Table of Contents

Exploration

Combat

Story

Art

Music

Other Notes

Spoilers

Ranking

Concluding

EXPLORATION

Exploration in Ender Lilies is amazing, your character (Lily)’s movements are very smooth and logical. There are very few times where I accidentally underestimate Lily’s dash/dive and go plummeting face first into a chasm. The level design is very well done with each room being a balanced or even difficult challenge but not pushing to the point it feels unfair. Backtracking is a major part of a metroidvania and Ender Lilies mastered that hurdle. From the first section the abilities that you gain are showcased to you with an area that is a slight bit of backtracking away. Then, both subtly and not at different points, later game unlocks are integrated into the world. While the ground slam attack spots are very obvious with their squishy platforms the water bubble areas blend much smoother into the environment. For each obvious gate there was another non obvious just waiting for an unlock to reveal it. While these hidden gates can make completionist runs more difficult Ender Lilies’s map helps ease the load there. The map reveals which areas are incomplete vs complete with a single color change, blue being incomplete zones and yellow being complete. The map also reveals where connections can be found by red dots that when passed through connect to the next area with a white line. While this may seem overpowered it’s balanced by the vagueness of the map. Every room is a rectangle, there are no defining hints to help you out and your location is mapped by a blue outline alone. Good luck trying to find your way through to the next area from the map, you will have to search the room to find your way.

COMBAT

Combat in Ender Lilies is set apart from other games by the Spirits system. Spirits can be found in the world and used for both combat and exploration giving a nice bit of added utility and value to backtracking. Combat in Ender lilies isn’t too hard. Attacks have pretty obvious telegraphs and some fights can just be cheesed. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem with the game. On my first playthrough the easier difficulty didn’t keep me from having to refight some bosses upwards of 40 times. The obvious telegraphs, usually coming with a red glowing line, can seem to make the game easy, however after playing for this long I realized those telegraphs are placed in the foreground giving the one possible tell when the screen becomes obstructed. Ender Lilies’s combat is fair, there’s little doubt to that in my mind. Every attack can be dodged with a single button press, but the timing and spacing change drastically depending on the enemies. Getting to fight your spirits before using them immediately acclimates you with their usage when you get them on your side. Healing is very smooth and forgiving as you can dash out in almost any point in the animation without a heal charge being used and heal charges not being expended when they would heal for 0. I know that seems like obvious stuff but those minor details are major factors of why I love Ender Lilies so much. Overall I love Ender Lilies’s combat, I know there are some people that can find it a bit easy. but for me it was just right.

STORY

Ender Lilies is a tale of the corruption and death of a kingdom. You play as Lily, a White Priestess waking up with a spectral knight guarding over you. You then go out fighting the remaining beasts of the land and purifying them of their affliction. However, they’re not beasts, not at all. They’re people, people lost to a power they had no hope of stopping. Once the rain started to fall, they were doomed. Even before it came down knights would drink new concoctions to protect their kingdom willfully turning into undying monstrosities to keep those they loved safe. Yet here we are, with so few remaining with their consciousness. That doesn’t make it better for them, their lives spent in constant agony in their tortured existence. No one was spared, from a son lost in the woods trying to get back to his mother or a lover trying to find a cure for his love and losing the remaining time they had. Land’s End is a shell of its former self and those that remain have to live with withering away while not dead. The game pulls at your heart a lot and some fights don’t hold back any punches. The Castle Town Maiden is a miniboss that before making this review I believed to be a required battle because of my pathing. In this arena you can see the earlier stages, beyond what we’ve become accustomed to from the Blighted. She will not attack, she will follow at your heels and you get to see that this creature isn’t a monster but a person. She still has control over her body and her consciousness. But you have no choice. You can’t leave the arena once you enter it. You have to defeat her and purify her. Even when you do finally defeat her and go to purify her she holds no grudge against you, in fact being thankful to be freed from this form. Her declaration, “It is most gracious,” still stings every time. But this game had me immersed well before the Maiden. No, within the first 15 minutes I had to do a double take at how quickly I became immersed in the story. Right at the start you meet enemies that cannot move, can’t attack, are just stuck. Between the art, soundscapes, and the prior knowledge that these Blighted were people I caught myself just minutes into my playthrough thinking to myself, “It would really suck to be one of these immobile ones and just trapped forever.” No game had immersed me into its world and story so quickly before and I had to pause to process that. As the game goes on further and further we can soon see this isn’t a story with a happy ending. This isn’t a story of redemption, of triumph through hardship, or the rebuilding of this land. No, this is no redemption. It’s a eulogy.

ART

The art of Ender Lilies is stellar. Every monster feels decayed and decrepit. You can see the decades of blight that have taken over the world. Meanwhile you still get to see the way Land’s End as it used to be in the environment. From the drawings of little kids, now long lost, to the corpse of the ruler of the land laying where he was cut down. The artists of Ender Lilies managed to make a world that felt stagnant for years but still breathing. The humanity and sickness all brought together in one amazing piece.

MUSIC

The music in Ender Lilies is orderly and atmospheric. Each chapter comes with three tracks along with the main theme that will fill in the remaining space. Those three chapter tracks are comprised of one main chapter track and two boss fight songs. These songs fit very well. The main chapter tracks really sold the environment they were taking place in with some of the later tracks hitting the uncanny valley and making me hesitant to enter their chapter. Meanwhile there are many tracks that are much more calming to fit their dreary but otherwise calm environments. I think at this point I’ve spent an hour or two in this game just standing and listening to the music. Then I would enter a room and everything would go silent, till a boss fight started and their boss music played. The boss music similarly ties in well to the characters that they accompany. Calm violin sounds aren’t what you’d expect in your regular boss fight but they made perfect sense when given the context of the character you’re fighting.

