Category: reviews

Animal Well

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Animal Well is a no-combat puzzle platformer with an open-world Metroidvania structure. You play as a small seed navigating a mossy system of underground tunnels. The game has no dialogue or diegetic text, nor does it need any. Your job is simply to explore.

Because this is a video game, however, the player needs objectives. Early on in the game, the little seed arrives in what appears to be a central hub with statues of four animals. Each animal’s flame is sealed in a themed quadrant of the map. Although your map is mostly blank at the beginning, the location of each flame is marked, giving you four goals to work toward. Navigation is anything but simple, however, and figuring out where you’re supposed to go is just as much of a puzzle as any of the one-room set pieces.

Since Animal Well gives you so many paths to choose from, the beginning can be confusing. In many ways, this game reminds me of Hollow Knight and Hyper Light Drifter, which are similarly cagey about where the critical path might lie. Thankfully, there’s no wrong way to play Animal Well, so you’ll be fine if you simply choose a direction and start walking. Once you make your way into a level proper, the path forward becomes much easier to follow.  

As you might guess from the title, the vast underground well that serves as the setting of the game is filled with animals that theme the puzzles. In the dog level, for example, you’ll need to find a frisbee that you can throw to distract the dogs that chase after you. In the seahorse level, fish blow bubbles into the air that you can use to reach higher platforms. In the chameleon level, you’ll need to adjust the path of wall-climbing hedgehogs so that they hit otherwise inaccessible switches.

Animal Well offers the player a beautiful and evocative environment to get lost in, and it’s nice to see such a well-designed game that focuses on exploration instead of combat. Most of the platforming puzzles are relatively easy but still very clever, which I appreciate. The pixel art is gorgeous and atmospheric, and each area manages to express its theme while still maintaining a unified aesthetic that ties the various ecosystems together. There’s not much music, but the sound design is fantastic.   

If I have one complaint about Animal Well, it’s that the map is riddled with secret passageways that are completely unmarked. In addition, you can only make it so far into each level without the aid of a tool from another level. In theory, this means that there are eight levels instead of four. In practice, it can be frustrating not to know whether you can’t proceed because you need a tool from a different level or whether you simply missed a hidden path. Unless you happen to be either very good (or very patient) with this sort of thing, I’d strongly recommend playing Animal Well with a walkthrough.

It’s impossible to say how long Animal Well takes to play. According to reviews, it has the potential to be a five-hour game, but I get the feeling that the majority of players aren’t going to have such a smooth experience. If I had to guess, I’d say that most first-time players should expect to spend at least six or seven hours getting to the end. After that, there’s potentially another ten hours of exploration enabled by the tools you find at the end of the final area.

Is the cleverness and charm of Animal Well worth the aggravation of getting lost and not knowing what you’re supposed to do? That depends on the player, of course, and it’s worth saying that this isn’t a casual game. Still, although I wish Animal Well were less opaque, I appreciate that it’s not actually difficult. Exploration is always rewarded, and I never stopped being surprised and amazed by each new bit of the game I managed to find. Every single screen in Animal Well is a work of art.

After finishing Animal Well, I read the TV Tropes page to see if there’s an actual story to the game. Perhaps you can unlock a different ending if you can manage to find all the collectables? From what I can tell, there’s no real story no matter what you do, but there are collectables underneath collectables underneath collectables. There’s also an ARG. None of that is any of my business, but it’s cool I guess. I always appreciate when the people who created a game were living their best lives, and I’m happy to have an excuse to spend more time poking around the beautiful mossy tunnels of Animal Well. 

Mr. Saitou

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Mr. Saitou is an Undertale-style narrative adventure game (with music by Toby Fox) that takes about two hours to finish. You play as Saitou, a white-collar worker who finds himself in the hospital after a failed suicide attempt triggered by stress and overwork. While sleeping, Saitou dreams of himself as a llamaworm (a comically extended groundhog) who goes on an adventure with a cute pink flowerbud named Brandon, the dream persona of a young child Saitou meets in the hospital.

