Confession time: I have never played Dark Souls. Nor have I played any of its immediate kin. So, no Elden Ring, no Bloodborne, not even Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. My excuse is that, upon Dark Souls release, I was taking an enforced leave of absence from video games, so I missed all that initial buzz. And then, when I came back to the warm loving embrace of video gamedom, the thought of spending hours trying to beat just one boss kept me far away from the Souls-like phenomenon. How then, I wondered as Enotria: The Last Song booted up, would I get on with the latest entry in the bloated Souls-like genre?
Enotria stands out from its many Souls-like siblings in two ways. The first is its colour pallet. The aesthetic of Enotria is resoundingly light and bright. The action takes place beneath glorious azure skies, amongst scores of golden, gleaming sunflowers, through white-washed villas, and across resplendent sandy beaches. It’s a far cry from the dark, dank, and gloomy look usually associated with the genre.
The second way Enotria emerges from the pack is with its setting of Italian mythology. Like all brilliant mythologies, Italian folklore is totally bonkers and completely inaccessible and incomprehensible to those not already immersed in it. I couldn’t make head nor tail of the story, nor did I understand what was occurring with the characters at any given point. But when the world you’ve created is this wonderfully over-the-top, you can’t help but be carried away by the wilful insanity of it all. What I can tell you is that it involved the stage, acting, singing, lots of masks, and very big hats.
In comparison to its look and world building, when it comes to gameplay, Enotria is more traditional. Your silent protagonist explores, fights bosses, gathers weapons and equipment, discovers save points, and dies. A lot. To a Souls-like newbie like me, it’s all a bit much. There are so many systems, so many intricacies, that developers Jyamma Games clearly didn’t know where to even begin with communicating it all to the player. The tutorial is a near-endless stream of pop-up text boxes explaining everything and anything. You can barely move for the first hour of the game without another very long lump of text telling you in excruciating detail about whatever it is you just tried to do. Clearly., it’s very much a case of tell, don’t show.
As such, it takes a long time for Enotria to get going and find its feet. But slowly – very very slowly – the systems start to reveal themselves. Rather than different player characters, you can equip and wear masks to power your avatar with new abilities and skills. You can generously switch between several of these masks on a whim, giving ample opportunity to change up your play and discover some impressively long attack combos in the process. It’s a revelation, providing the opportunity to wipe out even the most tenacious of bosses with a devastating and lengthy series of strikes. Elemental attacks are also unusually interesting. Rather than the usual fire or ice ho-hum, how about imbuing your foe with drunkenness? Now that’s much more fun.
Whilst you can equip hundreds of different weapons, the fact is that a handful will be your go-to choice; offering everything you need to progress. Dodging is the name of the game here, which works well enough, though the attacks themselves lack a sense of impact and contact to truly thrill a player. Combat feels exactly as you’d expect, which is, in this context, completely fine.
Enotria really lets itself down when it comes to the jank. Locking on to foes is fiddly and forced. While the game struggles with characters trying to fight each other on different height levels, it just doesn’t like it and refuses to play. It’s a real problem when your foes seem obsessed with finding themselves stranded on small boulders, totally confused. In fact, enemy AI is generally dumb, and that’s being generous. I encountered issues with controller inputs too, the game choosing to stack up moves and do them all in one go, rather than when I tapped the button. A good patch or seven will definitely be required to smooth out the overall experience.