My... Sort of Review of Ender Magnolia.
Does it really matter the game didn't do much different?
It's been a while since I've written anything because of work, but it's good to be back at it. At first, I thought it was great, if only because I get to start my return to reviews this year with Ender Magnolia, a fantastic game that is a sequel to Ender Lilies. But we're in some fairly uninteresting territory here for me, because it's basically going to be the same review all over again.
Ender Lilies Review: https://peakd.com/hive-140217/@dlstudios/ender-lillies-steam-review
That said, what is it I'll be talking about here, then? Well, I think I'll use this moment to talk about how not every game needs to be concerned with doing too much. There is obviously a line you need to walk to avoid simply retreading the same ground, so how does Ender Lilies manage it?
A big thing is that neither game is a huge time sink. Seeing a lot of reused mechanics isn't really an issue when each game runs roughly fifteen hours. Even if absolutely nothing changed, a total of thirty hours across two games isn't going to become a slog if the combat is genuinely interesting enough. Pair that with the fact that there are some fairly minor tweaks to how everything works, and these games being on the shorter end makes it perfectly fine. No need to reinvent the wheel—just give it enough of a shine to feel fresh, and that's all that was needed here.
As for the story, I’m going to quote my original review of Ender Lilies here, because it applies: “It’s a dark Metroidvania with similar styles of building up the lore; both are about fallen kingdoms done in by some kind of plague, and a protagonist who lacks memories. Even some of the twists about the main character are similar. I looked up my original review of that game from 2018 just to see, and a lot of what I said about Hollow Knight is also going to apply to Ender Lilies.”
What's absolutely fascinating is that, yes, this is entirely true in relation to Ender Magnolia as well, but once again, it feels like an entirely unique story from the other two. It's as if the developers sat down and asked themselves how many different stories they could tell within the confines of that setup and managed to give us two fresh takes on it.
At the end of the day, I can't really say anything about Ender Magnolia that I haven't already said about Ender Lilies, but in this particular case, I don't think that's a bad thing. It's definitely worth checking out.