Ender Lilies is a sidescrolling action RPG platformer from studios Live Wire and Adglobe, published by Binary Haze Interactive that exited early access this week and also released on Switch, with other console versions to follow. It slots into the vaguely defined "search action" genre of exploring and charting a virtual space being its main draw--though any time spent with it reveals its other additional priorities in clear fashion.
In Land's End, unnatural rain never ceases. The remnants of a past kingdom stand silently at its mercy, with only the horrifically mutated and cursed previous residents speaking to its former days of prosperity, built on the bodies of ruthless colonization and native displacement. Lily awakens in a remote church, unsure of herself and everything else, alone and not alone, as a nameless spirit beckons her to venture into the ruins and discover what role she may yet play in putting the rain-spawned Blight to its final rest, and learning what she can of her own origins and the spirits that haunt the land.
Ender Lilies is derivative to its core. You can find any number of primary influences in its aesthetics, storytelling, tone, design tics, play systems and audio and connect the dots directly--anything from the From lineage of dark fantasy that in turn has shaped works like Bombservice's Momodora/Minoria family of games to indie heavyweights like Hollow Knight. The succession of overlapping inspirations utilized in the endless permutations the genre regularly experiences get to be so densely iterative that making these distinctions is an eventual fool's gambit, unless the points of commonality are strong enough to support such an observation, and with Ender Lilies they invariably are: you cannot mistake this specific combination of elements for anything else, and it's only in the granular expressions of it that any notable differences are established.
Much is made about game mechanics defining the Souls family of games; discussions of it invariably orient around a for/against refrain regarding the games's difficulty and the experiential aspects of personal play, but just as important and influential a facet has been how these games have approached telling their stories and what manner of narratives they have even been. Ender Lilies subscribes to the lessons taught by the pedigree as those other derivatives have: there is a world of neverending, bottomless bleakness, touched by tragedy at every turn. This is by far the most tiresome aspect of this entire subgenre, in how committed they all are to a sense of performative sorrow and how it defines them; emotional significance and import reached for through impressing upon the player that things matter because everything is sad. As in reality, overwhelming grief quickly becomes draining, one-note, and farcical in its attempts to engender a spectrum of reactions and emotive states in the audience, and it reaches particular levels of rote and inadvertent tragicomedy in here when every major boss is followed up with their personally wounding life stories and deathly circumstances in summary. I am not especially incensed by any of this as Ender Lilies's committed aesthetics and tone already claim a kind of refreshing unsubtlety to everything it does, so in a sense the supercharged misery and bittersweet shadings work toward its holistic goal--it is just a funny vestige and hallmark of this chosen subgenre to toil in so consistently, and so deserves a degree of levity to a point the game is not willing to grant itself. For its individual qualities, the game does distinguish itself in that opposed to the template of an anonymous wanderer who stands in as a neutral point-of-view and vehicle for the player's interactions with a ruined world, a silent witness to its testament, Lily's journey is more personally driven, mute and amnesiac even as she is, accompanied by a mouthpiece companion foil: the story's heart eventually centers on her and those immediately related to her, framing the genre standard differently from the usual bewildered and highly interpretive wanderings of ambiguous nobodies.
For all its accidental pratfalling pomp, the sequentially overcome and soliloquizing boss figures do serve a distinct purpose in underlining just what kind of game Ender Lilies is: a damn hard one. This isn't the kind of bouncy jaunt one undertakes with the expectation that the game will unravel at the slightest tug; it gives way only when taken as seriously as its atmospherics try their best in creating a reference point for through associative semiotics, and so the sense of cohesion carries much of what would otherwise come across as a forced attempt at adversity picking up the slack for aspects of the design that didn't follow through. You have to master the evasive tumble and dash, as the game's fundamental design entirely relies on the invincibility frames it grants; it's not a supplemental bonus to leave by the wayside as a curiosity. You similarly can internalize the parry and counter timings built into Lily's central toolset and the specific spirits that utilize them, as practically every enemy telegraphs their attacks with a flashing gleam of their eyes--the game acknowledges what would in other games be niche tactics as something that can be used proactively and universally, for nearly every kind of opponent, no matter the scale, and the rewards upon success granted in turn. After a relatively gentle start, Ender Lilies builds and builds upon its own mechanics in a way that expands the player's options at a rapid pace until the identifying and execution of optimal strategies per a given opponent becomes the bedrock upon which its challenge rests. Lily is not a static set of skills to be perfected as she is, nor is she an empty frame to slot any kind of micro-adjustable player preference into--if there's a commonality to be drawn here, it would be Order of Ecclesia or perhaps even Bloodborne's sense of creative restraint in how they shape their protagonists; every tool acquired is unique and possessing of massive ramifications on play as they all fulfill different situational needs and remain equally as valid to utilize and thrilling to experiment and synergize with. That is how every boss, despite the wall many will invariably pose, becomes such a compelling playground for experimentation where sad battle idiots play at fighting game footsies, as anything can work... but the proverbial Achilles's heels are there to be intuited according to personal affinities to a playstyle and the opponent's particular quirks; more than once a despairing battle completely flipped its power dynamics as a change of mentality over execution mastery was prioritized.
