Enotria: The Last Song Review [IGN]

Enotria: The Last Song is quite like most games inspired by From Software-style action RPGs. You patiently adventure through dungeons, put weapons of various shapes and sizes into monsters, and try not to die terribly in the process. It’s all pretty familiar by now, but all the other stuff around that core is where developer Jyamma Games really tries to spice up this recipe. The ideas that work, like taking the setting out of dank caves and swampy bogs into the shimmering light of sunny mountainsides and colorful cities, really work. The things that don’t, like the overwhelming amount of unintuitive things to unlock and equip and the janky performance issues, keep Entoria’s name from gracing the growing list of games that become more than just another soulslike.

The most striking way Enotria escapes the dark and gloomy shadow of the big games it’s inspired by is its livelier setting and art direction. Where most soulslikes are dedicated to the dank caves and dungeons that are staples of the genre, Enotria gets the sun involved in a big way, beyond simply praising it. Striking skies, rolling fields of golden sunflowers, and clean, sandy shores are front and center. Even places where things go bump in the night still have bold colors and radical environmental aspects like huge, twisting trees. Similarly, many enemy and NPC character designs are covered in little details that make them pop, even when the textures can sometimes feel flat.

This more vibrant world is suffering from a dark corruption that has trapped everyone in it in a constant state of monotony and repetition. There’s lots of metaphor to stage plays and everyone playing a role like an actor, especially early on, but I found my interest waned in the plot as I progressed. Individual interactions with some characters can be interesting, but in true soulslike fashion, much of this story is hidden in mystery, and I was not all too keen to unravel this one.

Each area is filled with enemies that vary greatly from each other, but within each region they can get pretty repetitive over time. That doesn’t mean they can’t be dangerous the whole way through, but I saw most of what I could expect from a given region pretty early into it, and it takes about five or so hours to get through one.

I did enjoy most of the bosses I encountered, the best of them providing unique challenges that broke up the dungeon skulking. They aren’t all hits, though: Sometimes I fought cool stuff like a big, gnarly hermit crab or a golden conquistador who could moonlight as a Final Fantasy dragoon, while other times I fought the same knight with the same sword combos but different colored armor on four separate occasions.

It all gets slightly undermined by some inconsistent performance, too. Even my reliable combo of an Intel Core i9-9000 processor and an RTX 3070 GPU struggled to keep the frame rate smooth, usually when entering new zones or fighting outside in very sunny spots. It was always a bummer to see such pretty spaces chug so dramatically, regardless of the combination of settings I tried.

Even so, there’s a lot of worthwhile exploration to do in each of Enotria’s three zones. Areas like the eerie yet bustling city of Quintia are dense with lots of branching paths that lead to loot or shortcuts. Occasionally, these shortcuts can help you bypass whole sections of a castle or crypt, but very few turn out to be paths to whole new locations. There were plenty of nooks and crannies to despite the relative linearity of each zone , but there were some gimmicks that seemed like they would be a bigger deal early on that showed up very scarcely after, like white glyphs that can be activated to make temporary platforms and structures to open up new locations.

Much more common are the red glyphs all over the world that unleash combat challenges which range from pushovers to absolute menaces – I was happy to see they were optional after I went knocking on their door and got knocked on my ass. It was sort of strange and jarring, then, when I would stumble into rooms that also included bosses that I would later learn were not necessary to beat just lingering around without that same kind of action to opt in, so to speak. It’s like Enotria identified surprise bosses as a problem with soulslikes and made red glyphs to address that, and then in the same game shunned their own solution. It’s not a huge issue – this kind of pushback is par for the course in these games – but it’s a head-scratching moment of inconsistency.

