Fast forward just under four years and developer Binary Haze Interactive, purveyors of both Ender Lilies and the excellent Redemption Reapers (review here) are back with Ender Magnolia – Bloom in the Mist. While this is a direct sequel to the previous game, the creatures, characters and story are all new, so expect to learn everything from the ground up, even though the mechanics are remarkably familiar.
In Ender Magnolia, you play Lilac, a young girl who has woken up without any idea of who she is. Lilac as an Attuner, imbued with special powers that allow her to detoxify homunculi from the fumes released by the Land of Fumes. Homunculi are magical creatures created by humans to help them, tainted and twisted by fumes to turn into monsters. You begin the game by meeting Nola, an old homunculus who has lost her memories as well. As you make your way through Ender Magnolia, you will slowly acquire powers from various homunculi, allowing you to use a variety of attacks.
While Ender Magnolia plays like a normal metroidvania, there are some noticeable differences in the quality of the story which is slowly spun out through homunculus memories, conversations, and short but emotional cutscenes. The plot winds out with a complex interaction between two powerful but ideologically opposed houses of Attuners, making for a series of revelations about your experiences in the game as you navigate the slowly moldering remains of the Lower Stratum as you try to make your way to the Upper Stratum where it seems the mysteries of your origin lie. With such a tightly written and nuanced story which plays out conversationally, there’s no sense in giving any spoilers but suffice it to say that the plot is surprisingly compelling for an action-based game, evoking an almost RPG-like feel which contains much less exposition.
What you’re really here for is the gameplay though and Ender Magnolia – Bloom in the Mist has that in spades. Building on the structure of Ender Lilies, Ender Magnolia creates a complex interweaving of abilities to balance that allow for you to structure combat based on your preferences. You now have Abilities, Equipment, and Relics to manage and each adds another layer to the gameplay. Abilities are generated by Homunculi and as the game progresses, you’ll acquire five slots to use for various attacks. These start with basic sword-style combat and expand into medium range pressure attacks, independent automatic attacks, defensive counterattacks, and aggressive powerful attacks that need to recharge after use. Combined with your dash ability which makes you temporarily invincible and allows you to pass through enemies and attacks untouched, you have a wide repertoire of attack options to choose from as each homunculus eventually has three different type of attacks, all of which can be upgraded as well. Whew!
That’s a lot to take in and we haven’t even scratched the other options yet! Next let’s look at Relics. While exploring the world of Ender Magnolia, you’ll occasionally come across various relics. These are leftover Attuner technology abandoned by Attuners as the world slowly collapsed due to fumes and the corruption of the homunculi. Relics can be installed in slots to boost your abilities in various ways, including attack power, defense power, additional healing, and much, much more. The key here is the number of slots you have. There is no way to install all the relics you find, so you’ll have to pick and choose based on how many slots you have available and the type of character you’re creating. To expand the number of available slots, you’ll have to find or buy magic vials. Each vial provides an additional slot for relics and the price goes up each time you purchase one. With 12 spaces for the over 20 slots you can eventually gather, there are a lot of hard decisions to be made when it comes to utilizing relics, though it pays to experiment, creating combinations of abilities that boost your combat effectiveness significantly.
While relics and abilities were both present in some form in Ender Lilies, Equipment is the new addition to Ender Magnolia. With equipment you can add bracelets, carapaces, and totems to your repertoire. Bracelets tend to give fairly significant stat boosts, far more than levelling up overall and are well worth your time to build, especially as some augment your healing abilities. Carapaces provide a variety of additional functions from stat boosts to shielding abilities and more, and Totems give base function augments like extra lives, attack and defense boosts and more. Between relics, abilities, and equipment, there’s an absolutely massive amount of variety to choose from for various builds in the game that dramatically shifts your abilities based on your loadout choices.
We haven’t even hit all the gameplay functions in Ender Magnolia yet either! In addition to Lilac’s build options, the basic functionality of the game is outstanding. Eventually, you’ll get grappling abilities, double jumps, crushing dive attacks, and a whole series of functionality that slowly but surely unlocks access to various areas in the game. That’s not to say that there’s no challenge here, but it’s a structured challenge and your abilities come at a measured pace that keeps things moving while never getting stale. Just when you think things are starting to get a bit slow, there’s always a new area that you can find in the map system that you couldn’t access before. With hidden rooms and items everywhere, the game manages to stay engaging throughout. The map even tells you if you’ve found everything by turning blue in areas where there’s nothing left to discover, drawing you back to areas that you haven’t fully explored!
