Enotria: The Last Song, the Italian “souls” all soul, body… and masks

Enotria: The Last Song will have to wait for a few more months, but the ambitious project of the Italian team of Jyamma Games he’s already showing his claws with one free playable demo. After trying it in full, we finally have much clearer ideas about what awaits us in the sunny adventure of the Milanese studio. Despite some critical issuesperhaps because of the test build, perhaps because there is still something to polish, the title has many interesting strengths, and we can say that it actually satisfied us. As we told you recently, this demo has the Estimated duration of approximately 8 hours. We can say that the estimate is almost exact, although the timing can greatly increase or decrease based on your personal capabilities.

Quinta, the city of actors

The Demo of Enotira: The Last Song will see us start in an unspecified place near a city built on a mountain, located at the same time in one splendid background with a Mediterranean flavour, close to lush countryside and the seashore. This picturesque and fascinating – truly – medieval-style village is called Fifthdefined as the “City of Actors“.

In these places, we will control our character: a “Without Mask”. In the demo, not many things were explained to us regarding who we are, or what our mission is, but it guided us inside a quick tutorial to learn the basics of combat. The style underlying everything that we have before us can be defined as that of the “classic” soulslike, but with a couple of differences due to the parries and the special moves (called Mask Line). What is most “special” in Enotria, however, concerns the customizationand we’ll talk about that shortly.

Wandering first near the sea, then in the city, and then in a dark area with an abbey dedicated to Maja, the demo engaged us in very different areas, all with their own peculiarities, and a noteworthy variety in level design. If there is something that shines a lot, is therefore the quality of the environment. We then underline that it succeeds step away brilliantly by some clichés typical of the genre: in fact you won’t find corpses scattered everywhere on the map (just a couple, for some reason), and for the rest you will only see living creatures and people, integrate wisely with the environment and atmosphere. So here we go from a city that seems perpetually celebrating, to an area where cultists seem to be plotting something macabre and dark.

Be on your guard, Marrano!

The gameplay structure is quite solid, and introduces several pretty good new features. The biggest peculiarity is linked to Loadout, or structures that we can prepare in the rest menu, and also change in combat: that’s right, we can have up to three different builds saved, and also switch them during combat. These build will depend both from masks that we will have found (or generated), from weapons and the gems equipped, from “relics” that will be dropped by the bosses, gods traits which we will gradually unlock from a skill tree, the special movesand give it quick objects. Customization is very extensive, the variables are almost infiniteand this mechanic is preparing to be the flagship of the entire work.

Another peculiarity of the gameplay concerns the combat, with the enemies – including bosses – who will have a bar which will fill when they will be hit or when you will carry out perfect saves. When it fills up, the enemy will be stunned for a few seconds, and you can make a critical attack. Getting in tune with this mechanic will be essential to prevail. It is probably due to the presence of this mechanic that there are no (at least we have not encountered any) possibilities for stealth attacks from behind, or attacks from above.

As already mentioned there will be several rest points, in which we will recover life, but we will also be able to work on loadouts, use fast travel, and more. Of course, enemies will also respawn.

Since it is a demo would be premature speak about difficulty and of balancingespecially because the “memory” gained to level up, the weapons available, the masks and so on, they will certainly be very different in the final version. In fact, it seemed to us that the areas and loots were well enriched in the trial version, to give players a concrete idea of ​​what they can find, do, and create.

The bossfight proposals were worthy of the name, even if, above all, the one with Curtis was somewhat affected by the size of the map, but above all by one of the most debilitating problems of the game: the camera and the target lock.

Technical aspect

We tested the demo on PlayStation 5and we can say that on a technical level the game presents many joysbut also some noticeable aches and pains. We have already praised the level design and the environments, and if we will set the quality by focusing on the details, we will have some really good views ahead of us. However, it was the ones who lost out FPSwhich, unfortunately, a sometimes they struggled even in mode performace.

Artistically speaking the game is a gem, and who knows what other places we will discover later. L’musical accompaniment then it is uniquecharacteristic, with the skilful use of musical instruments of the time which the game is inspired by, as well as the clothes of the enemies, the buildings, the tapestries and so on.

Now, however, we come to the bitterest part. Removing some bugs and glitches, which we already expected given the nature of the build, we encountered some problems in the command response. We are not talking about actual input lag, since we often talk about animation speed, but a couple of things actually make you turn up your nose. Let’s talk for example about slowness of speed in jumpor of dodge not exactly immediate (since pressing the same input for a long time will make the character run).

The thing we believe more serious but it concerns the target lock: let’s start from the fact that the camera will remain fixed in a certain sense, if we decide to lock on a character, however it will not follow us in a homogeneous way, and it will not follow us in our movements (for example if we wanted to go around the enemy). This led to a serious domino effectthat sees dodge directions are wrong while we lock an enemy, reckless camera movements, blockages and locks on enemies or map elements, and other things like that. Not to mention that when we attack an enemy after he has faltered, the lock will disappear: that’s right, it will not remain on the enemy, if he is not dead, nor will it transfer to someone nearby. We will have to do everything manually.

We would like to underline that the one we tested is only a trial versionand who therefore we could be far from the final result. There is a lot of time to fix certain critical issues, and this could be proof for the developers of Jyamma Games a healthy source of feedback, which we are sure will be taken into consideration. One thing is certain, with all the adjustments and precautions, Enotria The Last Song has the potential to become the best Italian video game ever. While waiting for the definitive release (or perhaps another demo), the final judgment is obviously postponed. Our impressionsFor now, there are a lot of them optimistic.