Thoughts on my time with Ender Lilies and its sequel, Ender Magnolia

I’ve been a little bored with video games lately.

Part of that is likely just a cyclical mood thing, but another part is probably that I’ve been anticipating Monster Hunter Wilds (out in about 48 hours as I write this), and when you’re anticipating a game, everything else can seem a little lackluster in comparison. Nothing over the past few months had really been able to get me out of my funk... until I decided to dip into a game from my (somewhat recent) backlog: the 2021 Metroidvania Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights.

Actually, me buying the game is a bit of a story in itself that might amuse anyone who buys more cheap Steam games than they ever end up playing (that’s probably most of us on this forum, right?).

Damn the timing

I have to start this off by talking about buying a different Metroidvania. It’ll make sense in a second.

Ori and the Blind Forest was a game that caught my attention due to GB’s coverage of it, and especially Brad’s advocacy during 2015 GOTY discussions (I think he’s still bitter that it didn’t get a GB music award that year). I put it on my wishlist and waited for a sale. I ended up buying it in early January 2016 for $12.

Then the dev did something that annoyed me: they released a Definitive Edition, and offered it to current owners of Ori for a discount ($5), but on a timer. If you waited too long, you’d have to pay full price for the new version. This felt, frankly, kinda shitty to me. I didn’t see why the offer couldn’t be perpetual. But anyway, I gritted my teeth and bought it. That lingering resentment is probably a contributing factor to the fact that as of my writing this blog, I’ve still never actually played the thing.

Fast forward to 2021, when Ender Lilies was released. I fairly quickly identified it as my sort of nonsense, and added it my Steam wishlist, thinking that I’d eventually pick it up on sale when it was on a deep enough discount.

However, the thing was, whenever Ender Lilies went on sale, I’d look at it and think: “This is the exact same type of game as Ori and the Blind Forest, and after [X years] I still haven’t played Ori, so why would I buy another one just like it?”

And so over the next ~3 years, I kept seeing Ender Lilies on sale, but never for more than half off ($12.50, from $25). I kept not buying it, mentally citing Ori to myself. Finally, in early July 2024, it went on sale for $10.50, which was as cheap as it had ever been. I sighed and thought, “Fine, I’ll just buy the damned thing.”

Then, the very next month, August 2024, it was a free PS+ game.

Honestly, I didn’t end up minding that much, since I liked the game well enough that I’m fine with the dev having a bit more of my money. But damn, those clever bastards...

I later realized that the game had probably been a free PS+ title to drum up interest for the sequel, even though I wasn’t aware of its existence at the time; it had entered Steam early access in March 2024 and was ultimately released in January 2025. And as a marketing tactic, it seemed like it probably worked, given that August 2024 saw a 3,000% increase in player count for Ender Lilies.

Gamma issues

Before I really get into talking about Ender Lilies, it’s probably worth mentioning something that (kinda literally!) colored my experience with it. It has to do with the game’s gamma settings. On first launch, you’re eventually greeted with this screen:

Here’s the thing about this gamma adjustment screen: it does not give you an indication of what the ideal gamma is supposed to look like. There’s just the three images of the main character at different brightnesses.

Since I was so used to games telling me to “adjust the brightness until the image on the left is barely visible,” that’s what I did. As it turns out, for me that ended up being a gamma of 25/200. OK, sure. I went forward with that setting and promptly forgot about it.

But I do remember thinking, even in the early going, “Gee, this game really is dark. Oh well, I guess that’s just the style!” That was fine until I started entering areas towards the latter portions of the game that were supposed to be even darker. Which led to situations like this:

Can you see the platforms on this screen? I sure can’t! I kept assuming that there was some sort of torch or lamp that I was I supposed to find to make these areas more visible, and that I had just missed it. It was only after 100%-ing the game and contemplating doing this write-up that I thought, “Hang on, what if I just increased the gamma?” I tried upping it to 75/200, and got this:

Ohhhhhh. Uh, OK. Would have been nice if I’d realized earlier that my gamma was set way lower than the developer really intended. I do somewhat blame myself for this, but also: dudes. If you’re going to give players a gamma adjustment screen, you need to provide some indication of what it should look like. Otherwise you’re going to end up with situations like mine.