Mr. Saitou has something of slow start, during which the player’s sole job is mashing a button to advance text. Thankfully, the game becomes much more engaging after the first ten minutes, at which point Saitou enters the dream world.

After the introduction, Saitou spends about half an hour in an office of llamaworms that serves as a stage for a gentle comedy about workplace culture. After a ten-minute segment of mandatory afterwork socialization in an izakaya, Saitou returns home to his neighborhood of underground tunnels.

Saitou decides to skip work the next day. This gives him an opportunity to meet Bradon, who wants to visit the Flooded Gem Caverns deeper in the tunnels. The remainder of Mr. Saitou unfolds in a beautiful fantasy-themed underground space enhanced by lowkey elements of exploration and simple puzzles.

What I appreciate most about Mr. Saitou is its creativity, which is driven by cute but thoroughly original character designs and clever writing. Even though most of the gameplay consists of simple conversation-based fetch quests, I never got tired of seeing what was around the next corner, and I always enjoyed talking with each new character.

The game’s humor sits comfortably at the intersection between wholesome and quirky, and the writing subtly references internet culture without relying too heavily on these allusions. The simple spatial puzzles are easy and engaging without feeling as if they were phoned in, and the thematic background music is lovely from start to finish.

I love almost everything about Mr. Saitou, but I should probably mention that there’s an unskippable musical cutscene featuring about three minutes of unremittingly flashing strobe lights toward the end. If you (like me) are photosensitive, this may be worth taking into consideration.

In addition, the sentimentality of the ending may ring hollow for players searching for a more nuanced or complicated story, especially regarding the extent of an individual’s personal responsibility for ensuring their quality of life under late-stage capitalism. This is a valid criticism, of course, but Mr. Saitou is a game about a llamaworm and a talking flower having magical underground adventures. All things considered, I think it’s probably best to enjoy the game for what it is.

Mr. Saitou is a sweet but still surprising game that’s entertaining to read and engaging to play, and I feel that its story earns the right to state its final message clearly: The world is filled with interesting people and beautiful places, and there’s more to life than slowly killing yourself for your job. Good health is a blessing, so you might as well make the most of your time on this earth while you’re still young.

Deepwell

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Deepwell is an Undertale-style narrative adventure game that takes about two hours to finish. You play as a blank slate character called “the Cartographer” who has recently arrived in the small forest town of Deepwell, which clings to the southern rim of a massive hole in the ground. Oddly enough, anyone who descends into the hole beyond a certain point gets “blipped,” meaning that they appear at the top of the hole as if nothing had happened. Generations of mystery hunters have sought the solution to this puzzle, but perhaps you might be the one to finally figure it out.

Deepwell is only about two dozen screens large, and there are five main characters to talk to. Most of the game involves engaging in long and meandering conversations with these characters in order to learn their stories. Sokolov manages the town library, and Evan runs the general store. Pierre has created something resembling an art gallery on one side of town, while Lily lives in a field of flowers on the other. At the intersection next to the highway, a robot named Bing helpfully provides information to visitors.  

It stands to reason that everyone living in such an isolated town would be a little weird. Aside from Bing, who is essentially a tutorial robot, each character is a self-contained short story that gradually unfolds as you talk with them. Thankfully, there are no wrong conversation choices, nor is there any missable content. The player is free to walk where they like and talk with the characters as they wish while unlocking a few extra conversation topics by interacting with each character’s environment.

On the eastern edge of town is a waterfall that hides a secret cave. Glyphs drawn onto the wall of this cave indicate whether a character’s dialogue has been exhausted. Once the Cartographer has sufficiently spoken with each of the town’s residents, a new path will open deeper into the forest to reveal a sixth character, who tempts the player with the possibility of an alternate (and much darker) ending.  

You can actually end the game any time you want by simply heading back to the highway and leaving town. You can also choose to wrap up the story at any point by taking a boat across the lake to see what’s on the north side of the giant hole. Although you’re given a choice in the final section of the game that affects the ending, I think Deepwell ties up its thematic threads quite nicely. This is a story about personal purpose and fulfillment, and about why we need art and mystery. How you approach these themes within the context of the game is up to you.

