Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights (2021)

This game is both more than and less than a Hollow Knight clone. The main drawbacks are: It's a little too inspired by hollow knight, the first part of the game feels boring with little "metroid-vania" aspects, the difficulty jump is too harsh mid way through the game, most of the pickups feel mandatory given the games steep difficulty curve, and the level ups hardly ever feel meaningful. However, the game does really come into it's own towards the mid point, and once you unlock all the abilities it becomes a lot more engaging to play, and even though the combat difficulty can be frustrating it's still pretty fun

8.25/10

Et tu, Ender Lilies? I've just spend what it felt like 1 hour going through an area full of Sliksonesque challenge rooms. And in this game they are worse than in Silksong because when you die, you need to do them again. Just utter hell.

Those relatively small rooms filled with enemies made me realise that one big problem with the game is how the game shows attacks. See, since you play as this smol helpless girl your attacks are actually spirits of former bosses that attack for you. But because they are former enemies they look very similar to other enemies: muddy, brown and rotten. So when there's a lot of stuff on screen it's very hard to know what's you and what's some other horrible abomination. They should've changed the sprites for your attacks to be more distinct. It would've fit with the narrative and made the gameplay much better. But I suspect they didn't have the budget for alternate sprites.

I've been in that liminal space between games lately.

Bilewater drained me of any motivation to continue with Silksong, although it's still installed in case I forget and want to pick it up again.

I went back to The Witcher 3. I had to start a whole new game because I remembered fuck all about the game. It's not sticking with me. I like the world but the gameplay doesn't feel good. I know that the game wants me to "prepare" before engaging with monsters by studying their weaknesses and concocting oils and traps, but I can beat any encounter with light attack + dodge. Besides, the process of alchemy is not enjoyable. The UI is terrible and even when I try to do things "the right way" I realise that I don't have the correct plant and there is no indication of where to get it.

I then tired Blasphemous, since it was like 85% off a few days ago. The pixel art and atmosphere are great but there is something about the movement that is very unsatisfying. It feels stiff and clunky.

Blasphemous reminded me that I had dropped Ender Lilies months ago. Last night I picked it up again. I had a better time. I think the soundtrack is carrying the game. I might stick to that one a bit more.

Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights offers a gorgeous art style that eloquently juxtaposes delicacy with brutality. Witnessing Lily stumble through broken, rotten environments evokes a Precious Moments character navigating the Undead Burg from Dark Souls... in a good way, as absurd as that sounds. The music is very pretty as well and keeps the entire experience feeling hazy and dreamlike in spite of the dark visuals. I just wish I had much else good to say about my experience with it.

Beneath the visuals I found Ender Lilies pretty limp through and through. I place a lot of value in level design and combat (when applicable) when it comes to a metroidvania, and this failed to deliver on either.

The level design is incredibly bland. Most rooms feel like a series of platforms and enemies were dropped in and then the developer moved on. Sometimes there're opportunities to use movement abilities you unlock later, which is meant to encourage backtracking but when every room looks the same it's tough to recall where exactly to backtrack to when the opportunity arises. I didn't see any particularly creative uses of these abilities either. They have their one or two standard uses and that's kind of it.

The map helps with this backtracking issue a bit by showing roughly where rooms connect to each other and whether all items within have been gathered or not. Yet it falls far short of staples of the genre like Super Metroid, which came out nearly 30 years prior. This is because the map is a set of rectangles with lines drawn between them with little to no respect for the actual size and shape of the rooms they represent or where in the room you actually are.

Combat is oddly slow paced and clunky feeling. Lily feels rigid when attacking, lacking the fluidity that would make it feel more fun and exciting. That can be a design decision. Bit hard to tell if it's deliberate here. This was a complaint I also had with Blasphemous but what made that combat work better for me was that the hitboxes for dodges felt tight and responsive. Attacks also had a palpable weight and punchiness to them, communicated both in their varying speed and accompanying SFX. Every one of Lily's attacks sound like someone dropping or kicking a ball of aluminum foil. Hopefully if I pushed further into the game enemies would provide more variety and by extent flavor than I saw but their attacks all felt pretty samey as far as I got.