The classic Souls-like Metroidvania, with a twist

Anyway, gamma issues aside, overall, I quite enjoyed Ender Lilies! Allow me to describe the basic mechanics.

The “gimmick” of Ender Lilies that makes it unique is that your main character, Lily, is a helpless little girl who can fight only with the aid of spirits of fallen warriors. Hitting one of the three attack buttons will activate one of the three spirits you’ve got equipped, who will appear out of thin air near her location and do their attack.

At first, this honestly felt a bit awkward and unsettling, to have your attacks so strangely disconnected from your actual player avatar. But I got used to it soon enough. In the end it was cool flavor. I also got a kick out of the fact that Lily’s dodge wasn’t a roll, as is traditional in these sorts of games, but rather simply a frantic dive forward, with generous i-frames. It reinforced that this was not a person who was good at combat. At all. Just a little girl fighting against overwhelming odds.

Anyway, worth noting that there’s plenty of unique spirits in this game to choose from (26, to be exact), and that you can have three equipped at any one time. While your primary melee attack options tended to be infinite, most other spirits had limited uses between “Respites” (i.e., bonfires). If I have any criticism of this system, it’s that upgrade materials are limited enough to discourage much experimentation; there are nowhere near enough mats to fully upgrade everything, so I tended to simply stick to the stuff that was upgraded more than was ideal.

Beyond this spirits mechanic, the game falls pretty squarely within the bounds of what you’d expect from a Souls-like Metroidvania. Enemies will stay dead until you rest at a Respite. There are plenty of traversal powers you’ll discover throughout the game that will unlock previously inaccessible areas. And the story is mostly indecipherable, apart from the general through-line of Lily purifying the land. Well, I’ve never really cared about story in these types of games anyway. One departure is that there are no “corpse runs”; there is no real penalty for death other than sending you back to the nearest respite and re-spawning all enemies.

I do think that a major strength of this game is the boss battles, particularly the big, main story ones. Somehow it manages the trick of bosses seeming nearly impossible on the first one or two attempts, only to seem eminently beatable after a few more. “Tough but fair” is a cliché in these games, but very much applies here. Boss fights had a satisfying level of difficulty while never feeling unbeatable... except in those first couple of attempts when you simply didn’t know the pattern.

According to Steam, I hundred-percented the game after 23.1 hours. While I had minor frustrations, some self-inflicted with the gamma issue (“Where the hell am I supposed to jump to?! I can’t see anything!”), I mostly had a great time with it. And it was only after beating it that I realized that a sequel, Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist, had been released in January.

I noodled over whether to go ahead and pay full price for it. I’d liked Ender Lilies quite a bit, but Monster Hunter Wilds was awfully near, and moreover, Ender Lilies had had a NG+ patched in, so I could just play that instead, and wait for a sale on the sequel.

But the problem with that latter idea was that I derive a lot of the enjoyment of Metroidvanias from the exploration/discovery aspects. So playing a NG+ just to fight tougher enemies and bosses to compensate for my maxed Spirits, with the mystery of the exploration removed, did not actually seem like the best time in the world. Moreover, I thought there might be just enough time for me to finish the sequel before Wilds came out (turns out I was right). So I went ahead and paid the full $25.

The good and the bad of optimization and polish

There are undoubtedly things about Ender Magnolia that are straight-up improvements on its predecessor.

One obvious one is that you can now fast travel to any respite from any location instantly. Whereas in Ender Lilies you could “Return to Respite,” which would send you back to the nearest respite, but then if you wanted to fast travel, you’d have to sit up from the bench, sit back down on the bench, and only then select “Fast Travel.” It was more steps to accomplish the same result, and there’s really no reason that Ender Lilies shouldn’t have had the same mechanic. A very basic QoL upgrade.

