After just under a year in early access, this sequel to the beloved 2021 Metroidvania Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights is finally ready for prime time. Set a few decades after Ender Lilies (but which you don’t need to have played to appreciate this standalone adventure), Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist begins in a very similar fashion. You awaken in a dark and fantastical landscape with only the tiniest scrap of memory to help you get your bearings, but you quickly discover you possess a strange ability to control synthetic, robotic beings called Homonculi to help you fend off wayward attackers. As before, this is a journey of discovery, healing and trying to fix a world where everything – and everyone – has seemingly turned against you, all through the lens of befriending monsters and drawing on their respective abilities to help you push further into this strange and dying land to find the source of its malignance once and for all.
Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist reviewDeveloper: Adglobe, Live WirePublisher: Binary Haze InteractivePlatform: Played on PC (Steam Deck)Availability: Out now on PC (Steam), PS4/PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch
In fact, Ender Magnolia sticks so closely to the foundations co-developers Adglobe and Live Wire laid down in Ender Lilies that it almost feels like an exact replica of that game at first glance. Lilac’s Homonculi pals come with similar flavours of ranged and melee attacks, with your basic hack and slash sword combos gradually bolstered by big tanky punchers, ranged rapid-fire shooters, devastating counterattacks, and an automatic aerial drone of sorts over the course of its 20-odd hour runtime. All of them can be mixed and matched to suit your play style, and you can also map them to whatever face buttons feel the most natural to you. It’s a wonderfully flexible system that feels crunchy and satisfying with every button press, and the more you power up your menagerie of companions by enhancing their weapons with special, hard-won components, the more deadly and fulfilling they are to use against the droves of powerful enemies you’ll face.
ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist Final Trailer Watch on YouTube
And what a world they inhabit, too – a dense and dreary cityscape separated into three so-called ‘stratum’. The lower strata – effectively the slums of this place – are comprised of forlorn streets that peel off into dank, grimy mine shafts and shady laboratories those in the upper echelons of society (or what remains of them, anyway) want to keep firmly out of sight and out of mind. The central regions, meanwhile, start to take on more formal structures, such as a magical academy full of portals and twisting dormitories. There’s also a Japanese-style pagoda whose floors once saw Homonculi testing their strength against one another, and which now forms the stage for one of the game’s most memorable, multi-stage boss gauntlets. Estates and factories fill out the edges with interlocking shortcuts to other parts of the map, while the final, upper strata you’re ultimately trying to reach is all sleek, futuristic curves and imposing architecture protected by laser turrets (though still with a certain grunginess about it given its state of neglect).
1 of 3 Caption Attribution Lilac cannot fight on her own, so she summons her friendly Homonculi to do battle in her stead.
The magical barriers that once protected this city have begun to fail, you see, letting in a deadly blight and ‘rain of death’ that’s killed almost all its human inhabitants, and caused its remaining Homonculi population to go mad. It’s perhaps a slightly hackneyed setup where good intentioned characters have become predictably corrupted by forces beyond their control, and any attempt to stop them must first be met with terrible violence before Lilac can ‘tune’ them and restore them to their better selves. But it certainly makes for some thrilling boss encounters, and makes even rudimentary exploration through its warren of interconnected corridors feel fraught with tension and unrelenting danger. Indeed, you’ll breathe a sigh of relief whenever you stumble across one of its sparse smatterings of rest points, as these are the only spots you can replenish your healing vials and tweak your equipment and accompanying set of Homunculi. Once you leave, everything is locked in place until you find the next one.