I was intending to get further but every time I booted up the game I just felt no motivation to continue whatsoever because there wasn't really anything I was enjoying. I can appreciate how the game wears its influences on its sleeve. Some of those games are my all time favorites. But I don't feel that Ender Lilies does them justice or pulls from them in any way that feels meaningful/interesting.

The style is growing on me, although I still find it a bit too murky and indistinct, it has its charm and it works well to set the mood.

What I to love, surprisingly, is the music. It's calming but melancholic and melodic.

I also love how it changes subtly in different parts of each map, or as response to being in certain places or going through menus. It's fantastic.

What I still is not growing on me is the contact damage and the aggressively tracking ranged attacks.

I'll admit: It took a bit of time for me to warm up to this game's Souls-adjacent combat, but once I did I found it to be a rather rich experience, and one of the better indie Metroidvanias I've played in recent memory—up there, for me, with Hollow Knight and the two Ori games. Some of the music I found to be less than engaging (I really did not like the town-area track, and at least one track feels almost verbatim ripped from FFX), but the art is stunning, the item collection and abilities are deeply satisfying, and the story was compelling enough that I wanted to see it through to 100% completion. Not sure if I feel any need to tackle a new game + or any of the boss rush stuff that opens at the end, but then those things rarely appeal outside of something like Chrono Trigger, where the added endings made it worth repeat journeys.

Solid, through and through. Definite recommend.

Sometimes the art alone is worth it. Visually, this game is often stunning, and it does a good job of upping that vibe with subtly good music.

The above must be emphasized as the game's greatest strength. Unfortunately, while it feels fun enough to play early on, the gameplay only truly comes into its own five or so hours in. By the end of the game, the combat is downright fun. The nature of the combat allows for fantastic combos and enemies are just challenging enough. You'll feel confident such that your hand moves across your controller like an overly excited spider.

The story is almost... almost!... quite moving. It could have either used more subtle writing in some key moments or another pass by the translation team. Something. There's a particular relationship that should have been played up more given how much time you spend together.

Don't be afraid of the four out of five review here. I wouldn't even say play this after Hollow Knight, the most obvious comparison and current gold standard of this genre. Ender Lilies has its own vibes and is worth your time in its own way. Pretty and poignant.

The game on the surface, feels almost like another Hollow Knight. The story is interesting, the artwork and atmosphere are dark, brooding, and compelling. The combat mechanics of having multiple spirits you can equip is a great idea with really cool animations.

All that is solid, but the level design is a nightmare. First, the map, one of the most important elements to a smooth metroidvania experience. This goes the route of simple blocks, like old school Metroids. Luckily, it will tell you what rooms still hold secrets and which you have completed.

But as you explore the individual rooms, they all feel so poorly designed. The scale of the room is not even hinted at on the map - you could be in a literal small box of a room, or a 6x4 giant room and wouldn’t even know it. The actual content of each room feels totally randomly generated. No room has a specific feeling or design to it, they all feel aimlessly created in a hurry. The upgrades are scattershot and often just found in a random pot somewhere.

Once I realized how purposeless the level design was, I bailed. There was never a fun momentum of exploration, just a frustrating checklist of trying to find whatever you missed in a totally confusing layout with seemingly no intention.

But again, the art is good, music is hit or miss, some of the ideas deserved better, so ymmv. But things like map/level design/exploration are too important to me to want to finish this one.

Ender Lilies: Quietus (I think it means nap-nap time) of the Knights is the definitive 2D Metroidvania title to demonstrate that if you want a job done right, you have to hire an amnesiac loli to do it.