OTHER NOTES

Unlike many of the other games I’ve gotten, I payed full price for Ender Lilies. Usually I’d be waiting for a sale to make the purchase eat a bit less of my wallet, but I couldn’t wait to play Ender Lilies. I’m absolutely not disappointed with my purchase at all. I’ve gotten much more than enough time and entertainment out of this game to make it worth it. That was also a pretty notable thing for me, I spent a lot of time just thinking about this game. The 80 hours I have in Ender Lilies is accompanied by another 10 speculating on the lore of the game. I love Ender Lilies, there’s no question to me how much this game’s story and feeling impacted me for a solid month after playing it. I’m really hoping for a sequel to Ender Lilies but I don’t want to rush them. If they can continue to deliver this quality content they can take the time they need.

Skip the Spoilers!

SPOILERS

I’d like to keep these spoiler sections brief but I could talk about this game for hours. The reveals of Julius, Miriel, and Fretia stung as did most others given the loss they showed. I will say I found the last two boss fights, Miriel and the Blighted Lord a tad boring. On my first playthrough I had gotten very accustomed to spending full seconds in the air and the stationary bosses were very easy to defeat making the game feel a tad anticlimactic. For my first playthrough of the Blighted Lord I was just jumping up and down around her hurtbox and with some well timed Umbral Knight Last Rites immediately dealt with the fliers as they came. That would be my main area for improvement on the game but it wasn’t so bad it intruded on my enjoyment of the game especially given the lore tied around those two bosses.

RANKING

Ender Lilies is by far my favorite metroidvania and all of the factors that I’ve considered in this make it an S-tier metroidvania. Without any major impactful flaws this game couldn’t rank any lower.

Concluding

Thanks for reading this review all the way through, it means a lot to me that others actually see what I make and I hope you thought I did a fair job reviewing Ender Lilies. If you would like to help me out, sharing this newsletter with others and subscribing for future posts are amazing ways to help out these reviews. Additionally if you want to go above and beyond, you can go to my Ko-Fi, I’ve got three tiers of membership none over $3 usd or if you’d prefer you can use Ko-Fi’s donation service. Any amount helps me make more of these reviews and is very much appreciated.

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Breaking it down I simply will not be playing any games that are 3d, to me they are not metroidvanias and will automatically be sent to the N/A category (more on that later). Guided non-linearity is going to be a consideration for the game. Guided non-linearity means the game is designed to be open, to allow for multiple methods of exploration. An example of this would be in Hollow Knight when you have obtained Dive you could go to Crystal Peaks or continue into Waterways. Both options are available and there’s no one linear path. Within that openness however, there are areas that are inaccessible at certain times that limit the otherwise infinite possibilities. That’s where the “guided” portion of guided non-linearity comes in. These are limitations the devs give that still allow for the general openness for the map while still maintaining a bit of control over progression. An example would be in Ender Lilies at the bottom of the Coven there is a door with a lever a long ways ahead, this distance can only be covered by collecting a later game feature. That brings us to our last definition, utility-gated exploration. The limiters I mentioned above all have this core aspect in common, a gate and a key. The gate in the Ender Lilies example is the door, it won’t let you continue. The key then, is the ability you need to unlock to get past that door. That’s the essence of utility-gated exploration. You cannot continue until you find a new piece of utility whether that is item, ability, or whatever else, somewhere else in the map. You can’t enter City of Tears in Hollow Knight without the City Crest and you need your sister to open up held pressure plates in Greak: Memories of Azur. This design promotes exploration as you need to explore to expand the map to explore some more.

So great, now we have the definition of the genre but how are these games going to be compared and how will these reviews be broken up. The categories will be: Exploration, Combat (or other non Exploration mechanics), Story, Art, Music, a general Other category, and Spoilers. I will preemptively state that I’m not the biggest fan of pixel art games so I will most likely be ranking them lower than non pixel art games in the Art category, they don’t all instantly fail for me they’re just not my preference.

How will games be ranked, on a tier list. Or more accurately with letter grades. S,A,B,C,D,F, and N/A are all the possible rankings.

S-tier games are masterpieces and games I would recommend to anyone interested in the genre. They may not all be to your tastes but they are games I think everyone should play.

A-tier games are great metroidvanias that are held back by a few flaws. They are certainly still ones I’d suggest if you liked certain other games in the genre but aren’t for everyone.

B-tier games are not bad but held back by many issues. They’re games I think some people can enjoy but generally could be passed up.

C-tier games are just average, not bad, not good, just dead in the middle.

D-tier games are games I’d recommend avoiding. They may have one or two redeeming qualities but are overall failing at being a metroidvania.

F-tier games are games that can be classified as metroidvanias but have no redeeming qualities. These are games that fail to be fun and I would not recommend at all.

N/A games are games that while tagged metroidvanias I would dispute that claim. For some reason or another I think they fail at one of my three core principles for a metroidvania.

Which games are going to be reviewed? Any games that will be reviewed must be on steam and playable on pc and be tagged as a metroidvania (even if that application is in question).

Reviews will be posted every other month (bimonthly).

So that’s it, you now know everything you need to get started on my reviews. Hope you enjoy them and if you want to help me out, check out my ko-fi. I’ll have three tiers up each with growing rewards. For a dollar a month you get your name in every review, for two you can vote on which game I’ll review, and for three you can suggest games for me to add to the list. Every dollar helps and is much appreciated!

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