I’m willing to forgive things like that because combat is pretty strong, so finding new enemies to beat up is always a good experience (framerate issues notwithstanding). Anyone familiar with these sorts of games will be at home with the basic light and heavy attacks being governed by stamina. There is no blocking, and parrying doesn’t stun enemies outright, instead building up a gauge that eventually opens bad guys up for big attacks. Entoria’s parry window is more forgiving than in games like Lies of P, which similarly wraps its defensive strategy around counters, and therefore it felt way more approachable in the early game. Around midway in to this 30ish hour campaign, expect to get that deflect button tested regularly by enemies with longer attack strings, or encounters with multiple baddies at once. I liked the gradual easing into this kind of challenge, but sometimes I felt like the claustrophobic camera and the lock-on with a mind of its own felt like they were working for the enemies.

The risk/reward of the parry system extends to the four status ailments you can afflict on enemies (or be afflicted by), each having a dual set of conditions that help and harm. Causing dizziness on opponents reduces their defenses, but also makes them stronger and lets them recover stamina more quickly. Sick is your standard poison that does damage over time, but if you get too close to a sick enemy you can get sick yourself. It does sometimes feel counterintuitive or regressive on some bosses especially; using the fatuo element against enemies weak to it will do more damage – but it will also put the wicked status on them, which makes all of their elemental power way more destructive. Overall, though, I think the ailment system does encourage staying vigilant even when you have the advantage.

On the other hand, Entoria’s seven weapon types aren’t all as distinct from one another, mechanically. Ultra greatswords and colossal hammers are technically different on paper, but in practice I found no need to dedicate my two weapon slots to both of these where one big stick would do. There are around 120 weapons across all of these types, and while I didn’t find nearly as many as that, the ones I did find covered just about every base possible when it came to the four types of elemental damage they could do, those corresponding status ailments, and how they scale with your stats. Interestingly, different weapons can hide some additional abilities that are only be activated when using the right light/heavy combos. I didn’t spend too much time testing which ones do what, but more than once the decision to choose between two similar weapons with similar traits came down to the fact that one of them did extra elemental damage when I hit the right button and the other didn’t, and I enjoyed having that opportunity.

As far as building your character goes, masks are as close to classes as Enotria gets. Besides changing your look, they offer passive bonuses like doing more damage with heavy attacks or increasing stamina and defense. To get an effective build going, you need to use their boons as a baseline and layer on additional modifications in the form of roles and perks. The former are aspects of enemies you defeat that alter your stats in positive and negative ways, while also giving you more passive bonuses; I beat up a big crab and its aspect raised three of my stats but lowered two others while also raising my health by a percentage. On top of that, perks can add even more passive quirks to all of the attacks, dodges, parries, and abilities you’ll use.

Mixing and matching mask lines – Enotria’s version of offensive and defensive skills and spells – can be fun. Most of them are pretty impactful, even if the only real difference between many of them is the special elemental or status effects they cause. They must be charged up by hitting enemies before they can be employed, meaning they can’t be used to get you out of binds reactionarily. This isn’t so bad when adventuring through dungeons because you’ll have plenty of opportunities to hit things and fill up your meters. The problem appears when you pull up to a boss fight, which empties your meters fully before you start, meaning you have to work up to these powerful attacks from scratch against the tough challenges where you’d likely need them the most. I can understand why the designers would want to level the playing field, but it always felt needlessly punitive and I’d have liked to have been able to take advantage of preparing for a fight in that way. Mask line gauges also drain every time you rest at a bonfire, which felt more annoying than bad.

This is a lot of character tweaking to do, and perhaps too much for all but the most dedicated build hounds. I enjoy that myself, but what’s irritating is that none of the impacts of this lasagna of layered RPG systems are well communicated before testing things live against enemies. A list of all the bonuses being applied by everything in my loadout would have done wonders for measuring my build’s potential while still in the menu screen, for example. Charging speeds for lines are in Italian, which isn’t an issue for me and Google translate’s powers combined, but when “presto” and “vivace” both mean fast, theres no telling which one is faster without just figuring it out on the fly. Being able to set up three separate loadouts, each with their own masks, weapons, lines, perks, etc, that you can switch through on the fly means you can be ready for anything, but after settling on two builds I liked, I almost never made use of the third. In fact, I didn’t have to interact much with any of these systems after finding a good build early, which both highlights how ineffective it is at creating diverse play styles naturally, and how strong the combat is without all of that noise.