Enotria: The Last Song review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

In a timeline where it seems like Soulslikes are prosperous and plenty of content recently with the Elden Ring DLC having launched, naturally it means we’ll see plenty of fans of the genre, indie or otherwise, releasing their own spins on the genre and gameplay style. Jyamma Games’ Enotria: The Last Song releases on September 16th for PC on Steam, and a few days after on console. I had high hopes going in, despite hearing the negativity on the demo, but it didn’t quite deliver as I’d hoped.

To start, Enotria is a Soulslike based on Italian Theatre, featuring recognizable names such as Arlecchino and Pulcinela. You’ll be traversing more than just some Italian towns though, as there’s plenty of diverse biomes to explore and fight through. Ranging from dark and cultic churches to Greek warzones, you’ll always be in a unique situation. Although, navigating each zone can be somewhat frustrating at times. This leads me to the next point I want to make about the exploration and world layout in Enotria.

Exploring in Enotria often feels like it’s unrewarding in comparison to other games of the genre and style. Don’t get me wrong, the levels are gorgeous, but it doesn’t feel like the rewards you get for stumbling into optional bosses or areas are worth the effort it can take to get to them. They might get you a minor equipment upgrade that may or may not even be useful to how your build is leaning, or a weapon with worse stats and scaling than the weapon you’ve already been leveling up and dedicating yourself to. There are some very interesting mechanics for equipment and how you handle your builds, though. You have three “loadout” slots that allow you to equip two weapons each, equip unique masks that have varying effects ranging from carrying more healing flasks to better defense to better spell usage. You can also equip “roles” that are stat modifiers.

It sounds strange, but the closest comparison I have in recent memory to this is the Magatama system in Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne where equipping specific Magatama would change your stats based on what role it played. Oh, and if you’re at all familiar with big skill trees, Enotria: The Last Song has you covered plenty. You have a rather expansive list of upgrades you’ll be toying with and equipping as you play, enabling you to further fine tune how you want to interact with the game’s combat systems.

Speaking of stats and builds for combat, we’ve gotta talk about the combat. It’s great when it works and flows properly, but it has a lot of problems. There is a day one patch that addresses some bugs within the game, but nothing that seems to address the problems that seemingly lay within the core of the gameplay. Enotria wants you to focus on parrying enemies like it’s Sekiro, but gives you a normal combat loop like it’s a regular Soulslike, and these two methods don’t blend as well as you’d like. It results in enemies that feel like tanks, rarely staggerable without the largest weapons you can get your hands on. Not only do enemies feel like immovable objects (and you are very much NOT an unstoppable force), but you stagger at seemingly every little thing that hits your character. I also had frustration with some animations for being knocked down or staggered to last longer than other games, causing enemy interruptions to be frequent and annoying.

On top of enemies taking very miniscule stagger and staggering you with so much as a pebble toss, I ran into issues with enemies seemingly canceling attack animations into completely different attacks with no restart of the attack animation. This resulted in many deaths that felt like I couldn’t have prevented without just running away instead of engaging in the combat. The combat has great bones, but it lacks polish that leads to more frustration than enjoyment.

I didn’t notice anything in the details for the day one patch that fixed some more specific or niche problems, such as what seemed like control hanging where I would get stuck walking in a direction for a brief moment or my camera not stopping when I released the stick. I tried a few controllers and keyboard + mouse, with none of them solving the problem. It’s hit or miss when this happens, so it’s not a huge complaint as it’s not consistent enough to get in the way of the fun. Another weird issue that kept appearing (and keep in mind I have no idea what caused these things) was a lack of input acceptance. Sometimes menus would just stop accepting up or down inputs from my controller and keyboard, completely disabling my ability to interact with the menus. This was frustrating upon the defeat of a boss and gaining a bunch of level up currency, only to be able to not be able to spend it on the correct stats because the inputs weren’t being registered by the game. Again, these aren’t huge complaints because they weren’t very frequent to get in the way majorly, but they were enough of an issue that I wanted to bring it to attention.

I don’t necessarily think Enotria: The Last Song is a bad game, because it’s not. It has issues for sure, but they seem more attributable to the developers not having a ton of experience with the genre than anything else. There’s definitely good bones here with some solid ideas, but it definitely could benefit from a sequel that improves upon the issues within the current release. It runs at a relatively stable 60 frames per second on my somewhat outdated PC hardware all the while maxed out visually at 1440p, so I’m quite impressed by the performance. Jyamma did excellent work with optimization work on a game that I can only assume is using Unreal Engine 5.

If you’re looking for a new Soulslike experience and willing to tolerate some notable negatives all the while experiencing a very unique setting, it’s a decent time. It’s a bit difficult to recommend to a more casual audience, but if you’re seeking a challenge, albeit not necessarily intentionally, Enotria is a decent time. Enotria: The Last Song has its share of issues, but I’d wager it’s a great first step for Jyamma Games in this style, and I can only imagine they’ll make something even better with the next release.

Note: Jyamma Games provided us with a Enotria: The Last Song code for review purposes.