Enotria: The Last Song review — One noisy mess

Souls-like games are becoming increasingly popular nowadays, and we see yet more as the year pushes on. The quality, however, is rarely there with these copycat titles. This time we get Enotria: The Last Song, the debut project from Jyamma Games, set in a sun-drenched world inspired by Italian folklore. Do the stunning vistas of golden sunflowers and pristine beaches do enough to bring this experience up to the levels of its inspirations? Nope, because this is another flop of a game with half baked mechanics and janky movement. Let’s find out why.

The narrative revolves around a world trapped in an unnatural stasis by a mysterious play called the Canovaccio. There’s no character creator here as you take on the role of the Maskless One, a wooden puppet tasked with breaking this cycle and restoring free will to the world. You alter your appearance by donning different types of Masks found throughout the world. The premise is undoubtedly intriguing as it incorporates elements of Italian theatrical tradition, particularly Commedia dell’Arte, which you don’t see often in media nowadays. But like all Souls-like games, the story is delivered in an obtuse fashion that requires you to piece together the lore yourself.

Enotria uses the tried and true Souls formula of stamina-based combat and dropping your experience upon death. But it does introduce some unique elements, and that is most notably the Mask and elemental system, allowing you to switch between builds on the fly to address different enemies in a rock-paper-scissors like fashion. There are a total of four elements in the game: Vis, Malanno, Gratia, and Fatuo. Different elements inflict different status effects, such as Gratia triggering the Radiant status effect. You’ll need to equip different elemental weapons per loadout in order to gain the advantage in combat.

Instead of your traditional gear and armor, Enotria has you wearing various Masks to change your physical appearance and alter your playstyle. Masks can be obtained from defeating bosses or gathering enough shards to recreate them. Each Mask provides distinct passive effects and abilities. For example, the Automaton’s Mask increases heavy attack damage and grants immunity to the Sick status while Awakened – you enter an Awakened state when you land a finishing attack on an unraveled enemy. Meanwhile, the Fisherman’s Mask boosts damage for finishing blows when only one weapon is equipped. 

Though the two aforementioned systems do break up the monotony of Souls gameplay, they feel half-baked and underutilized. The biggest offender is how poorly these mechanics are explained at the beginning of the game, where you just get pop up after pop up of informational text when all you want to do is play the darn thing! And given that I don’t know any Italian, I had a very difficult time memorizing if Vis is effective against Gratia or Fatuo is effective against Malanno. Then there’s this thing called the Ardore Burst, which allows you to do a stomp burst attack that can be used against enemies as well as interact with the environment in creative ways. It’s a cool gimmick at first but just becomes another monotonous mechanic that is barely used later on in the game.

Overall the combat is janky and clunky, with none of your hits staggering enemies but even the slightest bump staggering you out of your attack. You can easily get one shot by some cheap moves from boss enemies. The only saving grace here are the parries, which the developers actually happen to get down quite well. There’s crisp and satisfying audio feedback from performing a perfect parry and the window to parry is quite generous. As such, you should approach this game more like Sekiro rather than a traditional Souls game. Every successful parry builds up an enemy’s stagger meter, which when filled, allows you to perform a visceral attack.

It’s unfortunate that games nowadays release in such incomplete states and charge such baffling prices. Enotria costs $50 when it’s clear that the quality of the project is nowhere near triple A quality. Announced 2 years ago at the Tokyo Games Show, Enotria was originally slated for a June 2024 release date before being delayed twice, with a final September 2024 launch date. What’s hilarious is that the developers have released a “roadmap” of fixes and polishes that the game should have launched to begin with. There’s no new content, so don’t call it a roadmap.

Even with 2 delays, the overall quality of the game is passable at best. Animations are janky and you’ll often clip in between environmental geometry. Movement is unnatural and there seems to be an input delay to everything. Like I always say, if you’re going to make a Souls-like game, you have to nail down the fluidity of combat. The dodge is virtually useless here as there are no invincibility frames and every single enemy attack tracks you like there’s no tomorrow. I kid you not, a straight arrow shot at you will strafe and hone in on you. What a joke this game is.

So what about the technical performance? Enotria comes in at a very surprising 9.04 GB on the PlayStation 5, and it takes around 5-6 seconds to load in from the main menu. There was a complete absence of voice acting in the beginning cinematic, which funny enough, the developers are going to add that in the January 2025 “roadmap” update along with motion capture animations for each weapon. Like I said earlier, why release a game when it’s not ready? The game’s art direction is undeniably impressive, but this is not a good looking game visually. While I did not run into any game breaking bugs, there are plenty of frame rate drops and stuttering on PS5, even on the performance mode.

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