The graphics are primitive yet charming. I was put off by the crunchiness at first, but the lo-fi aesthetic grew on me. Deepwell contains a surprising number of insert illustrations and cutscenes, some of which are extremely well done. This is especially the case with Pierre, whose gallery of art installations closes with a remarkable set piece. I get the feeling that some players may find Pierre pretentious, but I appreciate his sincerity. And he’s not wrong about how visual glossiness is often a disguise for mediocrity. 

Deepwell is akin to a short story anthology that’s easy to pick up for twenty minutes at a time, but I ended up being so fascinated by the overarching narrative that I played the whole game in one sitting. The writing is exceptionally good. It gives me immense joy to know that something like Deepwell exists in the world, and I honestly feel that I’m a better person for having spent time with it.

Deepwell is free to play on Steam here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2803660/Deepwell/

Tales of the Black Forest

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Tales of the Black Forest
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1093910/Tales_of_the_Black_Forest/

Tales of the Black Forest is a 16-bit RPG Maker narrative adventure game whose tone is split evenly between wholesome cuteness and graphic horror. Although Tales of the Black Forest features a dozen simple puzzles, a few short chase sequences, and limited elements of exploration, it might be more accurate to call it a visual novel instead of a classic adventure game. Tales of the Black Forest takes about three and a half hours to play, and more than half of this time is spent reading character dialog as you progress through a linear story.

The game’s story follows a high school student named Kihara Kashin who wakes up on a bench outside an abandoned train station. Kihara has somehow been transported to a depopulated town called Kuromori (whose name means “black forest”), where she used to live as a child before her mother died in a car accident. Inside the derelict station, Kihara meets a mysterious shape-shifting woman named Kiritani Yuki, who tells her that she has been trapped in the ruins of Kuromori by a curse. The only way to escape Kuromori is to use Nensha, a magical power that allows Kihara to travel back in time by touching retro electronic devices. By going back to the 1990s with Kiritani as her guide, Kihara can learn the origin of the curse and hopefully break it. 

The overall story arc of Tales of the Black Forest admittedly doesn’t make much sense. Thankfully, the game is split into three distinct chapters, each of which showcases the stand-alone character story of a cute yōkai girl while allowing the player to explore her environment. Each of the three chapters also explores the intersection between an urban legend and a social issue of the 1990s.

The first chapter is about a deserted village, Shiranaki (a play on the urban legend of Inunaki Village), and rural depopulation. The second chapter is about a magical ghost train and a fictional version of the Aum Shinrikyō “new religious movement” that carried out the Tokyo Subway Sarin Gas Attacks in March 1995. The third chapter is about a haunted movie theater that serves as a case study for how many small businesses that thrived during the postwar Shōwa era were forced to close during the prolonged economic recession of the 1990s.

Along with urban legends and social issues, Tales of the Black Forest is strongly inspired by the movies of Studio Ghibli, and its magical world is filled with quirky yōkai and gentle kami. The character illustrations of cute girls that accompany the dialog text are somewhat generic, but the game’s developers clearly put a great deal of love and attention into the 16-bit character sprites and their environments. There’s not a single part of this game that doesn’t make a gorgeous screenshot.

Alongside its whimsy and beauty, however, Tales of the Black Forest contains serious and sometimes graphically violent scenarios with disturbing themes and imagery. The overall tone of the game’s story emphasizes character drama more than horror, but the gruesome and upsetting elements are still there. You’ll be talking to adorable cats in the beautiful green yard of a forest café, and fifteen minutes later you’ll be watching a young woman beaten to death by a deranged cultist.

This mix of wholesome and horror worked for me, but both tonal aspects of the story are equally prominent. Accordingly, I wouldn’t recommend Black Forest to anyone who can’t sit through the creepier moments of The Ring, nor would I recommend it to anyone who can’t tolerate the more sentimental moments of My Neighbor Totoro.

