Last night, I beat the final final boss in Ender Lilies for the 3rd of 3 endings, and I felt the need to go somewhere and say: Ender Lilies is outstanding and you should probably play it if you haven't.
Gameplay: 9/10 Art: 8/10 Score: 10/10 Story: 4/10
Ender Lilies is a metroidvania where you play as a little girl whose offensive and defensive abilities come from spirits whom she purifies of "blight" throughout the course of the game. In all, there are a staggering number of attacks to choose from by the end of the game, and they are all relatively unique, although some are in a similar category.
At rest areas, you can assign each of those attacks to square, triangle, and circle in two different loadouts you can switch between at will with R1. I frequently found myself trying new attacks and loadouts to deal with different areas and bosses. When you defeat bosses, you get a new attack from them, as well as new exploratory abilities (standard double jump, dash, etc.).
The bosses are a lot harder than I expected going into them, but in the fun way where trying new things can make a huge difference so it becomes a matter experimenting of solving it out. Regular enemy variety is also pretty expansive, as are the various areas that present unique environmental challenges.
As for the art, it's a beautiful, anime-esque hand-drawn style, smoothly animated and enhanced with effects. The only thing that I count against it is that its bleak color palette means it never reaches the level of spectacle that the best of the best (e.g., Gris, The Artful Escape) reach.
The score kind of has its own reputation. If you've heard of the game, you e probably heard about the score. Classical contemporary from Mili, it has a distinct fairy tale quality that is almost distracting to the gameplay with how good it is..
The story's fine. It lacks the immersive environmental character and humor of Hollow Knight (which I think was a clear inspiration), but there's enough lore to uncover that finding new notes (its main form of exposition) is interesting enough.
When I started it up, I was expecting to kill a few hours out of it a la Tales of Kenzera (which was a good enough time). But I got super sucked in and found it to be a serious highlight for the year.
I played this after it came up on PS+ as I'd heard good things. Whilst I did finish the game (well, ending 2) my feelings were mixed.
The combat is smooth with satisfying hits and it has a pretty soundtrack. But I found the graphics overly grey and detailed in a weirdly ugly/uncanny way? It's hard to describe but the aesthetics weren't particularly appealing to me. The map is also unhelpful - it's just abstract squares that don't represent the actual shapes of the rooms. So backtracking once you have a new traversal item is a pain. And I think all of this together made it tricky for me to care much for the story, which felt disjointed and uninspired.
But that said, the actual gameplay was decent and I sure it would appeal to most people. I've heard the second game actually fixes a lot of the issues I had.
Oh, I meant to mention the map, I know a lot of people take issue with it. It's certainly unusual and makes hundred-percenting item collection challenging. There are some maze-like areas with different levers you have to pull in certain orders that I'm undecided if they were improved by having less information.
Definitely a point of contention though, to say the least.
Yeah I really wasn't a fan of that. Coming from something like Hollow Knight, which colour codes each region and shows an outline of each individual area... Ender Lilies in comparison doesn't do a great job. Say I remember 'oh the area with the big drawbridge, there was a locked door that I can now get past', and then having to work out which rectangle that was on the map - kinda frustrating. But I'll definitely keep an eye out for the second game.