3.5/5 ★ – usagichann's review of ENDER LILIES: Quietus of the Knights.

This was a game that was wildly recommended to me from various sources....online reviews, reddit, etc. Since I have a penchant for Metroidvania's as a whole, I wasn't surprised by the recommendations and after having finished Blasphemous 2 during holidays decided to see what the fuss is about. First up, the art work is really distinct. You will probably have polarizing feelings about it, either hate it or love it because its not quite what you'd expect from the genre. The animation in the game is a little wonky, a little off, and that might throw everything off since there's always quite a bit of platforming in the genre. But once you get past that little hurdle, the rest of the game is quite competently done. The conceit of this game is that you don't do any attacking and instead use enemies you redeem to fight on your behalf. This introduces probably a microsecond or 10 of lag into your button press and the attack coming out (this is perceived and there might not be any lag) and you'll realize that your attack hit box is a bit off from what you'd normally expect. Yet another adjustment period combined with the wonky animation. With all that said, like I said, the game is competently done. There is some story and exposition but it comes down to "there's a plague on the whole land, and you need to go kill things and fix it". Every one you encounter is basically already dead or corrupted and there's no conversation to be had other than with ghosts. There's some journals to pick up but I'll be frank and say I didn't read any of it. Art style wise, you better like black/white/dreary landscapes as they wanted to convey the whole "bleak despair" scenario and while there are colors in some landscape, predominantly you are going to get black/white/grays. Your character is basically white with some black outlines and it doesn't get much better from there. Exploration wise the game isn't bad, and there are some nice quality of life stuff like your map turns a different color for each area when you've collected everything there is to collect. I still finished the game and got all the collectibles for it so while it wasn't particularly memorable, it was still enjoyable enough for me to spend about the 20 hours or so finishing it. Difficulty was about right and the length was also about right. Still, its not quite as revolutionary as I expected and my top 3 metroidvanias are still Hollow Knight, Ori, and Blasphemous 1/2. Good if you have the time to play through it, but if you don't, you're not missing much.