Tales of the Black Forest was made by a Chinese studio in an obvious homage to Japanese popular culture, and its story occasionally feels like an attempt to filter a lecture from an “Introduction to Contemporary Japanese Society” university course through the medium of fiction. I personally found the references to Japanese social problems of the 1990s to be interesting and well-intentioned, but I could understand that some players might find these elements of the story a bit cringe in the way that early 2000s “onigiri means rice ball desu” North American anime fandom was a bit cringe.

Tales of the Black Forest was originally written in Chinese, and the English translation feels as though it was created by someone without much experience in localization. It’s serviceable, but it can be awkward at times. I tend to think the concept of “standard English” is nonsense, and I found the translation to be charming, especially because it reminded me of how pirated anime used to have English subtitles created by people whose first language was Chinese. In keeping with the retro theme of the game, I very much appreciated this unintentional element of nostalgia.

Tales of the Black Forest isn’t perfect, but it’s a solid 7/10 game that’s elevated to an 8/10 by virtue of the love and care that the two-person development team put into every aspect of its creation. This game caters to Japanese pop culture nerds who are fans of both cute anime characters and creepy urban legends, and I’m surprised it hasn’t attracted more attention since it was released on Steam in 2019. Tales of the Black Forest is a small but shining hidden treasure.

Neko Can Dream Review on Sidequest

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

I’m excited to have published a review of the indie narrative adventure game Neko Can Dream on Sidequest. Neko Can Dream was created by the Japanese yuri manga artist Nekobungi Sumire, who captures a complex and beautiful world inside the simple Game Boy graphics.

Here’s an excerpt from my review:

Neko Can Dream will take most players about two and a half hours to finish. Even though the narrative tone is gentle, the pace is quite brisk, and the excellent game design ensures that the player never becomes lost or confused. Certain elements of the individual character stories will resonate strongly with players interested in themes relating to queer identity; however, at its core, Neko Can Dream is about how the dream worlds of video games can help people at all stages of life recover from trauma and reach out for connection.

If you’re interested, you can read the full review on Sidequest here:
https://sidequest.zone/2024/05/27/neko-can-dream-bittersweet-nostalgic-treat/

Usurper Ghoul

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Usurper Ghoul
https://evandahm.itch.io/usurper-ghoul

Usurper Ghoul is a nonviolent Game Boy adventure game that channels the “ruined kingdom” vibe of Dark Souls. I tend to think that Dark Souls is marred by needless difficulty; and, in the same way, the gameplay elements of Usurper Ghoul are needlessly frustrating. The nonlinear exploration-based gameplay of Usurper Ghoul is on brand for a Soulslike Game Boy game, but it’s not for everyone. Like Dark Souls, Usurper Ghoul becomes more interesting the more you engage with it, but the beginning is rough.

You play as a horned, skull-headed demon who wakes in a garden in the hills overlooking a small village, which in turn overlooks a valley of tombs. In true Dark Souls fashion, no one tells you where to go or what you need to do, and it’s possible to spend a lot of time walking around without getting anywhere. There are a few people scattered across the wilderness, but they’re not particularly helpful.

With no particular goal other than to explore the world, your job is to collect three items from three categories. Flowers allow you to interact with people, sticks allow you to interact with the environment, and rocks allow you to access more knowledge about the world. One stick allows you to unlock doors, for example, while another stick allows you to read written text. The catch is that you can only hold one of each type of item at a time.

The necessity of discarding one item in order to use another fits the broader theme of the game, which is that something must be sacrificed in order for something else to be gained. Unfortunately, switching between items involves a great deal of needless backtracking. The world of Usurper Ghoul isn’t that big, and the game isn’t overly complicated, but it’s big and complicated enough for the backtracking to be annoying. There are no puzzles involved; it’s just donkey work.

