Where do I start with Adglobe and Live Wire’s Ender Magnolia: Bloom In The Mist? Everything that I said in my Early Access review is still 100% true, but there’s so much more about the game’s full release to talk about.
The story was amazing and both endings were excellent. Lilac awakens in an abandoned research facility, missing significant portions of her memory but knowing she was sent there for her safety by someone important to her. After a brief sojourn – during which she is helpless to defend herself from crazed husks – she finds a Homunculus, Nola, who likewise has gaps in her memory. Nola needs Lilac’s powers as an attuner to be able to recover and move, and Lilac needs Nola to fight the maddened Homunculi that have been attacking her on sight. The two explore the ruins, finding another Homunculus who was left behind in the facility, and the three escape to the under city where they begin looking for ways up to the upper city and answers two why Lilac and Nola were left behind and to fill the missing gaps in their memories.
Much of the plot of Ender Magnolia involves learning about the present day situation of the city, moving between numerous districts and outside the city to find the truth of what’s going on, what led to the current situation, and how to make it right. As in the Early Access version, there are 14 other Homunculi that can aid Lilac, though only ten of those are active combat types and only four can be equipped to actively help at one time. You can switch your active Homunculi and which of their three combat options to use (so a total of 30 different active combat options, split among primary, cooldown, autonomous, and pressure types). The other four Homunculi provide movement techniques such as a dash that can damage enemies, a ground point, wall climb, a grappling line, a swimming dash (that can also damage enemies), a super jump, and a horizontal super dash that you can only perform from a wall climb. Each movement option also comes with a lot of lore. Ender Magnolia is very heavy on the story, which is not to say it’s light on combat or exploration – far from it. The areas of Ender Magnolia are wildly diverse. From the abandoned lab you wake up in to the lower city, each area has a unique identity and enemy types to confront and confound you.
The bosses are brutal, amazing, and each one is very cinematic. Ender Magnolia is every inch a Souls-vania, and that means enemies hit hard and you don’t get much (if any) invincibility frames. To help combat this, in addition to her Homunculi allies, Lilac can equip one carapace (which primarily offer the ability to summon a shield at the proper time to cancel an enemy attack and trigger a counter, a heal, or other odd effect), two bangles (defensive items that provide direct bonuses to Lilac’s HP, attack, defense, HP recovery, etc.) and one totem (which do everything from provide a once per respite full heal to HP regen to short term stat boosts). These can also increase or decrease the number of healing actions available to Lilac, something actually necessary for fully completing the game. She can also equip relics, though only up to either her relic limit (a value that can be increased by finding or purchasing the right upgrade item) or up to 10 total. Even with all of these options at your disposal you will need to play carefully and try your best to attack from safe angles and between boss attack patterns, and learn when to unleash the Attuner Art super attacks as you can and will be destroyed by more than a few errant hits even up to the very end of the game. Fortunately, as with Ender Lilies, the penalty for dying is to be sent back to the last used respite. Any progress made is not erased on death, and the game’s fast travel mechanic does allow you to teleport to any respite you have come across, not just those you have used.
In the Early Access, there was one type of currency, materials, which are used to craft items. In the full version they’ve added scrap, which can be collected from breaking an enemy’s armor, either by hitting with a movement based homunculi like a falling shockwave attack, dash attack, or by causing the enemy to fall from a great height. They also added in fragments, which are used to unlock cosmetic items, concept art, and character and enemy models. The amount of fragments acquired when defeating an enemy actually changes based on the difficulty level, which brings me to one of the neatest quality of life changes in Ender Magnolia: the difficulty settings. Instead of being just a simple selection of easy, medium or hard difficulties (though these are available as difficulty presets), Ender Magnolia offers the opportunity to adjust the difficulty in a number of degrees. You can adjust enemy health totals, enemy damage, enemy attack and recovery speeds, you can even toggle on hardcore challenges like turning off healing actions, or making every enemy hit kill in a single blow for the extra impossible challenge. Changing most of these settings adjusts the amount of fragments you get from enemies; roughly up double or down by half depending on your difficulty choices. And this new difficulty gets stored as a “custom” difficulty until the next time you decide to change it.
There is a fascinating subversion of expectations required in order to actually unlock the second ending. Midway through the game you arrive at a junkyard, and much of the water in the area is corrupted, and while Lilac can swim through it, it will deal her damage to do so. The main plot requires navigating through a certain amount of this water in order to progress, but there is an offshoot that leads to a different section of the game and which you cannot survive the first time through – its solution makes you think outside of the box as it’s usually avoided in platformers, much less soulslikes.
You also need to enter the otherwise optional area from a third direction and navigate a series of narrow caves full of poison pits and fake ends to find the hidden path forward to access the true ending, and that’s actually where I encountered one of Ender Magnolia‘s few bugs. A common obstacle in the game are gates which must be destroyed with the falling slam shockwave attack. Some of these can be destroyed from any height and others require a larger height to drop from. But in this case, when using the slam attack, the obstacle vanished but did not count as destroyed, leading to a few minutes of confusion until discovering the ever so slightly offset secret passage which gave the tiny bit of extra height to actually destroy the obstacle and move forward.
Ender Magnolia is amazing. Pick it up as soon you can.
Tim reviewed Ender Magnolia: Bloom In The Mist on PC with a review code.
