SPOILER FREE: ENDER LILIES: Quietus of the Knights | Part I

As with most Metroidvania games, I went into Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights with no knowledge or expectations of the game and in this first post I’ll try my best to give you as good of an impression of Ender Lilies as I possibly can without spoiling anything either. The follow ups will go into much more detail and won’t hold back on spoilers. So if you haven’t played the game yet and intend to do so, stick to just this first part for now and ignore Chapter II and on. Alright, with all of that out of the way…

Exploration

A metroidvania lives and dies by how exploration is set up. Exploration is really nothing more than another buzzword and can mean anything. First and foremost it’s about the environment itself being interesting enough for you to even care to explore, if that part doesn’t hold water it would be quite difficult for the game to keep your attention. The next ingredient is to tease out currently inaccessible areas to the player early on. You can see that there is something there, but you do not yet have the means to get there. This directly leads into the next point, which is the skill drip feed. Steadily let the player learn new skills that allow them to get to these previously inaccessible areas. Lastly and that one circles right back the environment being interesting enough, each screen should be unique enough and designed in a way that all of the learned skills, including skills that the players taught themselves, can be used to create a sense of ingenuity. Like figuring out a platforming puzzle, understanding that using skills in a specific order can make seemingly impossible jumps possible, or just simply finding secret paths.

Ender Lilies nailed most of this for me. As I kept moving forward I saw the map split into several different directions with no clear guideline as to which path I am supposed to pursue, nor knowing if I need a specific skill to make a jump, if I just missed a hidden path or if I am simply not even meant to be here just yet. The only thing that kind of bothered me was the lack of an option to place markers or other reminders on the map. As you can quick-travel between resting places and the map clearly tells you when you have cleared out a room or not, it is a minor gripe for sure, but when you’re used to certain features you immediately start looking for quality of life improvements. Even then, I’d say it’s a good thing that I have no other issues with how exploration works in Ender Lilies.

ABC — Abilities, Bosses & Combat

All of this would go heavily into spoiler territory if I dive in too deep here, so I will keep it at base level for now.

Abilities

The little girl you control can’t actually do anything by herself other than walk and jump. Spirits are her way of overcoming obstacles, be they high walls or the hordes of blighted standing in her way.

Spirits

Spirits come in two flavours, boss and mini-boss spirits. Whenever you defeat one, you have to purify them at the end of the battle. Once purified you will now be able to use that spirit. Actual bosses work the same way, but come with other benefits that upgrade your character. As is the case with most of these games, just think of better mobility options, more standard attacks and other things.

You can equip up to six spirits at a time split up between two sets of three, which you can swap back and forth with a tap of a button. Some Spirits like the first one you start the game with, the Umbral Knight, come with unlimited uses, others have limited uses, some come with cooldowns and others with some type of a combination of cooldowns and limited uses. You get to mix and match these freely, but… I kind of stuck with the same five to seven Spirits throughout the majority of the game.

Some of the later Spirits you get might be very useful too, but as you get limited resources to upgrade them it gets more difficult to justify using ones that you haven’t invested any resources into. Maybe that’s just me though, as the further you get into the game, the higher the levels of the Spirits you collect seem to be anyway. I am not sure if that’s based on the average level of your current Spirits or if each Spirit simply has a base level that it is acquired by. Spirits cover just about everything you’d expect; melee, ranged, counters, AoEs and so on. So almost everything you can do is more or less dictated by the Spirits you own. It doesn’t quite end there though.

Relics

Similar to Hollow Knight’s charm system, very similar actually, you get to equip relics in Ender Lilies each taking up a certain amount of space. You can mix and match your relics as long as they don’t exceed the amount of slots you have available. Relics are more on the passive side of things and grant you more experience, more damage, more defence, more uses on limited Spirits, reduced cooldowns, faster movement speed and more. They are quite straightforward and allow you to customise your character to your liking and in turn shape how you interact with the world around you.

Bosses

If you only count the bosses that grant you passives, then there really aren’t all that many, but realistically speaking you should count all named foes, that is all the blighted that allow you to collect them as a Spirit. With that in mind the number of the more resilient enemies jumps into the twenties. While mini-bosses for the most part are just beefier normal enemies with the odd upgraded attack here and there to make them stand out from the normies, the real bosses are an absolute treat to fight. With the exception of the bosses at the very end, which I thought were a little too easy, each boss kicked my butt at least a few times before I took them down and it was always a very rewarding experience. It’s what you’d expect, attack patterns that you can learn and exploit, as well as phase shifts to keep you on your toes throughout the fights. I personally really enjoyed the boss encounters in Ender Lilies, as they are very well executed in my opinion.