The basic gist of the game is simple enough: waking up in a strange ceremonial bed, you are a wee little albino girl trapped in a medieval city that has apparently just undergone the zombie apocalypse. Although you personally are a harmless little flower child, you luck out and come across the friendly ghost of a dead knight who agrees to assist you with all that murder you can't do yourself. Instead, you have the ability to purify the souls of the shambling undead horrors you come across, which is very convenient all things considered and couples perfectly with your new pal's flesh-chopping prowess. Wielding your ghastly guardian as some kind of battle puppet, you must explore, collect, grind, and boss battle your way to some sort of resolution. Escaping the city, perhaps? Or dispelling the plague? Only time will tell...

In order to succeed, you must explore a delightfully gloomy series of castles, dungeons, forests, and other assorted biomes, slaughtering a variety of Cronenberg-esque monstrosities and slowly piecing together the story of just what went wrong here. As you defeat bosses and minibosses, you purify their souls and gain new spooky spectral pals to tag along and fight by your side. Coupled with solid boss design and a pretty respectable difficulty level, you get a game that challenges and motivates you to mess around with your toolset to overcome tough fights, rather than just making you want to throw the controller at the wall or (even worse) letting you steamroll everything with just your standard swordboi.

The game doesn't take too many risks innovating on the Metroidvania formula - you've got your double jumps and your sequence breaks and your crumbly walls that really should've been built to code - but it performs all the necessary steps well, creating a fun world to romp around in that feels expansive and connected without being too big and too bland. A big part of that appeal is generated through the visuals, utilizing a lovely realistic art style that makes common settings relatable and alien ones hella unsettling. Music and sound work out great too; the soundtrack feels at times like it'd fit just fine in a Castlevania, and all the various squicks and schlorps of the dead come across just right.

The plot is a smidge unoriginal, blatantly pulling major themes from a variety of From Software titles, but it's all retold well and with real affection for the characters. Expect to care for your silent protagonist a whole lot more than you expected. On top of that, it goes out of its way to avoid the worst sins a Metroidvania can commit (<3 <3 <3 early double jump and convenient fast travel). Nothing in Ender Lilo & Stitch is going to be life-changing, but frankly it's still a jolly good experience that I have no regrets diving into. Four stars and change.

the good:

• interesting story and lore. the plot is unfolding quite well and the lore is told through small dialogues (no dub), well drawn cutscenes (no dub) and collectibles with flavor texts attached to 'em.
• the combat is fluid, balanced and with a decent learning curve. what stands out are the spirits (weapons and skills). lily doesn't use weapons in a common form, instead you're gonna use the purified spirit companions acting as a weapon or special skill. overall there is a great variance and depth. so basically you're having 6 skills in total to use while roaming the blighted lands, split on two hotbars. ofc some are better than other (eleine is insane), but there are basically no must have spirits. feel free to use whatever you prefer.
• controls are responsive and very intuitive. might require a couple of hours of practise, to utilize both of the skill sets (2 skill-sets, 3 skills per set) to perfection.
• the balancing is on point. ender lilies is kinda easy and accessible at first, but still challenging and the difficulty curve constantly goes up while delving through the blighted lands. the game's never unfair, but if you don't play properly and use your skills well, you'll probably have a tough time around. enemies can feel spongy at times.
• boss fights are quite challenging and unforgiving with fast and devastating attacks. the bosses itself are playing completely different from each other even tho the mini-bosses are just bigger versions of normal enemies, with a couple of special attacks. the "real" bosses getting tougher once you progress through the game. ulv was like really insane.
• ender lilies is an artistic masterpiece. the game is atmospheric and has some wonderful aesthetics. a well drawn artstyle with eye-catching details. ender lilies is a huge pleasure to the eye.
• loved the outstanding soundtrack. very well done by the classical japanese indie group "mili". atmospheric and melancholic vibes fitting the game's theme perfectly.
• dying is forgiving and not punishing at all. you won't lose anything and that's a huge plus for me, since im kinda sick of all the cheap "souls"-mechanics out there and the unnecessary pain of permanent loss.
• many important qol features like fast travelling in between checkpoints, free travelling to the last checkpoint from anywhere without any punishment (besides enemy respawning), decent mini-map for exploration and gathering all those collectibles and upgrades (for example: map tiles getting colored differently if you've found everything in the area).
• exploration is fun. many movement abilities and you can "abuse" combat abilities as well for moving around and doing some of the harder platforming part. there is huge amount of secrets, collectibles and things to explore.

the debatable:

~ ender lilies is a very difficult game like hollow knight, bloodstained and others games of this kind, so you can die easily even outside of boss fights to basic enemies and will die constantly all over the game. the world is relentless and will punish you over and over.