That feeling of eking out informal weaknesses in the adversary and the subsequent gaining of their spirits as allies and abilities frames the game as a sort of ghoulish Mega Man derivative in addition to everything else that's at play; Lily's starting armament only consists of the narratively focal Umbral Knight who provides solid, reliable all-rounder fundamentals to play in their quick, decently ranged melee combinations and remains a stalwart to default to throughout should diversification prove untenable. Everything else must be fought and won through combat, which serves as a preview of said internalized abilities and also ties those skills more personally to the world and Lily herself, as they are not just weapons to be picked up along the way but the lingering detritus of passed-on individuals whose regrets and hopes Lily takes upon herself while allowing the spirits themselves to work toward their unfulfilled wishes through assisting her. Lily becomes a vessel for a host of spirits of varying social standing and positions in life, but she accepts them all and they form an odd solidarity around her, manifesting when the abilities of each are called upon, and also when she remains idle or takes a rest in the game's many impromptu break areas of checkpoint-functioning respite. You can call them Stands if the pop cultural allusion makes the concept any more palatable, but the difference is fairly crucial in that Lily is not calling upon any externally projected internal spiritual or mental strength--she is, adversely, quite frail as a child in a hostile world, all her combat prowess borrowed from the supernatural forces at her call, with their roots in the deceased others as their source. The narrative and visual design underlines this divide, as every exploratory power-up gained is not something Lily does herself with her own body's physicality--instead it is the respective spirit that scales the wall or glides along the ground, with Lily held in their arms or hanging on for dear life to get where she must. Similarly, it is Lily who bears the cost of "purifying" the spirits and easing their pain, as the process is little more than a transfer of those burdens onto her as a substitute--a change which is visually represented in the setting's resident scourge, the Blight, coming to encroach upon her body and slowly taking it over. It becomes the narrative fulcrum of the story told: the burden of relieving others of their pain, and the cost of that suffered by the emancipator.
If Lily is, whether symbolically or practically, relieving an ailing world of the sickness that permeates it, it's the game's resulting responsibility to create investment and motivation in having her reach that goal through the player's actions. As a setting to linger in, Land's End is dreary to a fault, but it is not devoid of beauty, captivation and even awe. It's a game dealing in grand scale and minute detail both, the size of the environments contrasting with the painstaking attention paid to its individual components despite their breadth and diversity. Palette is not ignored, even as the overall presentation favours muted, grey-tinted colours, and the game's relationship to grim violence is more of an informed attribute than an ongoing element to consider; the encountered grotesqueries occasionally unsettle through conceptual basis but the game does not relish in dispatching them in morbid splatter as a matter of course--instead more of a suggestive red haze to punctuate the action is employed. The visuality is gotten enough mileage of to sustain the explorative backbone of the adventure, as the individual areas often contain many criss-crossing passages between adjoined rooms, and so topographical or scenery-related landmarks often guide one's way in charting the locations, in addition to the conscientious mapwork that denotes the connecting passages according to an unexplored/explored binary, the same of which is applied to the rooms themselves via colour-coding and whether or not they still contain undiscovered unique items. The game gives all the tools to make exploration "friendly" in this way, but through the strength of the layouts, their spatial configurations and the manner of hiding secrets within, even with these signposts interaction with the explorative core of play never descends into a thoughtless checklist or a detachment from the environment in front of one's eyes. A navigationally dense game structure like this that calls upon backtracking, optionally and otherwise, must always also be aware of that multilayered purpose of its environmental level design, and some examples in the genre are particularly lacking in this as they force repeated engagement with already solved stopgaps as a necessity of retracing one's steps--Ender Lilies never devolves into this as fast travel is integrated very quickly and Lily's developing mobility and toolset together with the style of encounter and level design allow for expedient traversal and plain ignoring of those elements of the environment that are no longer relevant to her current circumstances and goals.
