I’m going to preface this review with an ugly truth: I suck at Soulsbornes, Soulslikes, and other entries in the genre. My twitch reflexes are still good, but they’re not that good anymore (if they ever were). I can appreciate the artistry, I can appreciate the degree of difficulty, but all too often, it’s a lot of me slamming my face into a wall and dying badly. If I ever get isekai’d into a video game, a Soulsborne is not the one I want to get sucked into. As such, I didn’t get nearly as far as I would have liked. With that said, I have played a number of Soulsbornes and Soulslikes over the years. And of those experiences, Enotria: The Last Song stands out as quite possibly one of the most tooth-grinding and gratuitously insulting titles I’ve played in a long time.
Enotria takes place in a world bound by a magical stage script known as the Canovaccio. The demiurge of Music created humans, who in turn created the gods as a side effect of trying to plumb the mysteries of existence through the arts. The gods were no more perfect or fallible than their creators. This led to a war between humans and gods, which ended with the humans winning. A small cabal of particularly adept humans created the Canovaccio, an expression of a perfect world which trapped everything in existence as a play, and all the creatures within it as actors. Everybody has a role to play, represented by an ornate mask (similar to ones found in comedia dell’arte in the real world), and they do so ceaselessly. But the Universe for some reason allows the creation of a “Maskless One,” a being without a role or a mask. It’s up to this freak of existence (meaning you) to try and break the spell.
From a visual perspective, Enotria absolutely nails the aesthetics. The environments are strongly reminiscent of Renaissance Era Italy. The various enemies are all done up in distinctive masks. Weapons range from the practical to the highly ornate to the incredibly stylized. There are a number of elaborate effects and clever uses of the Unreal Engine’s capabilities. And there are all manner of little nods to the theme of “all the world’s a stage” with bits and pieces of set dressing scattered every which way. It’s slightly surrealist, and certainly sets a mood. However, it’s not quite perfect. Occasionally, certain visual indicators for special areas will not be present. Special effects for consumables seem to be using the same animation and lighting, which sometimes makes you wonder if you’re using the right item or not.
The audio on Enotria isn’t bad. Musical selections seem to be appropriate for the setting. There’s a good bit of ringing metal as swords clash and woody cracks as you break barrels or pieces of furniture. Yet there seems like a lot of missing pieces in terms of environmental audio. You don’t hear the waves crashing against the beach, birds singing the trees, wind blowing, the sort of small auditory cues that give you a sense of place. Whether this is an oversight or a design choice is impossible to determine. If the former, it does kind of kill some of the immersion. If the latter, I could almost see what the developers were shooting for, but it didn’t quite come out like they might have thought. Likewise, the dearth of voice acting, even just physical grunts from enemies, also hampers the immersion. All we get is some simpering lines from one of the seven “artists” who screwed up the world in the first place.
When it comes to the gameplay for Enotria, it feels as if all of the wrong lessons were learned when trying to study the Soulsborne genre. You are basically expected to parry everything. Dodging seems to be both ineffective and somehow discouraged, particularly during the boss fights. There’s mention of “Dodge hits” in the skill tree, but there’s damned little information about how to actually pull them off. So, parries it is, then. Problem is that parries feel somehow sluggish and disconnected from your button presses. If you get a perfect parry, it feels more like dumb luck than actual skill.
Speaking of skill, Enotria has deployed a skill tree which seems interesting at first blush, but quickly becomes obnoxious. Skills, much like weapons, are tied to one of three loadouts which you can notionally swap between. There are a lot of thematically appropriate names for various attributes and such, but very little is actually recorded about what they do or mean. They’re mentioned as brief tutorial blurbs, but we can’t go back to refresh our memories later. It took me far longer to find out any important information about various weapons and special abilities fumbling around in the character menu than it really should have taken. Worse, the character menu doesn’t actually pause the game. That right there is a crash-and-burn offense. I found this out the hard way, but I was able to recover from it easily enough.
Rather than armor sets, players obtain masks. These can be obtained either by defeating bosses or by collecting shards from various mooks as they wander around. Masks have different abilities tied to them, but the same buried information problem afflicts them as it does everything else. Adding insult to injury, it seems as though masks “hold on” to attribute point enhancements, so swapping from one mask to another might leave you suddenly short on health and stamina among other things. While I like the idea of being able to swap from one mask to another in principle, the execution here leaves a lot to be desired. Frankly, I can’t think of a reason why you’d want to swap to another mask unless you’ve developed a loadout for an edge case which you don’t run into over the normal course of exploration.
Beyond the rather iffy nature of the parry mechanic, Enotria‘s combat system is kind of a shambles. It doesn’t particularly innovate, and it doesn’t really iterate. It doesn’t do anything new or exciting. This bothers me tremendously, since the setting itself practically begs for a different style of swordplay. Why go with the same tired medieval-style weapons when we could have been fighting Florintine-style with a main handed weapon and a off-hand weapon like a main-gauche or object like a cloak or buckler? Nope, it’s standard Soulsborne fare here. Find enemy, swing away, lather, rinse, repeat.
This brings me to my final gripe about Enotria. There seems to be some fundamental balance and scaling issues at play here. If one’s persistent, one can get through the mooks easily enough with sufficient improvements to your attributes and gear. But I resent the hell out of having the “memoria” currency (the equivalent of souls in a Soulsborne) capped off at an arbitrary level until you’re able to clear the next boss. Material requirements for improving gear is one thing, but capping the currency amount to fit what the developers feel is the “appropriate” level is an open insult to the player. Worse, boss fights are an utter misery, and I only managed to get through two of them. As I said, dodging doesn’t seem to be encouraged, and parries feel so random that it’s a serious problem. Adding injury to insult, when in the boss fights, target lock can be “lost”, which means when you try to re-establish target lock, the camera sometimes points you in a completely different direction, unable to see the boss coming up your backside until after they’ve murdered you for the umpteenth time.
There’s no denying that Enotria: The Last Song is a different looking Soulslike. Unfortunately, that novelty is the only thing it’s got going for it. Rather than trying something new mechanically, we get a lot of Italian or pseudo-Italian words crammed into a badly laid out menu with a lot of systems which are neither user-friendly nor particularly helpful. And that’s on top of unsatisfying combat, unbalanced bosses, and arbitrary limits. Fans of the genre might find something enjoyable here, but the average gamer is going to be looking towards more polished entries.
Axel reviewed Enotria: The Last Song on PlayStation 5 with a review code.
