Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights Review
Even though they’re a pretty big deal in the gaming world, I haven’t played any of the Metroid games and the only Castlevania game I played was Lament of Innocence, an entry in the series I only ever hear maligned. I didn’t have any reason for avoiding them, I just never got around to either of the franchises that founded the “Metroidvania” genre. Looking back, my avoidance is funny considering how much fun I’ve had since then with games like Guacamelee and Salt and Sanctuary. In keeping with the idea that I only like Metroidvania games on accident, this week I didn’t realize I was going to be reviewing one. All I knew was I was interested in a game where the hero has ghosts do the fighting for them, so I looked at Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights.
Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights tells the story of a young girl named Lily, the last of a religious order known as the White Priestesses. Awakened from a magical slumber by a spirit known only as the Umbral Knight, Lily discovers her home has been ravaged by a curse her order was meant to defend against. Accompanied by the Umbral Knight, Lily sets out into the blighted world to find the leader of the White Priestesses and discover why their defenses failed. On the way, she will have to confront former friends and allies who have been twisted by the Rain of Death curse, using her clerical powers to release them from the curse and recruit them to her cause.
The unique feature of Ender Lilies that will catch the attention of most people, as it did with me, was that Lily doesn’t do any fighting. Instead, spirits do the fighting for her. All of the denizens of the kingdom have been twisted into sickly, raging husks of their former selves and Lily is able to perform a sort of inverted exorcism on some of them. Instead of pulling an evil spirit from an otherwise good person, Lily is able to wrest the true good soul from the cursed monstrosity their body has become. Players will quickly grow their roster of assisting spirits as every boss and mini-boss enemy is someone who can be purified and recruited once they’re defeated. My opinion of the spirits system started high because it’s conceptually interesting and has the unique mechanical feature of being able to deploy multiple spirits at once. It’s both handy and fun to send the battle nun spirit swinging her censer like a flail in one direction while the Umbral Knight slices and dices in the other direction.
But as the game went on, I cooled on the spirits system a little bit because it didn’t feel like it was taking into account the personhood of these spirits. I felt that if there was no way for the spirits I had recruited to actually show any personality, then getting new abilities from beating bosses is just the same trick we’ve seen from the Mega Man franchise for decades. This started to especially bug me when I realized that two spirits, the Fungal Sorcerer and the Floral Sorceress, were shown in their blurbs to have been romantic partners in life. Right then, I equipped both in the hopes that I would get to do a special couple’s move or get some passive boost, but got nothing. On top of that, I was surprised to see that upgrading spirits was just a matter of collecting enough of a resource and then spending it on a spirit. I would have loved to see a friendship or familiarity rating improve with time and usage, something that reminded me that these are people, not just weapons.
Alongside the spirits system, the rest of the gameplay in Ender Lilies has some good ideas. Following the standards of the Metroidvania genre, Ender Lilies has a huge sprawling map with areas that are inaccessible without the right ability, but several of these are more engaging than they needed to be. In the world there are sections of the land blocked by blighted barricades that require special abilities to break through. Some are easy to get through, but others require Lily to have sufficient momentum to breach. This forces players to find a high enough drop or long enough runway, depending on if the barricade is vertical or horizontal. Having some blocks require a bit of puzzle solving to get through kept my brain engaged and made me have more fun hunting for treasures. This was helped by the game’s map which coded individual rooms on the map by color: blue if the player still had items to locate, orange if the player found everything in that room. I appreciated knowing which specific areas I would need to backtrack to and got a very satisfying dopamine hit when a room finally turned orange.
Finally, I can’t end this review without first raving about the sound design. The music in this game is composed mostly of slow, haunting piano melodies with periodic additional effects, mixed to never be in the foreground but always present. Better still, though each region has its own style, adjacent areas have similar themes so changing from one to the next is delightfully subtle. The transitions were so smooth I didn’t notice until I used the game’s fast travel system to move to an area a good distance away. One area I want to compliment in particular is a late game zone that is disturbingly biological. In addition to the perpetually good piano, the music for this area is accompanied by sound effects halfway between an animal growl and the gurgles and groans the human digestive system makes at the most inopportune moments. It’s gross and I hated it a little bit but it’s absolutely perfect for that area’s mood.
Last week saw one of the most enthusiastic recommendations of a game I think I’ve written since starting this site. Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights doesn’t quite reach that level but I still think it’s great. Between the creative spirits system, engaging gameplay, and well crafted atmosphere there’s a lot to like in this game even though it aims higher than it can manage. I played Ender Lilies on the Switch but no matter what platform you decide on, it’s definitely worth $25.
Buy this game at full price
It’s worth every penny they’re asking