~ despite having some qol features to prevent getting lost, it still can and will occur due to the innate world design and nature of the game. so keep that in mind before playing. it's an o.g. metroidvania after all. this can get quite frustrating on higher difficulties if you have to fight.

~ if you can't handle areas like blight town from souls with constant ticks of chip damage, keep in mind the very last zone of this game is a huge poison trap paired with hard hitting enemies and fights in the blight.

the bad:

• attacks feel like they have no impact at all. don't get me wrong, they're totally fine balancing and damage wise, but attacking feels kinda unsatisfying unlike other games, where you can "feel and hear the devastating impact of your hits". imo not a big con tho.

rating: 10/10

trivia:

• it took me about 20 hours to 100% the game.

Guys this game is NOT Hollow Knight with its:

1. Story about a blight ruining an entire community of people
2. Resting spots which are the only places that you can change your stats and abilities
3. Relics that you can get, however, are only able to equip a few of them due to the limited amount of slots you have
4. Limited amount of times that you can heal before going back to a resting spot
5. Fighting corrupted versions of the denizens as bosses of which each have their own backstory and role within the world that is almost always sad
6. Final boss where you just fight vessal your predecessor who is housing the infection blight
7. Double jump, wall climb, long invincible dash and multiple other abilities

Again, this game is NOT HOLLOW KNIGHT

As the temperature outside rapidly drops day by day, so rises my frequency of game completions. The latest is Ender Lilies, a Metroidvania game whose strengths are not always strong enough to overpower its flaws and frustrations, but which generally speaking is an engaging and memorable adventure. With cool ideas drawn specifically from "Igavania" and Souls games, its challenging but fun combat, engrossing atmosphere, and convenient design kept me playing for many hours at a time.

I love how in this game, you'll very often go somewhere before you have the ability needed to complete it, but you almost always at least get something of value that will make the rest of your time easier. Then being able to warp right back to the last of many checkpoints and fast travel wherever else you want speaks to this game's attempt to trim some of the fat out of exploration in these kinds of games and focus on the fun part. And even if you die on the way, there is no rush back to retrieve any currency or XP. I appreciated these convenience-focused design decisions for a game that's already so hard at times, as they really keep the forward momentum going and made it more easily digestible than an admittedly cooler game like Hollow Knight, that I nonetheless found too tedious to complete.

When the game does get frustrating though, it gets pretty seriously frustrating. One area I cleared in the second half of the game seemed to be the start of the game's downfall, as it focused heavily on long, arduous combat gauntlets instead of any kind of interesting exploration. After this point, I noticed the levels started to feel particularly tedious with hazards and enemies with outrageous damage output. Rather than explore every little corner like I did in the first half of the game, I just wanted to be done with it at many points later on.

To get more specific, many encounters and areas were fun on paper, but too often in that second half of the game, their challenge leaned too much into tests of endurance for my liking. Several instances reminded me of why Sekiro's multi-phase final boss was so painful; it was fun and the individual parts were well-designed, but it was such a long, grueling gauntlet that you'd "get the point" long before you're able to actually complete it. I think most of these problematic battles would feel totally fine if they were slightly shorter, the obscene damage from making contact with enemies was reduced, and some of your flashier attack animations were toned down to improve visibility of what the enemies are doing.

Speaking of those attacks, one thing in this game that I liked was that similarly to Igavania games' soul mechanic, you capture spirits of "purified" bosses and minibosses to gain new movement and combat abilities. There is quite a variety of options available, and I found myself changing things up regularly to adapt to new situations, resulting in a totally different but still fun combat feel. Thankfully, you get access to several pretty useful abilities really early on, avoiding the pitfall of these kinds of games taking a while to get going.