A bigger deal was the upgrade to the map. While Ender Lilies did already have the nice RE2 Remake-like feature of color-coding rooms that were completed vs not, it was also not at all granular in its map detail. All rooms were rectangles, regardless of their actual shape, and they didn't show impassible barriers within the rooms themselves. Check out this screenshot from the first game:

Notice how that long, vertically narrow room in the center has several lines denoting entrances/exits from other rooms? Well, from looking at the map, you have no way of realizing that the top, central entrance leads to an elevator with walls on either side, so that those side-entrances are not optional but crucial to cover the whole area. You simply have to know and remember that fact for each room.

By contrast, the sequel’s map is far more detailed and granular. It reflects the actual shape of each room, plus all impassible walls, and even allows for setting custom map markers—though the map is already so good (even labelling items you can see, but haven’t picked up yet), that such markers are really never needed.

Ender Magnolia also does a really smart thing with the spirits. While Ender Lilies had twenty-six separate spirits, each with only one ability, its sequel instead has thirty separate abilities, but they are split amongst only ten different spirits which have three abilities each, and you can only have one power per spirit activated at a time. What this allows is for these ten spirits to develop their own personalities across the course of the game, with optional dialogue sequences at respites. Whereas before, the twenty-six spirits of Ender Lilies had been too many to be their own distinct characters; while your three equipped spirits would appear next to Lily at respites, they never had dialogue, and were only a visual difference.

By far my favorite spirit, personality-wise, was the “Shackled Beast.” He’s kind of a vulgar goofball. There’s a scene where your main character gets an item that apparently had a strong scent associated with it, and he expressed interest in it as “perfume.” In the end, you end up giving it to an NPC in trade for a useful upgrade item, and he laments: “But my perfume!”

Ender Magnolia also did away with the idea of limited uses of spirits. While this is more of a mixed bag, balance- and design-wise, for me it was a pleasant change, given that I’m one of those people who tends not to use abilities with limited charges at all, because I always think I’ll need it more for later. There are still cooldowns for particularly powerful abilities.

I should probably take the opportunity here to say that the music for both games is pretty great. Both are by a Japanese band called "Mili" that I’d never heard of. In particular, the song for the below trailer for the second game is a banger; it turns out it’s the music for the final boss (a bit of an odd choice, but it works). The music adds to the games’ distinct ethereal quality.

Difficulty is perhaps another thing worth mentioning. The first game simply did not have any difficulty settings; it just was what it was. The sequel, by contrast, has about the most granular difficulty settings you could imagine, letting you adjust enemy damage, health, and stagger resistance separately at any respite (mid-game, if you like). Speaking for myself, I started out by setting it to the “Hard” preset, and never ended up changing it. As it turns out, “Hard” for the sequel ended up being roughly equivalent to the difficulty of the first game, which was just where I wanted it.

Finally, and this feels like a weird criticism to voice, but if I have anything negative to say about Ender Magnolia, it’s that it seems to be so polished and optimized that it ends up being slightly less interesting than its predecessor. Maybe that feeling is exacerbated by the fact that I played the two games back-to-back, I’m honestly not sure. I spent 18.8 hours hundred-percenting Ender Magnolia, slightly less than the 23.1 hours I spent on the first game, and a lot of the time difference seemed to come down to the fact that the sequel provided such superior tools for navigating its world. There is a weird part of me that yearned for the rougher edges of the original, that old-timey feeling of being slightly f***ed and unfair. Maybe I should buy myself a hair shirt and some bondage gear.

But really, I can’t complain much. Ender Magnolia was a pretty great “one of those.” And while I know I said I wasn’t necessarily interested in the NG+ of Ender Lilies, I feel somewhat drawn to doing a NG+ play of the sequel. Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist yet; hopefully it’ll be patched in, as it was for the last game.

And hey, maybe after I finally get bored of Monster Hunter Wilds, I'll actually get around to playing Ori, huh?

...

If anyone has any specific questions about either game that I haven't covered, please feel free to ask. I think they're both worthwhile purchases. Also, shout-out to our intrepid mod @mento, who did the only write-up before this one of either of these two games (neither was covered by GB editorial staff).