn’t a problem forEnotria: The Last Song, thanks to it being ruled over by an eternal who will not allow anything in the land to change. The bright sunny skies light up the fields and towns, and everyone is still alive and partying whether they want to or not. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” is supposed to be a metaphor, but the rulers of Enotria have made it far too literal.
With everything scripted down to the last word, there’s no room for freedom or even the ability to fight for it until the Maskless One breaks free of its strings. It’s just a blank wooden human-sized puppet, but without a prescribed role, it’s free to act as it will, which means defeating the Authors to finally end the cycle of repetition and allow Enotria to start changing again. This would be a lot easier a task, though, ifEnotria: The Last Songwasn’t a pure soulslike, with the punishing challenge the genre is known for making every fight a potential avenue of defeat.
Enotria: The Last Song Celebrates With Fans with New Trailer, Contests
The Italian folklore-inspired Enotria: The Last Song is celebrating Summer Game Fest and Steam Next Fest with a plethora of activities and news.
Other than the kind of refreshingly sunny skies that would bring joy to the heart of ’90s arcade Sega, the thing that setsEnotria: The Last Songapart from other games in its genre is that it’s set in a theater-fantasy version of Italy. Sunflower fields and an intricate town lie under a rich golden sunset, while a ruined overgrown monastery is lit up by moonlight. Bright shores and cliffs are vibrant under the midday sun, and somehow even the required sewer area feels like a lost ancient Italian ruin. The scenery is beautiful and wonderfully detailed, and like any good soulslike there’s plenty of time to soak up the sights and poke around for secrets once the enemies are cleared out.
While the setting is unique,Enotria’s combat is pure genre-standard even if its terminology veers straight into jargon. Magic is replaced by ardore, enemy stun is unravelling, spells are lines and the elemental affinities are more easily thought of as icons than names. Vis, Fatuo, Gratia and Malanno are represented by a cup, flame, square-spiral thingy and mask, and thankfully a section of the HUD is a circle with the icons arranged to show which is best against what. Even the speed at which actions power up the mask lines to enable special attacks uses Italian tempo terms, which is great if you speak the language or have the required musical knowledge, but not so much if you can’t remember whether andante, adagio or lento is fast or glacially slow.
The speeds in order:
Presto - Fast
Vivace - Less fast
Andante - Not fast, not bad
Lento - Slowing down
Adagio - Turtle-speed
Grave - It’s going to be a while
Still, experience has always been the greatest power in any soulslike andEnotriais no different. The tutorial loads you down with plenty of information, at first simple and ending with the element system info-dump, but basic attacks are plenty to start out with. The standard attack is quicker than a power strike, dodge gets out of the way quickly, and parry either blocks or negates damage depending on how effective the timing is. The Maskless One fights using one weapon, no shield and whether the weapon is a single- or dual-hander parries with just its left arm. Parries not only minimize damage, but also add to the enemy’s stun/unravelling bar, and when full they go into a daze that leaves them open to a finishing strike. Each weapon type has its own type of finisher, and for standard enemies one is usually enough to defeat it.
At the start, parry and strike are plenty to defeat almost anything, but soon enough the major town area starts gently requiring paying attention to enemy elemental affinities. The health bars frequently display one of the elemental symbols, so carrying the right loadout along can turn a major encounter into a far more manageable skirmish. Loadouts determine how you’ve customized the Maskless One, and it can carry three at once and switch between them on the fly.
Each loadout is comprised of a mask, which gives specific perks and weaknesses that define how the build should be created, an aspect that should be chosen for its perks to synergize with the mask, two weapons, four special magic/line abilities, plus items and perks. In practice this should enable an incredible amount of flexibility to handle any situation, but the problem is that every loadout is working from the same base character stats. A fighter’s stats are built differently from an elementalist or battlemage, and it takes a good long while to earn enough masks to have any real choice outside a single favorite.
But the Backdrops Peel and the Sets Give Way and the Cast Get Eaten By the Play (Alan Moore)
Once the adventure gets going, though, the rhythm of combat and exploration make it easy to search out one checkpoint after the next, pushing just a bit harder through the enemies to recharge at the next save point. The save zones not only let you spend points on leveling up but also buy new perks, adjust special abilities, and sometimes when there’s an anvil available upgrade weapons, masks and magic lines. The genre-standard “death means dropping experience, dying before picking it up loses it forever” is in play, so spending it all before a boss fight is always a good idea, but experimenting with various weapons and learning the paths through the levels means it can be rare to lose everything.Enotriais hard in the way soulslikes tend to be, but aside from the occasional gauntlet where the run from one save-point to the next is particularly long, it’s not unkind.
Once the adventure gets going, though, the rhythm of combat and exploration make it easy to search out one checkpoint after the next
It is, however, a little buggy and unpolished in some of its features. Enemies frequently forget to attack if they do something unexpected, like drop to a ledge below where they were fighting. The path to the next objective is sometimes hidden as well, with one particular direction being in an easily-missable note that lets you know the path is back near the game’s starting point. Areas where you travel from one map to the next are uncommon but also unmarked, easily missed if you don’t notice the Travel icon on the screen. There’s enough to work on that the game has a roadmap of updates through March of next year, although to be fair it’s almost all quality-of-life upgrades rather than technical ones.
Closing Comments:
Enotria: The Last Songis a little rough around the edges, but still nicely playable in spite of this. The standard-level difficulty feels hard-but-fair, providing a good challenge once you get the various systems sorted out while filled with a strong variety of enemies and bosses with plenty of attacks to learn. The parry move isn’t all that generous with the timing, but highly effective once you get the hang of it, and feels great when you successfully fend off a multi-hit strike. Customizing a character gives a lot of room for experimentation, and while the best method is to pick a class and build towards it, there’s still plenty of leeway in how that class can play thanks to the large number of weapons with different handling and elemental affinities. Most strikingly, whileEnotriais hard it’s not dark, with the different qualities of sunlight feeling like a stronger theme even than the aspect of the world being a play that runs through the story.Enotria: The Last Songis a solid soulslike with a unique, appealing identity, which is plenty to paper over the rough spots on the quest to free the world from a script nobody asked for.
Enotria: The Last Song
Version Reviewed: PC
A soulslike game inspired by Italian folklore, Enotria sees players attempting to end a cursed, eternal play. To do so, they’ll have to don a variety of masks to give themselves the skills needed to succeed in combat.
