Souls of Italy – Enotria: The Last Song Review

Last year many were surprised by Lies of P, a game that actually managed to throw in some novel twists on the all too rote format used by From Software and their many imitators. Despite being a game about Pinocchio of all things, it showcased not only an understanding of the way someone would want that type of game to feel, but also a menagerie of different ideas and concepts that forged an identity separate from its inspiration. Enotria: The Last Song is similar to Lies of P in several ways, and while it substantially lacks the same level of polish and cohesion, it still manages to introduce several original ideas to the stagnant Souls-inspired space and stand out on its own. 

Enotria is an action RPG set in an alternate reality inspired by Italian folklore and popular culture. Here, the world has become an endless play, and every person who lives within, an actor. Everyone is wearing masks corresponding to different roles; you have lumberjacks, you have musicians, you have gondoliers, and so on. You play as “The Maskless One”, a character that exists outside the contents of the established storyline, who can take and wear any of those masks for themselves. As you make your way through the game, you’ll gradually gain more and more masks, learn more about how the world ended up this way, and who or what is behind this new attempt to flip the script.

What’s immediately noticeable about Enotria is its vibrancy. While there are several games inspired by Dark Souls, most of them adhere pretty strongly to the dark and gritty atmosphere established by it. Enotria eschews this immediately by utilizing its setting as a representation of the Apennine Peninsula, with beautiful sunflower fields, crashing waves of deep blue, and hills to climb for days. There are bright-bricked towns with winding staircases, murals adorning countless walls, and colorful banners draped across every window. Doing something different from your peers can make you stand out, but Enotria doesn’t just try to look a little different, it puts its entire heart and soul into looking beautiful at every turn. If much of Dark Souls’ design philosophy is predicated on the notion of beauty in tragedy and death, Enotria’s aesthetics scream life and revelry.

When I realized the game was separated across three separate interconnected maps, I was concerned that things would err back on the side of darker as things progressed, but even when Enotria is at its darkest, it never loses its sense of color. One map is inspired by Greek architecture, with huts on the shoreline giving way to white stone cities further inland. Another is a deeply blue Venetian city built entirely on water, with opulent halls filled with literal rivers of wine, and industrial factories built around mines and meteoric craters. People love when Italy is utilized as an inspiration in games, whether it’s the Ionian architecture of Heide’s Tower of Flame in Dark Souls II (Majula could be argued as well though it feels more Iberian), or the Renaissance-era Assassin’s Creed II (even if the 360 era meant much of its color was washed out), so it’s wonderful to see creators capitalizing off of the improvements in technology we’ve had, in a way that isn’t just pores on a face.

What you’re doing inside all of these environments however, is a lot more comparable to the standard Souls format. Like I said, an interconnected world, there are boss fights, there’s a hub (appropriately a theater) you return to with vague NPC quests. You’ve got light attacks, you’ve got heavy attacks, you’ve got the Lies of P/Sekiro block and parry move; if you can think of a thing that’s in a Souls game, it’s probably in Enotria in one form or another. What makes things stand out a little more however, is that Enotria lets you choose between three loadouts of spells, passives, weapons, and stats, whenever you want. On the surface, this feels like nothing more than a quality of life feature, but it actually feeds quite well into the core loop of the game. 

Quickly, you’ll realize that the elemental system in Enotria isn’t as basic as “this boss has a slight weakness to lightning weapons”, or “this weapon now scales with this stat instead”. Instead, every element is basically a debuff you’re afflicting onto a boss, and some bosses have a very Pokémon-esque super effective weakness to a specific element (determined by color). While I was initially concerned this would make the game too easy (in some ways it still does), in practice, it meant that I was creating several different loadouts and using a bunch of different weapons to deal with any given situation, rather than making one build and just sticking with it for the entire game. 

This goes alongside the Mask mechanic pretty well, and specifically the Roles that come along with them. While Masks add an interesting passive ability- for example “parrying an attack quickly fills your spell gauges”- Roles are ways of tweaking your stats in various different ways. While all Roles have generic passives like “+5% damage reduction”, they also give various amounts of stats, and as the game goes on, the sheer amount these stats give you can completely transform your character depending on what loadout you’re using. This can be minor changes like becoming tankier if you’re low on health, or major changes like now meeting the requirements for a weapon you might not be able to use with the stats you’ve gained just from leveling up. While I wish this loadout system had gone a little farther (some masks are obviously better than others), and taken it even further to include some of the stats you pumped in from leveling up, the flexibility of this system made me experiment with a lot more weapons and options than I would have in most other Soulslike games.