One might say that Dark Souls involves needless complications and barriers to progress, but one of the primary attractions of Dark Souls is that it’s gorgeous to look at. You might be continually frustrated over the course of your journey through Lordran, but you tolerate the setbacks because the environment is so beautiful and atmospheric. The world design of Usurper Ghoul is unique and interesting, to be sure, but it’s still rendered with primitive Game Boy graphics. There’s no background music, and the sound design is limited to jarring beeps at odd moments. In other words, it’s not necessarily a pleasure to trek back and forth across the map to switch out one tool for another.

The overall story of Usurper Ghoul is intriguing, but the writing is hit or miss. Most NPCs say decontextualized NPC banalities, and the lore encountered in books and on monuments often feels like a parody of Dark Souls. Although this is never explained, your goal is to enter a tower; and, to do so, you have to collect enough lore to figure out the right order to light torches in front of the tombs in the valley. You need different sticks to unlock gates, to read the writing on the tombs, and to light their torches, so this is a tedious process even if you (like me) lose patience with the game’s obtuse writing and resort to a walkthrough to figure out the order.

Having discussed what’s frustrating about Usurper Ghoul, I now want to explain why I enjoyed it anyway. The next paragraph contains mild gameplay spoilers, but it’s also the coolest part of the game.

For your own nefarious purposes, you can offer three varieties of flowers to NPCs. Comely flowers make people like you, malodorous flowers make people dislike you, and horrid flowers will kill anyone who touches them (except you). In one of the game’s endings, you can climb the tower in the valley and simply leave the kingdom behind without hurting anyone. If you want to experience everything Usurper King has to offer, however, your goal becomes to kill as many NPCs as possible while managing the limitations imposed by each death. Each NPC you kill with a horrid flower leaves a book in the tower whose text emphasizes the theme of sacrifice. For me, this was when the story became worth the trouble of navigating the world.

I found the endgame of Usurper Ghoul to be extremely compelling. And really, despite the initial annoyances, the ideas informing Usurper Ghoul are brilliant. I feel that the success of the execution is limited by the Game Boy technology, and I’d like to give the developer a nice chunk of cash to hire collaborators and develop these ideas into a less bare-bones format, perhaps along the lines of Tunic. Usurper Ghoul is a fascinating proof of concept; and, with a bit of polish, I could easily imagine it becoming a cult classic.

For me, the payoff of Usurper Ghoul was worth the frustration of the gameplay and the occasional Dark Fantasy Generator™ writing, but your mileage may vary. There’s a lot to explore and experiment with in the world of the game, and it’s definitely possible to spend several hours there. I lost patience toward the middle and used (this walkthrough on Reddit) to smooth over some of the rougher bits, and I ended up spending a bit more than two hours with the game. If nothing else, I’m really looking forward to checking out the developer’s comic projects in the near future.

Last Train Home

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Last Train Home
https://hby.itch.io/last-train-home

Last Train Home is a short and spooky creepypasta story game. It’s free to play in your browser, and it takes about five minutes to complete. You play as a salaryman who finds himself on a near-deserted commuter train in the dead of night.

The first half of the game is set in three train cars and the two walkways between them, each of which is occupied. With the doors at either end locked, you move between the three cars and talk with their occupants, befriending them by completing small tasks.

This is all well and good until the lights go off, at which point you’re left to fend for yourself in the darkness with nothing more than a cigarette lighter and the eerie flashes from outside the windows to illuminate your path forward. Where is this train going, and how do you get off?

Just as the United States is home to countless urban legends surrounding cars, from vanishing hitchhikers to cursed highway rest areas, there are all sorts of urban legends about commuter trains in Japan and South Korea. “The last train” is a common motif in cautionary tales warning midnight passengers against accidentally boarding the wrong train or even, heaven forbid, falling asleep and missing your stop as the train continues hurtling into the night.

In contrast to the pristine coziness of trains in East Asia, there’s a New York style grunginess to the cars in Last Train Home that renders the environment unsettling and uncanny. The lighting and sound design are nicely creepy as well. There’s not a lot of text, but each line manages to be subtly unpleasant. There are no jumpscares, just a pervasive atmosphere of creeping dread. The catharsis at the end of the story is lovely, but you’ll definitely have second thoughts about running to catch the last train after playing this game. 

