A Mask For Every Occasion: Enotria: The Last Song Review

Souls-likes take the best parts of the Dark Souls Series and bring them to life in a new and clever way. Lies of P houses a souls-like for Pinocchio, Ender Lilies created a souls-like around a metroidvania experience, and now Enotria: The Last Song utilizes Italian folklore to bring a souls-like to the center stage. You play as the maskless one, a voiceless character tasked with freeing the world and ending an endless play, the canovaccio.  Enotria is clever in its approach to adding new concepts in building a souls-like, while maintaining what makes a souls-like, a souls-like.  The addition of the story mode makes Enotria accessible to those who want a more relaxed time with the game, but be warned, the bosses will still knock you upside the head with their need for a sparring partner who can parry and keep up.

A Vibrant Souls-Like:

My time with Enotria: the last song was a mixture of joy, questioning the mechanics, being miffed over the bugs/crashes, fangirling over the bosses, and falling in love with the color palette used throughout the game. There‘s a lot that this game has to offer, the primary thing being the creation of a bright, immersive world. Enotria’s color palette is something I was awestruck over constantly. The vibrancy of this game is something I don’t typically see in a lot of Souls and Souls-likes. It was a Technicolor wonderland, and gorgeous down to the assets used for consumables and items found throughout the game. I hope more souls-likes in the future add more color to their world, because the contradistinction of a colorful world and a heavy story does mesh well together. The bosses were just as colorful and created an Alice in Wonderland aura that I got lost in, and much like a lucid dream, when the colors, parrying mechanics, and fun bosses collided, I felt unstoppable. There’s also a heavy-handed application of history that further cements that feeling of immersion. Enotria’s story is tied to Canovaccio, which is the Commedia Dell’arte (Italian comedy).  This was an early form of theater that was popular throughout Europe between the 16^th and 18^th centuries.  Commedia is characterized by the mask types of what was/is a part of society. A king that would abuse his power, the drunk parading amongst the streets, it's all making fun of the characters in life, creating a caricature of them, if you will. And yes, Arlecchino, Pantalone, and several of the characters we meet in Enotria are based on real people. Much like life, the canovaccio is about improv, seeing what happens, and not being afraid to exist in the moment. The story of existing in an endless canovaccio is witty, and in combination with reading all the notes, brings more of the story and its clever nature to life.

Peeling back what makes Enotria good reveals  a lot that needs work:

The mechanics in the game are a hit or miss; it truly depends on how you level up and what weapon you choose. Some of the weapons can be a bit clunky, which reminds me of Dark Souls, so that fits quite nicely.  There is a perfect balance, however, that allowed me to have the best of both worlds: a great weapon, ease of use, and a loadout that disgustingly demolished anything in my path. The loadouts, while a great addition and clever mechanic in certain circumstances, felt unneeded with how I play. Another thing that had great intentions behind it, but felt ultimately useless (even though you had to use it), were the reality glyphs and rifts.

There are symbols located throughout the world of Enotria to activate different pathways or to access hidden or previously closed-off areas. Then reality rifts create a more permanent pathway, while still being temporary until you leave the area. Both of these offer little to no substance in Enotria, and during my time, reality glyphs felt useless, while rifts are just a means to continue the game. Now, you may love the addition of the loadouts, as well as the reality glyphs and the rifts, and they might be crucial for some of you in the game. But a lot of the time, I felt that I was accidentally hitting the button for the different loadouts instead of an item or weapon, and I couldn’t get rid of previous loadouts from what I tested. And in the case of the Reality glyphs, I didn’t see as many of them in the late game. Most of them were earlier in the game, or they might be in spots that I may have missed entirely.  Reality glyphs just felt like an afterthought more than a steady mechanic.

If you can get the loadouts to work, and they work seamlessly, that’s what matters! The parrying in this game I found to be better than a lot of Souls-likes out there! Some bosses (and mini-bosses) require you to be incredibly precise with your parrying, while others you can skirt around the general area of precision. When you’re getting used to a new boss, like the champion of Veltha, or Captain Spaventa, you need to have incredibly accurate timing on your parrying.

When it came to the final boss, Arlecchino, it was a mixture of something new, a parrying hell, and Malenia. That boss was the best and most finicky I’ve ever experienced; it was entirely too reliant on parrying a lot of the time. Sometimes in the third phase, my hits wouldn’t land, and his “ultimate,” if you will, was a more caffeinated version of Malenia’s waterfowl dance.

What makes Enotria  a Souls-like:

A soul's like is comprised of a few things:

- A bonfire, or a safe place/hub for me to escape to. - Relentlessly dying to bosses, even to common enemies. - Environmental storytelling, - NPCs around the world - A boss and their move sets, and needing to memorize them. -Reclaiming lost “souls” -An openness to the world with things to discover. Enotria has a lot of what gives a souls like that a beautiful kick to the ego, or ya know, something else that hurts. It has depth in how it approaches notes and characters, and parts of the world, but falls flat when it comes to the description of the items, which is key to the experience of a Souls game, amongst other things. One of the other main things where I feel it lacks in the souls-like department is the NPCs.  I saw a few of them scattered around, but no vendors, other than one that unlocked when I got to the Theater of Masks, Mecenate. In story mode, things were a tad easier, but only in terms of the common enemies. The story bosses and mini-bosses proved to be a challenge at points. The term Souls-like can be approached subjectively, to what you think makes or breaks a souls-like. Overall, Enotria feels to me like it’s an experimental souls-like.  There’s so uniqueness in the blood of this game, but it’s also mixed with qualities of the Souls game.

 Enotria does carry bits of the soul's DNA; a lot of what a soul's like is its environmental storytelling, and Enotria is excellent at that through notes and certain NPCs, alongside Plucinella. There are also a lot of optional bosses that are incredibly challenging, the exception being the secret boss, Plucinella. I beat him in one go, and it was an underwhelming boss battle to say the least.  Enotria provides that openness, but it is also incredibly linear, with a good amount of backtracking needed for progression.

You get a crash, you get a crash, everyone gets a crash:

The game would have been better, honestly, if the crashes weren’t so terrible. I had crashes from early on in the game to right before the end, to the very end before the credits.           The integrity of the game's core (story, setting, etc.) is unchanged, but the fact of the matter is that some significant bugs could hinder progress. One bug, for example, almost made it impossible for me to complete the game, where you needed to pull levers to drain the water.

One of the drain levers wasn’t working, and in one of the sections that were supposed to be filled with water, it looked as if there was no water and that I could walk through it.  When in reality, passing through the area would render me dead in a few steps. Restarting the game a few times helped, but it shouldn’t have to come to that. The way a game runs is crucial to how the game is perceived and, most importantly, played.  For a lot of people, it won’t matter how good the story is, or the vibrancy of the world, or even its bosses. If the game doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, it's an unneeded barrier for people to try to get through to enjoy the game.

Enotria: The Last Song will be overlooked because of its spotty performance and bugs:

I went on a journey of expansive lore, a story mode that’s still punishing, weapons that can do some serious damage, and a beautiful world. Enotria: The Last Song is a charming souls-like, built on wit, colorful writing, and art that pushed through to my soul. Through all the bugs, crashes, spotty performance, and near-not-completing the game, I felt as if Enotria won’t get the recognition it deserves because of the performance issues and bugs.  I can see past the problems to a beautiful art piece, and I know that won’t be the case for a lot of people. Yes, I think the games that are delivered to us should work, but we should also be forgiving of those issues if we can make it to the finish line of a game with those problems still present.  Enotria is a perfect example of not judging a game by the bugs, but by the content of the game.