Enotria: The Last Song

The third and final game of my backlog's soulslike block was Enotria: The Last Song. Of the three games, it's the closest to your usual soulslike, although its atmosphere is -- at least on the surface -- rather bright and cheerful instead of the usual doom and gloom of the genre.

A sunny and thematically-unitary soulslike

Enotria is the name of the game's world. It is trapped in an indefinitely repeating theater play, the Canovaccio -- oh yeah, the developer Jyamma Games is based in Milan, Italy, thus all the Italian names. An element of potential change is introduced in the form of a puppet: you, the Maskless One.

The game's (English) voice acting is quite convincing and the writing came off equally strong. However, the surprising number of references to other works struck me as gauche and ill-fitting. For instance, how Pulcinella and Veltha characters both at certain points quote the recurring opening line of The Wheel of Time.

Litho, a mysterious being, was my favorite character -- such delivery on their lines! -- but they're also the one to drop the most intertextual references, which made me suspect that the stuff I didn't recognize might have been from somewhere else originally, too. Keeping fantasy writing completely in-universe appears to be such a hard thing to accomplish. I must admit, though, that the "You have no mouth yet I hear you scream" from Litho is an awesome line.

Potentially an extremely challenging experience

I found Enotria, particularly its bosses, difficult to an unprecedented degree and the game became a sour, frustrating journey. I was absolutely loathing the thing at points, and it was only amplified by the nonsense the developers want you to do for 100% completion -- why the fuck is there only a single abnormal scuttler in the whole game, half a map away from the nearest knot (bonfire), that needs to be killed 50 fucking times for its 3rd compendium entry!? The 50 or 80 kills for the rarer enemies' complete entries for the 'Erudite' achievement is lunacy.

A 100% completion in Enotria requires about 2.75 playthroughs at the minimum because 2 lesser bosses need to be killed 3 times each for their entries (and you get 1 of each per playthrough). There are also 3 different ending achievements but you can easily save scum one of them to avoid finishing a third playthrough.

As I painstakingly made progress through the whole ordeal, I managed to pick up few gameplay tricks and bits of knowledge, on my own and from others -- particularly one battlemage build presented by youtuber BLIND_playthroughs that helped me get past a roadblock at the end of Act 2 on NG+1 (and +2) -- and my opinion about the game turned around by the end of the journey. Enotria does have quite a few issues that could be fixed, though. If there ever was a game in need of some sort of a director's cut, this one would be it.

Parry this

Enotria kind of pushes you into a mindset that it is a parry game -- and you see people repeating that, too. In combat, a press of B is suddenly no longer a dodge roll but a shorter forward leap and the full dodge requires a double press, which rarely feels quick enough. I assume both moves have i-frames but they feel futile with how much the bosses of this game track your movement while performing their attacks. If you didn't actually dodge through the full attack, the tail end of it will come right at you even if you got to the other side of the boss.

Parrying is also more beneficial because, unlike dodging, it by default unravels (deals poise damage) like your regular attacks. Filling up the poise gauge allows to you perform a high-damage finishing blow (note: may not actually finish the enemy). Relying on just parrying to break poise will require serious patience with bosses, though, especially in some cases where it would take a whole business day's worth of parrying to unravel them -- looking at you, Giangurgolo. So you probably want to wield a weapon that is quick enough for an attack between parries. Sabers are the quickest weapon type, although there is most certainly variation between the game's vast arsenal.

Now if parrying in this game only were even moderately easy for me. Despite what I've seen comments say, the parry window did not feel lenient. I never became good at hitting it: I continued to be either too early or too late at a way too high frequency. And the bosses punish hard for that, their attacks dealing so much damage. It doesn't help that the game's healing flask, Armonia Amber, takes so many upgrades before it stops being ass. I should've started using the consumable item Armonia Sap earlier.

Not too pretty on minimum settings

I lowered the game's graphics settings to their minimums (and half-forgot them there -- thus the screenshots looking ugly compared to what this UE5 title would look at its best) in case a higher framerate would help with the parry windows. It did not. Also: while the game ran otherwise great in potato mode, there was one massive enemy projectile attack, very common from Act 2 onwards, that would tank framerate to single digits even if I wasn't looking at it. Maybe it hits a dozen breakables or something and the physics calculations take a lot of computing power. I have seen reports of general stuttering but I didn't experience that after the very start of the game when it might have been still compiling shaders.

Technical and options-related issues I encountered in Enotria include not being able to turn off controller vibration. Fortunately you can use Steam input these days to do that. At one point it got turned back on for whatever reason. Since I had just played through three games on a controller, I was initially going to use keyboard and mouse but for some reason I didn't like the feel of mouselook in this one. At least sprint is on hold B in this soulslike instead of the too common LS press.

Bosses sometimes get stuck and/or their behavior locks into repeating something useless. It didn't happen frequently but I did witness it on four different bosses over my playthroughs. A little bit of mercy provided by the otherwise harsh game, one could say.

The block and guard health mechanics of Lies of P would be so great in Enotria. Being able to at least partially block damage would make things less stressful. Parry is hardly even supported by anything in this one: there's like one perk that heals you from parries and that's pretty much where the proper synergies end.