Another thing the game does well is its atmosphere, aided by some dark and rainy visuals and a soft piano-driven soundtrack. The art style was something I was a bit unsure about going into the game, but I ended up loving it. The idea of controlling this maiden whose attacks come entirely from momentary summons of fallen enemies is really cool to watch in motion, and it's all animated and timed out in a weighty way that looks and feels good. Individual rooms in the middle of levels can feel somewhat nondescript at times in both their look and level design, but most of the bigger landmark moments nail the aesthetics.

Story-wise, the game plays out in a similar storytelling style to Dark Souls, where there is not necessarily the strongest core driving narrative underlying everything you do, but individual areas, enemies, and parts of history are filled in with nice narrative beats fleshing out their relations with one another. I would not strongly recommend this game on the basis of story if you consider that a huge criterion, but it is decent overall because of those good smaller moments.

As evidenced by all this text, this game ultimately became a somewhat conflicting experience, where I had many hours of amazing fun, and a couple other hours of absolute pain. The core principles behind the game always kept driving me forward and (mostly) saved me from total despair, though, as I always knew I would be a few rooms away from that checkpoint or lever I needed to hit. It walks a fine line with the pace and difficulty, and I think it does fall off that line a few times, but it mostly hits the mark and delivers a memorable and fun experience.

I don’t want to sound too harsh, as a Metroidvania glutton I enjoyed my time with Ender Lillies, at a time where a lot of us are eagerly awaiting Hollow Knight: Silksong, a game that attempts to do similar things fairly successfully is bound to be warmly received.

From the start though, I’ve had this nagging feeling that this game was missing something and the reason it’s hard to pinpoint is that the devs are good enough that it’s almost never one major thing. The creators of Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knight, a title so generic it becomes offensive, understand what makes a Metroidvania work. If you go left at the start, as most Metroid fans are wont to do, you will be greeted with a locked door that will nag at you for 90% of the game and that exaltation you feel when you finally open it is exactly what the genre is all about.

So if you are in the mood for a decent Metroidvania, read no further and go play Ender Lilies. If you are looking for the next Hollow Knight on the other hand, read on, or stay away from this game.

So what makes a Hollow Knight so great? Maybe it depends on who you ask, but for me it’s a combination of true exploration, amazing level design and art direction, areas that feel different enough but part of a whole, great gameplay and combat; satisfying new abilities that make you want to immediately revisit previous areas. I could go on and on, but let’s focus on these for now. Ender Lilies never feels great, the areas are fine, but not memorable. It’s somewhat challenging but not consistently enough to give you a sense of accomplishment, the bosses are pretty good, but don’t feel especially inspired. There is also a readability problem where the fights become a sloppy combination of your flashy attacks and the bosses flashy attacks and you can’t tell when to dodge. The exploration is maybe the most problematic, because the game color codes the map, orange if completed and blue if you need to find something, there are also red dots on the sides if you need to find a new path. It’s helpful, but inelegant and also provides this checklist feel instead of the more refined and mysterious exploration of Hollow Knight. Another apt comparison would be the checklist nature of an Assassin’s Creed type open world map vs Breath of the Wild’s organic and explorative one.

The game completely falls apart in the final section, a poisonous uninviting mess of an area that makes you reminisce fondly on Dark Souls’ Blighttown. It’s impossible not to take damage, and you are basically invited to rush through a rushed through environment instead of exploring it, an experience that mirrors development perhaps? It certainly feels that way.

Ultimately the bottom line is that Ender Lilies is unoriginal, somewhat generic and if you’ve played Hollow Knight, Blasphemous, Salt and Sanctuary or a SoulsBorne you’ve played a far better version of what’s on offer here. That doesn’t mean the game is without merits, it’s competently made for the most part and will definitely scratch the Metroidvania itch if you are a fiend like me.

7.5/10