Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist Early Access Impressions
Ender Magnolia is shaping up to be a great metroidvania.
Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist. Credit: Binary Haze Interactive / Adglobe / Live Wire
Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist is a metroidvania, like its predecessor Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights. It’s a 2D sidescrolling platformer with beautifully animated sprites. Magnolia maintains or slightly improves on the visual quality of Lilies. There isn’t much of the game available currently in the Early Access version, but what’s there is highly polished and feels great to play.
As toxic gas seeping out of the Land of Fumes corrupts humans and artificial life forms, accompany Lilac on a quest to cleanse the crumbling kingdom's legions of plagued souls. Convert formidable foes into friendly fighters and use their skills for up to 30 additional abilities. Explore the soaring heights and dungeon depths of an interconnected hand-drawn world while unlocking Lilac's memories to unveil the origin of the kingdom's tragic demise.
Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist. Credit: Binary Haze Interactive / Adglobe / Live Wire
Ender Magnolia features a protagonist that doesn’t have the power to fight her own battles—she must recruit homunculi to fight by her side. Having summons be your primary weapons is a neat mechanic; each of them specializes in a particular kind of attack such as melee, ranged, power, or counter, and each has multiple learnable and upgradable attacks that let you mix up your strategy depending on the situation.
Combat feels good. It’s not easy, but bosses do have learnable patterns that require patience to exploit. I kept getting killed by the final boss in this version of the game because I would jump in to attack when I should have been waiting for bigger openings. You just can’t take too many hits and there aren’t any healing items, since the health mechanic works like the Estus Flasks in Souls games which only refill when resting. My only irritation with Ender Magnolia that I hope is changed over the course of development is that the game doesn’t allow you to change your equipped relics or homunculi attacks unless you’re at a resting point.
Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist. Credit: Binary Haze Interactive / Adglobe / Live Wire
I really liked what I saw in Ender Magnolia. It’s shaping up to be a fantastic game and its painterly visual style is a sight to behold. Even at this stage, it played smoothly on my Steam Deck, a good sign in terms of the quality of the game’s optimization. The asking price for Early Access is a little bit steep considering the amount of content currently in the game, so I’d suggest waiting for an update or two before diving in.
Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist is available now for PC in Steam Early Access.
Played on: Steam Deck