The difficulty is increased further by the quite narrow field of view and boss health bar being at the bottom, over your character. And if you have to back away so that the camera hits a wall and is pushed forward, your character disappears completely -- you can't see if you're ready to act: are you still standing or do you need to roll back onto your feet. Add boss attacks raising clouds of dust and debris off the ground and things are terrible. Enotria's first boss being in a tight room gives you a pretty negative impression from the get-go.

Optionally easy first run

I was able to deal with all the challenge until I got to the first Spaventa Gatekeeper boss at the start of Act 2. Bosses usually have no runback worth a mention (at least the main ones) but that one just happened to have three annoying spear throwers in the way from the nearest knot to the boss. I couldn't deal with the runback and dying anymore and started looking for a way to make the game more tolerable.

I recalled seeing a Story Mode button (a post-release addition) in the main menu and wondered if I should restart the game on it. It turned out that you can switch to it even mid-run. And so the rest of my NG+0 became very easy. Story Mode lowers enemy health and damage considerably, although there are still few challenging encounters.

Giangurgolo took a good number of attempts despite the Story difficulty. At least he repeats his melee attacks in such a predictable manner in his first phase that even I started getting the parry timings right. Once you get to the second phase, the fight can be finished quickly because parrying his charge will stun him for few seconds every time, allowing you to wail on him uninterrupted.

Story mode also grants a huge bonus to Memoria (souls) gain, making you out-level the game without trying. That turned out to be very helpful, for I wasn't aware that from NG+1 onwards, there is only one difficulty level. Being overleveled helped a lot on the returned difficulty level. Since my first run had been very thorough, I also had all the tricks at my disposal and I started experimenting with them a bit.

Many things to try

One thing I did early into NG+1, was picking a weapon from each element (fatuo, vis, malanno, and gratia) to upgrade fully. To my surprise, the fatuo longsword I had chosen, the Waning Petal (from Maja's quest line), has a multi-projectile ranged barrage as its alt attack. I no longer had to engage in the parry nonsense. The attack's downside is that it doesn't charge your equipped abilities, the Mask Lines, like normal weapon attacks do. But safely witling down enemies from afar was an acceptable tradeoff.

I initially thought that Enotria was trying to just reinvent elements but the respective status effects they cause (wicked, dizzy, sick, and radiant) are at least novel. Each of them has a positive and a negative effect. Being afflicted by wicked, for instance, increases elemental power but heals attackers. There are consumables to make you affected by one at will but I thought the game was challenging enough already and avoided the fettles as much as I could. Each element is also strong against another element: there's a reminder on the HUD which element you probably should be using.

The final Spaventa Gatekeeper, a mandatory boss at the end of Act 2, is fatuo-imbued and thus isn't particularly weak to the element. Granting him the wicked status isn't a great idea either; the boss's attacks were annihilating me on NG+1 and I started looking for help again. I watched someone use the Warrior Deity greatsword's alt that is a bow attack. Despite being gratia-infused, it still took many minutes to kill the boss with it, all the while the player still had to dodge the heavy-damage, screen-wide projectiles. Then I found the aforementioned battlemage build.

Now this is what I needed

Battlemage is one of the game's attribute stats. Among other things, it increases the recharge rate of your Mask Lines. The build's idea is to spam Presto-speed (very fast recharge) Lines like Ballarella and Paroncina to trigger few synergies. Simply doing that works great against most enemies but bosses can't generally be overwhelmed like that. On bosses you're instead working towards charging the Grave-speed (slow as hell) Jaws of the Chimera, which can happen instantly upon any Line use thanks to the Maestro Decoratore perk. Jaws is a nuke spell that does massive damage and is guaranteed to break a boss's poise if it didn't finish them outright. The Allegro-speed (kind of fast) Coastal Harpoon line is in the build because it's almost guaranteed to stagger and interrupt any enemy.

The build practically zoomed me through the rest of my Enotria adventure, although I did still use the Petal spam against some enemies, like Captain Spaventa right after the Gatekeeper. Funny how the game became so much more enjoyable when it didn't feel unreasonably punishing. I could unmute its music because the -- honestly pretty banger -- boss fight tarantella track would no longer distract and piss me off.

I did slightly alter the build, though. I didn't fancy double damage taken so I used the suggested alternative, Aspect of a God, instead of Arlecchino's. I also switched Overdrive Amber to Tis But a Scratch, and I think the latter perk alone would have made the Gatekeepers easier for me if I had known how good it is. It says it reduces damage taken from ranged attacks but doesn't state how much. I thought it was like 10% but it's more like 75%. Overdrive Amber would cause Armonia Amber use to slightly charge your Lines, which is nice, but the perk also halves the Amber's effectiveness, which I did not like.

The build
Mask: Guise of Arlecchino
Aspect: of a God
Lines: Ballarella, Paroncina, Coastal Harpoon, and Jaws of the Chimera
Perks: Unleashed, Inner Abundance, Greater Inner Might, Vigorous, Maestro Decoratore, and Tis But a Scratch, (all from the Blue tree except the last one from the Red one)
Attributes: enough Battlemage for 250+ Line Charge

If a status effect is being bothersome, you can use Maestro Elementale from the Purple tree instead of Tis But a Scratch to increase your Status Defenses like I had to against Giangurgolo on NG+2 when I beat him for fun.

Jyamma Games is currently working on La Divina Commedia. It doesn't mention being a soulslike but does appear likewise to be some manner of a third person action RPG. I hope it won't be as difficult to master as Enotria was for me.