Review of Enotria: The Last Song: “A sun-drenched Bloodborne that doesn’t quite live up to its inspiration”

When you look at it properly, Enotria: The Last Song is Bloodborne after the sun has risen. Its world, inspired by the Italian Renaissance theater scene, is bathed in golden light and awash in color. As you walk through the streets of the Quinta, the first town you reach, you'll see actors mocking each other in verse, musicians playing in loose groups, and marketplaces overflowing with sweet treats and clay amphoras full of wine.

However, if you look beyond the seemingly good life of this place, you quickly realize that the people are trapped in a horror that is in no way inferior to that of Yharnam from Bloodborne – even if Enotria itself does not live up to the inspiration.

Enotria: With you by my side – Launch trailer – YouTube

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Brief info

Release date: 16 September 2024
Platform(s): PC, PS5 (Xbox Series X is still coming, but is currently postponed indefinitely)
developer: Jyamama Games
editor: Jyamama Games

You start Enotria as the Maskless One; in a world trapped in an eternal, scripted performance, you are the only one without a role and free to make your own choices. Granted, most of your choices involve killing things, namely the key players that set the eternal performance in motion. However, it serves a good purpose. If you can kill all the bosses that put the world in stasis, you might be able to get Enotria's world moving again.

The fields, caves, monasteries, and streets of Enotria are teeming with deadly enemies that you can dispatch with a few unblocked blows. To progress, you'll need to be careful and learn to time your attacks, parries, and dodges to survive. Along the paths you travel, you'll find rest stops where you can upgrade your character with the resources you've earned and refill your health bar and your limited healing potions. However, resting also resurrects any enemies you've killed. Enotria will be familiar to anyone who's played any of FromSoft's Soulsborne games or their numerous imitators.

Modeled on Bloodborne's aggressive approach, Enotria rewards you for jumping into the fray and takes away most of the tools you have to keep your enemies at a distance. The game offers no shields or armor and few ways to deal ranged damage. You can't even block your enemies' attacks, only parry them with perfect timing.

However, if you can parry enough attacks, you'll “disintegrate” your opponent, stunning them and leaving them vulnerable to an attack of tremendous impact or even a killing blow. When you're facing a knight armed with a sword as large as yours, it's deeply satisfying to parry each of their savage attacks, only to then counter with an attack that kills them in a single blow.

However, this mechanical focus on parries can lead to you just watching your opponent's sword arm, waiting for the moment they start their attack so you can tap the left bumper to parry. It's a shame, because in Enotria you're always surrounded by a beautiful world and I've spent hours just looking at people's elbows.

Create new strength

Enotria: The Last Song screenshot with a cutscene from the game

(Image credit: Jyamama Games)

Where Enotria gets a little ahead of other FromSoft-inspired games is the freedom you have to define your character. Besides the standard tools of an RPG, like permanently improving your stats and weapons by redeeming experience and crafting materials to level up your character, increasing your attack power, elemental damage, and defense, there are plenty of ways to temporarily change your character build.

In keeping with the theater setting and your role as a Maskless One, you can don the masks of your defeated enemies to take on their characteristics. These passive buffs are similar to those you would unlock when completing an armor set in other games. For example, after defeating Zanni, a gigantic former drama teacher who has taken to eating his students, you'll receive additional healing potions. On the other hand, wearing the Mask of Change, which you get from defeating the tutorial boss, will let you do more damage with heavy attacks.

Enotria's skill tree works differently than many other RPGs. The unlockable perks only activate when you place them in one of your six active slots. There are nearly 70 perks to unlock, and they can be combined to create builds that support radically different playstyles. One perk grants you a little health every time you perfectly parry an enemy's attack, another weakens your defense but greatly increases your stamina, and yet another adds elemental damage to your weapons every time you cast a spell.

In addition to the masks and perks, there is the ability to switch between three loadouts on the fly, even in the middle of a boss fight. If you're the type of player who likes to theorize, this feature might be interesting for you. I myself rarely used it because I didn't have enough freedom to switch between builds in the more difficult fights, and because perfecting one build is time-consuming enough, let alone refining three builds.

Bitter fighting

Screenshot from Enotria: The Last Song with a fight against a big crab

(Image credit: Jyamama Games)

I circled the bosses and tried to push them against a wall so my PC wouldn't have to render the panoramic view on the other side of the arena.

Boss fights in Soulslike games are often at their best when you feel like you're dissecting an enemy that once seemed invincible. You have to study their attack patterns, look for gaps in their armor, and then dissect them. You get a taste of that in Enotria – you have to learn your opponent's movement patterns to know when to dodge, when to strike, and when to parry – but the bosses' health bars and the amount of time you have to spend wearing them down before they're stunned make every fight a grueling one.

While you have a lot of flexibility in how you build your character, no matter what mask you wear, what perks you equip, or what spells you bring into battle, there's little you can do to lower your health bar significantly faster. Entering an arena to spot a boss felt more like a chore than an exciting moment, as it meant another hour or more of throwing myself against a wall until I was lucky enough to string together enough perfectly timed dodges and parries to take them down.

There are plenty of tools to help you stay in combat longer, like perks that grant healing in combat and items that permanently increase the effectiveness and number of healing potions you can carry, but I still prefer shorter fights to having to heal myself 10 times over the course of an extremely long fight.

Enotria: The Last Song screenshot with a dark and ominous tone

(Image credit: Jyamama Games)

While I did encounter bugs in Enotria, they were mostly in my favor, with bosses freezing in place for half the fight so I could drain their health bars. Occasionally they worked against me, such as a shortcut ladder I couldn't climb, forcing me to take the long, enemy-filled route. One persistent issue, however, particularly when entering the second region of Enotria's world, was significant, frequent framerate drops. I'm usually forgiving of low framerates, but in a game that requires so many perfectly timed button presses, it's frustrating that the developer failed to provide an environment that supports this level of play.

I tried circling bosses and forcing them against a wall so my PC wouldn't have to render the view on the other side of the arena. An interesting tactical challenge, but not intentional, I think. It's a shame that a game so heavily inspired by the theater is let down by its performance.

There's a lot to enjoy in Enotria, particularly its lush world and unusual source material. However, it also does little that other games haven't already done – and done better. Combine that with the poor performance and drawn-out boss battles, and it's hard to recommend it to anyone but the most diehard genre fan who's already played through Lies of P, Lords of the Fallen, Nioh, and of course all of FromSoftware's games.

Enotria: The Last Song was tested on PC using a code provided by the publisher.

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