Combat

You have up to three attack buttons, which are customised via your equipped Spirits. You can dodge, and quite early on in the game you will also learn to parry. You also have access to three heals that can be upgraded in potency, as well as further strengthened and increased via relics. With the amount of Spirits you will have at your disposal later on there really is no clear cut way in how you’re supposed to take care of enemies, as that really depends on what you feel most comfortable with. There are however some clear advantages when Spirits are matched up with certain enemies. An enemy that doesn’t move from its place might very well be susceptible to attacks that keep dealing damage over time like AoEs for example, while enemies that get evasive at close range might be easier to take care of with projectiles. You get the idea.

I am pretty sure I’ve gone through a large portion of the game with probably the worst set up for any given situation, but I still enjoyed fighting the enemies and bosses a lot, so it really is up to you how you want to experience combat in Ender Lilies.

Difficulty

In the universe that makes up the Metroidvania Bossploration games I’d say that Ender Lilies is on the easier and more importantly forgiving side of the spectrum. This is highly subjective of course, but for one there’s no penalty for dying, you are just sent back to the last resting point you were at. You don’t lose any experience points, you don’t get any debuffs, your equipment, relics in this case, don’t degrade, nothing. The only thing that happens is that all enemies will have respawned and you will have to try again. While the game’s difficulty technically ramps up quite significantly in the later stages of the game, the combination of Spirits and Relics you have acquired up to that point really offsets that curve. There are absolutely some difficulty spikes here and there, as certain combinations of enemies and the environment you’re forced to face them in can be quite the challenge, but it never really felt insurmountable or like a hassle. As long as you’re paying attention to what you’re doing, you should be absolutely fine here. Dying in these types of games isn’t really a failure, it’s just a part of the experience, even more so when there’s absolutely nothing to lose.

Presentation

Visuals

The game features a somewhat unique look that still manages to feel familiar. The way backgrounds work and animate reminds me a lot of Hollow Knight, while the way humanoid enemies animate reminds me a lot of Salt and Sanctuary. In terms of sprite Artwork, it’s definitely its own thing and looks pretty cool. I really like the visual effect these very flat sprites have in motion layered on top of the backgrounds.

Story

The game is very plot driven, but the storytelling is in the background for the most part. You know the drill, Resident Evil style notes and Soulslike item descriptions. What I did like in this game is how a lot of the things you read weren’t just historical pieces that explain how the current state came to be, but in a lot of cases were also foreshadowing events that you have to deal with later on. This is by no means a groundbreaking new form of storytelling that had never been done before, but I really enjoyed the plot, the history of the world, how it set up “aha” moments when you came into contact with certain pieces of what you had been reading about earlier on and how it was presented to me. The execution of it all is really good. There are a few cutscenes as well, which for the most part are just slightly animated still images. They are however pretty stylish and once again, as long as you had been following the Story via the notes and item descriptions, really fill a lot of gaps in knowledge you had up to that point. While I really enjoyed the story and the plot, they are not mandatory to follow. You can still have a tonne of fun playing through the game just for the sake of exploring the world, fighting enemies and bosses.

Audio

Lastly a very short summary on audio in Ender Lilies. This is for the most part a very quiet game. Unless absolutely nothing is happening, music just kind of disappears into the background. Strikes, blows, hitting and getting hit all have relatively satisfying sounds attached to them. The sound design is serviceable, but this might be the weakest part in what is a very satisfying package overall. Just in case it sounded confusing, the audio design isn’t bad at all, it’s just not all that special or memorable.

Closing Words

It took me roughly 18 and a half hours to get the platinum trophy. I didn’t use any guides and spent a lot of time in certain rooms trying to figure out why a room wasn’t marked as cleared yet. So a more keen eyed player might get to that 100% mark a lot quicker than that. Have you played Ender Lilies yet? What are your thoughts on the game? If you haven’t played it yet, are you going to give it a try? Let me know in the comments, either here or on YouTube! My name is Sasa and I will see you next time.