When playing a up-to-date Souls-like game, there’s an element of translation involved as you try to understand the language of the game. What are the upgrade materials called? What’s the equivalent of poison? What are the experience points and checkpoints called, even though you’ll call them souls and bonfires anyway? I’ve done this many, many times, but this time there’s a surprising twist, one that would make the infamous, pearl-clutching racist HP Lovecraft turn in his grave. The secret language of the Souls-like game in Enotria: The Last Song is actually just Italian.
I don’t just point this out because there’s something comical about an Italian developer making a game in Italian and only translating part of it, but because the worst thing about Enotria is that it obfuscates its compelling systems by not explaining them. Or explaining them once, at the beginning, when you’re still trying to get the basics, and expecting you to remember them throughout the game. This is despite the game having a comprehensive tutorial section, because it only records half a dozen of the most basic pieces of information before giving up. Want to know the details about every enemy type in the game? No problem! Need a refresher on what exactly the Gratia status effect does? Tough!
It’s a real shame, because Enotria has a lot to offer. It’s truly pretty, and the scenery is inspired, drawing from various Italian cultural touchstones, from archaic Rome to the canals of Venice. The environment immediately sets it apart from most of its genres, eschewing darkness and gloom in favor of brightness and joy. Quinta’s starting area transitions from lush, golden wheat fields to a city locked in perpetual carnival, while elsewhere we see sun-bleached Mediterranean cliffs and towering Roman columns. Even the shadier areas are colorful in their own way, and Litumnia’s nighttime cityscape is rendered in darker tones that are still opulent and evocative.
The inhabitants of Enotria, the extensive majority of whom are humanoid, are trapped in their masked roles by a massive spell intended to create a perfect world but instead causing stagnation and madness. Not only do the masks provide the usual reason for everyone to wander around, waiting for you to come and stick a few feet of steel in their faces, but they also form part of the game’s signature customization and upgrade system.
The protagonist is maskless, with no role of his own, and can instead take on any role he chooses by donning the masks of those he defeats (bosses tend to drop entire masks, while regular enemies drop shards that you can loot if you wish). The masks provide a variety of effects, such as buffing certain types of attacks or granting additional healing items. On top of that, there’s an extensive skill tree, dozens of spells and weapons, and stats that are increased in the typical one-point-per-level fashion.
Of all of From Software’s Soulsborne games, the combat is the closest thing to Bloodborne (insert obligatory “when’s the PC version?” comment). The different weapon types (diminutive and huge hammers, four different sizes of swords, plus polearms) don’t change much in combat, and since spells require fistfights to charge up, even the most timid mage will find himself stuck at times. Your defensive options are dodging and parrying, and the relatively tiny dodging range combined with the fact that you can parry absolutely anything (swords, dogs, cannonballs, giant boulders thrown at you by giants) means that parrying is often the better option.
It’s when you introduce skills that things get compelling. There are four trees that roughly correspond to melee, spellcasting, rogue stuff, and elemental gubbins. You can quickly acquire a whole range of skills, and I must have had over half of them unlocked by the end of the game, but you can only have six in your slots at a time. Combined with the complementary masks, they allow for much more playstyle customization than just choosing a weapon.
I went with something like a sword mage build, buffing my weapon with elemental spells and choosing support skills that increased my power when one of my spells was energetic or when an enemy was afflicted with a status effect. This turned out to be a good decision, as it meant constantly adjusting my loadout to best handle a selection of enemies in a given area or tinkering with it to find the best build to take down a boss. Luckily, you can have three different loadouts at once, and you can switch between them on the fly.
Enotria’s status effects are noteworthy for their elegant implementation, adding a layer of strategy beyond the typical “water beats fire” elemental interactions. There are only four elements in the game, and each has a corresponding status that has both positive and negative effects. Vis, which is supernatural drunkenness as far as I can tell, increases your damage and stamina recovery rate but lowers your defense. Gratia, on the other hand, provides healing over time, but if you build up too much of it, it explodes, taking a huge chunk of health away.
Unfortunately, it seems like it’s all too basic to bypass these systems entirely. Pick a build that relies on physical or basic magic damage instead of elemental types, and you’ll be able to get through most of the game with a single weapon and loadout, with no real reason to branch out. While the core combat is solid, aside from the occasional camera glitch, it doesn’t have enough depth or variety on its own, and I can see how that playstyle would quickly become repetitive.
That said, a more direct design would have avoided the aforementioned impoverished explanations of Enotria being encountered too often. Spells, or “lines,” charge at different rates. There is no equivalent to mana; you simply howl at enemies until one of the spells in your four slots gathers enough power to cast it. Each spell’s description states how rapid it charges, but in Italian (I wasn’t kidding, that’s helpful! I managed with half-remembered childhood music lessons, but if you don’t know your presto from yours allegroyou’re out of luck.
This impoverished communication extends to other areas as well. After defeating the large boss at the end of each zone, you’re given a briefing on where to go next. Hopefully, you’ll recognize the location and know exactly where it is, otherwise you’ll spend a lot of time running around trying to find it. There’s no map, which isn’t usually a problem, but when you’re trying to find a specific door that’s already been unlocked, having some kind of reference would be very helpful.
It’s also quite buggy. In the 25 hours it took me to finish the game, I encountered a number of issues, including NPC dialogue and controls freezing, as well as a few crashes. There were some performance issues, with occasional stutters and persistent screen tearing that I just couldn’t get rid of. The worst part was that the final boss would simply freeze on one attempt, allowing me to simply beat him and skip his final phase entirely. A bit disappointing. Jyamma is aware of the issues and is already working on fixes, but it seems a bit out of place to push the release date of the game forward (it was brought forward while I was working on this review, so I spent some of my time on the launch version) when you’re still fixing issues.
Those issues aside, I had a great time with Enotria. After hundreds of hours of playing the sprawling Elden Ring, especially in the DLC, it was refreshing to play a Soulslike of a more accessible length and back-to-basics approach. The unusual environments and pretty, appropriately shortcut-filled environments were a joy to explore. While you do have to actively accept the intricacies of the systems on offer, they are knowledgeable, imaginative, and I hope to see some of the ideas expanded upon in the future. Enotria is the epitome of AA gaming, with all the good and bad that comes with it.
This review is based on a test version of the game.