Of course, aside from all the gameplay, Ender Magnolia – Bloom in the Mist is an unbelievably gorgeous game too. Sprites are large and stylized with an anime feel to them and the backgrounds are rich with muted color and depth suitable for the grim mood of the plot. Enemies are wildly varied and creative too and you’ll frequently come to a new area and stop just to admire the sheer artistry of the designs for a bit…at least until the rather aggressive enemies start pummelling you. There really aren’t very many games in the genre that look this good and if you thought Ender Lilies was gorgeous, it doesn’t hold a candle to Ender Magnolia. Even cinemas are uniquely fascinating with filer and camera angles worked into still images in such a way that they’re more powerful than much more advanced rendered cinemas in other games. Simply put, the visuals in Ender Magnolia will blow you away.
That’s not the only impressive thing about the game however. The soundtrack and sound design arguably surpass even the outstanding visuals. Soft piano études mix with clever sound effects to create a soundscape that draws you into the world of Ender Magnolia without becoming tedious or boring. Even though some of the best tracks are looped, it makes no difference because each area has subtle variations and shifts in the pacing of tracks that maintain your engagement. There are soft but more active guitar sections, mournful violins, and soothing piano work all carefully designed to create a rich tapestry of sound that will make you long to obtain the soundtrack for this hauntingly beautiful series of compositions. With excellent voice work to accompany the music and sound effects, there are simply no issues whatsoever with the sound here. This is one of the best sounding games we’ve played in recent memory.
One of the more modern nods in Ender Magnolia is the considerations given to player abilities. Ender Lilies is an amazing game, but it’s remarkably hard. Ender Magnolia has a noticeable shift in difficulty, making the game far more approachable. What’s particularly interesting is the sliding scale of difficulty options available from any save point. From here, you can individually adjust enemy attack strength, HP, attack frequency and more, as well as toggling various difficulty functions. This makes Ender Magnolia far more approachable, allowing you to shift up and down in various stats for enemy interactions with no penalties incurred. Stuck on a boss? Shift the difficulty down for some of their stats. Want more of a challenge? Crank things up a bit. With both standard presets and personal options available, this is one of the most user-friendly games we’ve ever played in this regard.
That’s not the only area where quality-of-life improvements help Ender Magnolia – Bloom in the Mist to shine either. We’ve already mentioned the map of course, but in addition, the fast travel system is extremely effective, rapidly shifting you from save point to save point, allowing you to traverse areas quickly rather than losing momentum in the overall game with tedious backtracking. Stopping at a rest point resets your health as well (though it does also reset all the enemies you’ve killed…enemies who don’t respawn until you save). You can always quickly warp back to a town and upgrade if you’re struggling to progress. You also have several healing potions to use which are replenished with each save, allowing you to fight your way through difficult areas without having to leave and come back if an enemy catches you off guard. It’s all designed to maximize the pacing of the game, keeping you moving forward with a feeling of steady but inevitable progress and maintaining the freshness of the story rather than diverting to exploration and losing the flow of the plot.
It’s not very often that there’s nothing bad to say about a game. Ender Magnolia – Bloom in the Mist is that game however and every conceivable barrier to player progress has been minimized, creating a game which flows smoothly through the entirety of play and provides a fascinating story, stunning vistas, and a top tier soundtrack. The gameplay is responsive and incredibly well-designed and there are enough hidden items and interesting areas that no player is likely to get bored with the game. With multiple systems to manage and an increasingly complex economy that keeps you constantly shifting the way you play, Ender Magnolia – Bloom in the Mist is a simply spectacular game that no one is going to want to miss, regardless if you’re a fan of the genre or not. This is what gaming should be.
This review is based on a digital copy of Ender Magnolia – Bloom in the Mist provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well in both. Ender Magnolia – Bloom in the Mist is also available on PS4, PS5, Xbox, and for PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.