The biggest standout element that might come to define Ender Lilies is its music. It comes to it through the work of the indie music group Mili, previously heard in a game context in various rhythm games, but this is the first game they've scored in its entirety, in a way that doesn't feel like a visiting guest artist stopping by to leave their imprint on an otherwise unrelated work, but in how the audio coheres to the atmosphere and identity of the game as seamlessly as any other design element does. In essence you get a prevalent emphasis on melancholy piano backing, but not in a way that verges on monotony, as tracks can also go toward the ambient, noodle around with synths, pluck at strings or even incorporate subtle vocals in just about the only expression of the term the game allows for. Tonally, the weaknesses are the same as the rest of the game's in implementation, as most boss tracks (multi-staged as the boss patterns themselves are) go toward the "every boss BGM must be an aural tragedy" end of the emotive scale in the discussed consistency that it can't help but become funnier than intended in practice. Still, the sheer vision of how a game like this should sound is so strongly evocative at every moment that even the indulgements feel at peace with themselves, and full of thoughtful integration, like every save point hosting an alternate, subdued version of the surrounding environmental track. The decision to use a professional group accustomed to working with each other results in some really distinct utilization of vocals, such as one particular one that made me jump and thereafter glance about myself, anxious and unnerved, in how effectively it used nonstandard vocals to impress foreboding. Even the game's final parting mood is crystallized in the vocal credits theme, which is a concept surely familiar to many, but historically been notable in how at odds with the rest of a game's aural texture and nature they have been--Ender Lilies reserves its musical coda as a completely earned and incrementally developed culmination of everything the game was atmospherically and narratively working toward, as the lyrical component is not only coherently constructed but cogent of theme and tone.
It's somewhat paradoxical to try and compose any ultimate assessment about Ender Lilies; it's built to specifications so exactly in some ways that it feels like there's not much to say at all, but then it does everything it attempts with such clear intent that it's hard not to get swept up in its performance. And maybe there's still room for exceptionality even within these borders: as a new game made by a new studio, it distinguishes itself in featuring the story of a girl, and ultimately women, who are not sexualized inappropriately to any degree along the way. It's a bittersweet thing to make note of, because even as that ethos that so many others fail is maintained, it's also not free of other kinds of exploitation as much of the thematics and imagery are built around the tragic suffering of saintly women, and so it perpetuates the conventions of its genre in matching gendered fragility and symbolic "purity" with heartbreak to create drama. Lilies are also charged with related symbolism and while the game leaves opportunities for a queer reading for parts of its cast, it never commits to anything and presents a boringly heteronormative world; in this context, I'm somewhat relieved a textual connection between queerness and the invariably tragic content was not explored more than suggested. It's a world and story where everything is bad for everyone all the time but women are cast in the objectified roles of endurers and sufferers more than others, and so it's fortunate that a sense of deliverance, relief and solidarity is eventually reached for as a narrative and thematic culmination, again in light contrast to the entropic drudgeries of its peers. I would not so much call it salvation for a genre that often feels like it's consuming itself, but it may just be the first glimmers of a daybreak beyond a gloomy downpour.
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Practical miscellanea: it took me around 15 hours to reach the proper credits, and then about three hours more to reach the "true" ending and 100% completion. It's way longer than the genre standard, but not quite as bloated as some; at any rate, I didn't feel exhausted by the end of it, which probably says a lot on its own. Performance docked on Switch is honestly pretty spotty, it practically microstutters constantly as almost any environmental complexity or presence of enemies at all disrupts the framerate, so those sensitive to that should probably investigate the game on other platforms if possible; I still didn't really mind it too much despite being very aware of it as I played. I would recommend it even in its least technically stable form.
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