Enotria: The Last Song Preview – One of the Best Soulslikes Under The Sun

3 years after its first announcement in TGS Online 2021, we finally got an opportunity to try out a demo of Enotria: The Last Song. Developed by Jyamma Games, the game is a soulslike set in a beautiful sun-lit world inspired by Italian folklore where the brightest sun casts the darkest shadow.

As an independent game studio in Italy since 2019, Enotria is Jyamma Games’s first product, slated for release on 19 September 2024 on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.

Exploration

The game definitely lives up to its claim to being a soulslike, with all the classic features of one such as strong bosses, hidden enemies, elite monsters, map exploration, and of course, swamps. It almost feels like we’re back in Elden Ring for the first time, albeit with an average-sized open world instead.

Just like other soulslike games, the world is filled with many places to explore and discover, with skills, weapons, tools and items scattered across the map. However,the game wont give you any hints or directions, including for locations of key quest items. We personally came across a grand total of 2 NPCs throughout our demo playthrough.

This demo showcases all sorts of vistas and locations to explore. After defeating the first boss, you will find yourself at the field of beginnings, with sunflowers as far as the eye can see. It’s a relatively peaceful location that grants you breathing room to familiarize yourself with the controls and enemies. The second location is at the beach, also a place that lets players practice the controls, but contains more elite enemies.

Across your journey, you can find and interact with 3 different types of reality glyphs, which lets you swap between environmental states to solve puzzles, reveal secrets, traverse the world and gain a strategic edge in battles. But some secret paths you can trigger are on a timer and will disappear after a while.

Shortly after, you will discover Quinta, a small town set in an Italian carnival that’s so merry, even the enemies are dancing. The sheer merriness of this quaint town made my journey much more fun. The town also has a large number of small houses you can just walk in and discover, and traversing the roofs can net you some useful items.

Loadouts/Build

Your build consists of three main loadouts; masks, lines and weapons. You can swap between up to 3 customisable loadouts at any time which offers an extremely flexible and diverse combat experience. For example, you can be a swift lancer at the start of the fight, and swap to a parry knight midway through.

Firstly, the masks are the biggest selling point and in our opinion, one of the most unique things about the game. Each mask works like a different class akin to JRPGs affecting your gameplay style, stats as well as the types of weapons you can equip. With each mask, you can equip a main core and different skills on it to further specialize your build.

Lines are Enotria’s equivalent of spells, and you can equip up to 4 of them at once. Hitting an enemy builds a meter which can then be spent on casting lines. There are many spells such as a long ranged magic crossbow, magic long spear, all with their own unique effects.

Lastly, Weapons are the most common items in the game and includes the full range of handheld medieval weapons that you can think of such as long swords, greatswords, and morning stars. These can just be found in chests or as enemy drops, and as a reward for defeating bosses. As per most soulslikes, you can upgrade these by using certain elements.

Path of Innovators

The Path of Innovators works similarly to a skill tree where you can upgrade your skills and stats. The Path also offers a unique pool of talents which can be used to further expand your playstyle options.

By combining the talents from the Path with masks, plates can create their own custom builds on a single screen, featuring a unique system that makes theorycrafting and altering playstyles for each situation easier than ever.

Combat

Despite being challenging, the combat in Enotria feels smooth and compact, the perfect combination for a soulslike. Just like other soulslike games, you will still need to manage your stamina, parry, run and dodge attacks, relying on just your skill as a player. Without an MP system, abilities will take both time and meter to charge up, as well as an eye for timing as skill casts can be interrupted by the enemy. If your sills are interrupted, you will take damage and your meter will not be refunded, thus requiring the players to repeat the process.

While we found the combat enjoyable, a minor issue we had was with the audio as we found the sound effects too plain. Otherwise, the challenging boss battles, tricky enemy design, and unstoppable attacks make it the ideal soulslike combat experience.

Conclusion

In our opinion, Enotria: The Last Song has almost all the ingredients for a perfect soulslike game. The artstyle might not gain your attention at first, but the gameplay is outstandingly fun. We have played around 3 hours of the demo and we still have not discovered everything that it has to offer. For a demo, I believe a lot of effort has been put into it, and we will certainly buy it when the game gets a full release.

Overall, This game is ideal for soulslike enjoyers. But if you are using a low spec PC, we would be hard-pressed to recommend it, even when playing on low graphic settings, because the game runs on Unreal Engine 5 and has high requirements.

Enotria: The Last Song was reviewed on PC via Steam with the following specs – 12th Gen Intel Core i7 Processor (14-core) i7-12800H, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU, 16GB GDDR6 VRAM, 1TB SSD, Windows 11.

Review code provided by Jyamma Games.

Enotria: The Last Song

Publisher: Jyamma Games

Developer: Jyamma Games

Release Date: 2024-09-19

Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, Steam, Xbox Series X|S

Set in a beautiful sun-lit world inspired by Italian folklore where the brightest sun casts the darkest shadow, become the Mask of Change and free a world of unwilling actors, stuck in an eternal script not of their making.

Join Us!