This was also aided in part by a feature that From Software recently utilized in Armored Core VI that needs to be in every single game like this ever: weapon downgrading. At any point in Enotria, you can just refund the items you put into a weapon, in order to upgrade another. This means when you find a direct upgrade to a weapon you were already using, you can just immediately bump it up to where your other one was with practically no hassle at all. No scouring the wikis for crystal lizard locations…no twinge of regret from using your titanite slab on a weapon you no longer love…This is the type of feature that you really don’t truly appreciate until you’ve experienced that sort of pain and loss…and now I never want to be without it.

While I enjoy all these features, the unfortunate truth of Enotria is they don’t often live up to their full potential. I love the concept of being this hot-swapping elemental debuffer; but in reality there just wasn’t enough of a difference between them to feel meaningfully distinct. Sure, the pink debuff causes the enemy to deal and take more damage, but the increases are so negligible compared to the sheer amount their innate weakness to pink weapons already brings. Even further hampering this is how much in common most of the weapons have with each other, with most weapons sharing the same handful of base movesets, with animations either accelerated or decelerated between them as the only noticeable differential. Imagine my disappointment when I defeated a boss that was wielding a spear blunderbuss, and when I took it for myself and it didn’t even fire any bullets! It just does the same thing every other spear does! 

This is the main problem with Enotria; it has a lot of ideas, and they’re all here in interesting ways, but the application is consistently generic. Though most of the named bosses are pretty interesting and fun (albeit often with one mechanic that tends to sour them), the standard enemies are so basic and overused that they quickly blend together into a slurry of every basic Souls game enemy you’ve ever faced. One of the most egregious examples of their overuse is the Spaventa Gatekeeper, who you fight at least ten times over the course of the game. The first time you fight them it’s interesting, largely because they’re one of the first meaningful “phase change mechanic” bosses, gaining a Zelda style sword beam on their attacks once they get to half health. However, you keep running into these guys, and the only meaningful difference between them is an ever-swelling HP pool and the color of the beam that comes out of their sword. This was a problem I ran into in Elden Ring, and if a game with a budget as absurd as that can’t make reused enemies compelling, it was never going to go well for Enotria.

There are a smattering of other issues across the game, but they’re more upsetting in how they drop the ball, rather than outright being bad. The spell system here is much different from the traditional Souls “equip a bunch and use as needed” format; you equip four abilities per loadout, and they each have their own meter that fills up gradually over the course of a fight through different actions. This is engaging in the sense that it allows you to have several of the fun moves that the advent of weapon arts have afforded From Software’s more recent games, but their finite resource and often long-winded activation time can mean you flub them more then they’re actually useful. 

The same goes for the game’s sphere-grid level up system. You gradually buy passives for four different skill trees over the course of the game, and you can equip six per loadout. While the four skill trees cover the four facets of combat (the spells, stamina management, raw offense, and elemental damage), there’s not much depth in what you’ll actually pick between your different loadouts. Sure, you could set up an interesting elemental build that synergizes with your spells to cast them more often, but you could also just as easily do more raw damage with the generic attacks you’re always doing, and do pretty much the same amount of damage across all your builds. 

A lot of these issues are compounded by Enotria’s rough launch. Despite already being delayed by a fair amount of time, it’s obvious that certain elements of the game’s design were still undercooked, and there’s several bugs across the experience to contend with. I regularly ran into things like despawned elevators that required a full restart, soft-locks in the middle of NPC dialogue, the frame-pacing issues inherent to every Unreal Engine 5 game, and enemies that would just stop doing anything entirely in the middle of a fight. Several of these issues have been fixed since launch, with a couple patches coming out over the past few weeks, but even when some are squashed, others are added in. During my playthrough the developers added a Story Mode to the game, distinguishing the previous difficulty of the game as “Soulslike Mode” in the menu. While this worked well enough (and I appreciated them adding an option), issues with their rebalancing efforts for this also meant that my healing became largely ineffectual, right as the difficulty of the game was spiking. Imagine my confusion as I looked up videos of a fight I was struggling with, only to watch the player heal to full with a single swig of their potion, while I had to do 3 after nearly every attack. I felt crazy! 

These issues all make it feel like Enotria could have at least gotten a little closer to the highs of something like Lies of P, but it just needed more time and eyes on it to really perfect what makes it interesting. While all the disparate parts and concepts at play are genuinely original, they never really coalesce into something meaningful. There’s so many little ideas I love over the course of the game; things like the more enemies of a certain type you kill the more lore snippets you get of them, references to Italian character concepts like Il Capitano and Arlecchino (Arlecchino stocks are really high these days!) are really fun to see, even if the story is on-par with the average Soulslike (barely there). I think if Jyamma Games works on another game, and take what they’ve learned from this, they could make something truly special, because even in its chaotic half-baked state, Enotria has a heart and soul that feels all too rare in the current space of Action games.