A Man Outside

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

A Man Outside
https://litrouke.itch.io/a-man-outside

A Man Outside is a short vocabulary quiz game. This twist is that, while you play, a creepy shadow man watches you from outside your bedroom window. You’re tasked with doing three sets of ten vocab cards as spooky ambient sounds play in the background, and you can look out of the window at any time to see if the man has gotten closer. Between quiz sets, you can text a friend to update them on the situation.

I hope it doesn’t spoil this game to say that there are no jumpscares. The vocabulary gets progressively creepier, though, and there are fun distortions in the quiz interface. The vocab game itself is quite good, even without the added attraction of the creepy man. Necrophagy is my new favorite word.

Based on what I’ve seen in YouTube playthroughs, your vocab score doesn’t matter, and the choices you make in the text conversations simply add a bit of extra flavor. In order to get the true ending of the game, you have to play it from start to finish three times. There are three different vocab difficulty levels, so I suppose that adds a bit of replay value. Each run only takes about seven or eight minutes, but I don’t think the second or third ending is anything special. The alternate endings are nice bonuses for vocab flash card enthusiasts who want to try every difficulty level, but the first ending is perfect.

As an aside, as someone with ADHD, I often have to pretend that someone is watching me in order to get past executive dysfunction. I used to “have someone watch me” by going to coffee shops, but that only worked in Tokyo and Washington DC, which are beautiful and walkable and filled with cafés. Philadelphia has many charms, but it’s not that sort of city. Now, if I’m having trouble sending emails or whatever, I have to conjure an amorphous imaginary person who’s sitting in the room with me just out of eyesight like some sort of sleep paralysis demon.

So, for me, playing A Man Outside was kind of comforting. Cozy, even. Honestly, this might actually be a decent way to study vocab.

One Hell of a Maid

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

One Hell of a Maid
https://bun-tired.itch.io/one-hell-of-a-maid

One Hell of a Maid is a free, ten-minute RPG Maker horror game about a young man who has been dispatched on his first assignment for an at-home maid service. Unfortunately, the apartment he’s been contracted to clean belongs to a group of cultists. Using a handy set of cleaning tools, you follow the handsome maid as he cleanses the apartment of blood on the floor, eldritch horrors in the bathtub, and coffee stains on the couch.

The apartment has three rooms, and each of them has a (very) mild jumpscare. I love the monster design, and I also love the poor maid’s no-nonsense attitude regarding the horrors he encounters. This was the only job he could get, apparently, so he might as well do it. It’s unclear why he has to wear a frilly maid’s outfit, but it’s probably best not to think about that too hard. 

The ending of the game is very sweet. When the cultists finally come home, they are adorable. The gameplay in One Hell of a Maid is minimal, but the art and writing do a lot of heavy lifting. Just like the maid himself, bless his heart.

One Hell of a Maid is not for everyone, but…

Actually who am I kidding. The appeal of this game is universal. What a fun and tasty snack.

Ender Magnolia Early Access Review

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

This past weekend, I played an early access version of the dark fantasy 2D action-adventure game Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist, which includes about three and a half hours of content. So far, I really like what I see.

Ender Magnolia is a sequel to Ender Lilies, a Soulslike Metroidvania published by the Japanese developer Binary Haze Interactive in January 2021. In Ender Lilies, you play as a young girl named Lily who wakes up alone in a ruined kingdom built on the edge of a much older kingdom. The blight that plagued the kingdom of the Ancients spread to Lily’s kingdom untold decades ago. As the last of a line of priestesses, Lily’s job is to purify those affected by the blight by laying them to rest. Since Lily is defenseless on her own, she’s aided by the spirits of the blighted whom she’s purified. Each boss and miniboss the player defeats contributes to Lily’s moveset, which is completely customizable.  

Although this isn’t 100% confirmed in the early access version, there’s strong evidence to suggest that Ender Magnolia is a prequel that takes place during the last days of the kingdom of the Ancients. This kingdom has clearly fallen on hard times, but it still boasts a sophisticated fusion of magic and technology that led to the creation of artificial lifeforms called homunculi. Homunculi are able to resist the influence of a magical blight rising from underground, but only to a limited extent.

You play as a young girl named Lilac who is an Attuner, a title that designates someone who possesses the magic necessary to repair homunculi and purge the influence of the blight. Where Lily purified decaying zombies in Ender Lilies, Lilac attunes renegade humanoid robots. While Lily’s purification allowed the blighted to rest by allowing them to die, Lilac’s attunement helps homunculi regain their sanity.

Since they’re still alive after attunement, the defeated robots don’t automatically join Lilac as companions. If I had to guess, I’d say that the relatively limited number of Lilac’s companions in Ender Magnolia is probably Binary Haze’s response to a common criticism of Ender Lilies, namely, that there were too many companion spirits and not enough upgrade resources to experiment or use them all effectively. Thankfully, this excess of choice doesn’t seem to be an issue in Ender Magnolia, in which Lilac’s attacks are still fully customizable but much more focused on a core moveset.

None of the minibosses join Lilac, but they’re still fun to fight, as are the challenging area bosses. Whereas there were major spikes in difficulty in Ender Lilies, Ender Magnolia seems to be more balanced and linear in terms of challenge. According to the developer notes on Steam, the full version of the game will allow the player to customize the difficulty, but the standard setting worked just fine for me. I still died a lot (affectionate) and was grateful for every character stat upgrade.

In Ender Lilies, Lily was the only living person in the entire kingdom, so she didn’t have any need for money. This is not the case in Ender Magnolia, which has a central village hosting a small shop where Lilac can buy bracelets that boost her defense and other upgrades. Money isn’t directly received from defeating enemies, but must be found in the environment or offered as a reward.

The game’s economy is supported by numerous NPCs who can be found in the central hub, as well as scattered across the map.  Some of these NPCs are human, and some are homunculi, and some seem to be visitors from the “upper stratum” of the city, like Lilac herself. The player can still find scraps of text with background lore hidden in the environment, but there are also living people directly sharing their experiences. Some of this text is relevant to Lilac, but I appreciate that most of it isn’t. As in Ender Lilies, Ender Magnolia contains a lot of smaller stories that have very little to do with the player. This world is in decline, but the player gets a sense that there’s still something for Lilac to save. She’s a very sweet girl, as is her main companion Nola, a stern but elegant sword lesbian. I’m looking forward to all the tears I’m going to cry as their tragedy unfolds.   

Like Ender Lilies, Ender Magnolia is intensely atmospheric. The primary aesthetic of Ender Lilies was ruin and decay, while Ender Magnolia seems to be more rustpunk (or whatever you’d call what’s going on in the city of Midgar in Final Fantasy VII). There’s a beautiful city above, but you begin the game in the slums, which are filthy and decrepit. When the rusty browns of this aesthetic are interrupted, such as in an abandoned castle overgrown with brilliantly scarlet maple trees, it’s a sight to behold. The sound design and music are also marvelous. To me, the way the game designers use the beauty of the environment to inspire the player to overcome challenges is the hallmark of Soulslike games, and Ender Magnolia nails this perfectly.

I keep comparing Ender Magnolia to Ender Lilies, but it’s not necessary to be familiar with Ender Lilies to enjoy and appreciate what’s going on in Ender Magnolia. In fact, I’d say that Ender Magnolia is much more accessible to newcomers, at least based on what I’ve seen so far.

Meanwhile if you, like me, have done multiple playthroughs of Ender Lilies, Ender Magnolia still feels fresh. It’s significantly different from its predecessor in ways that are fun and interesting and not just new for the sake of change.

I’m really excited about Ender Magnolia. If nothing else, not only can you pet the big fluffy robot zombie dog, but he also serves as your method of fast travel. What a good boy!!