Enotria: The Last Song is a beautiful, if imperfect, soulslike developed by Jyamma Games. Set in a fantasy world inspired by Italian folklore, it brings a beautiful art direction and some interesting unique gameplay features to an otherwise rather familiar formula. While not all of these features work as well as intended, the game definitely has enough working in its favour to be worth the attention of soulslike aficionados.

In Enotria: The Last Song, the gods have disappeared and a group of human artists have crafted the Canovaccio, a mysterious play which has enslaved the whole world into its masked cast. With the world stuck in stasis, every actor forced to play their part in the Canovaccio, you play as The Maskless One, a wooden puppet with free will to defy the Canovaccio by travelling across three main regions to defeat the play’s authors so that free will can be returned to the world.

It’s a compelling premise which leans into the Italian theatrical tradition of Commedia dell’Arte, with a hammy English dub which feels oddly appropriate for a setting where none of the cast can emote with their facial expressions. The game has a rich in-game compendium compiling all of the bits of lore that you come across in chests and following boss fights to enrich the setting’s backstory, character motivations and optional objectives. This was quite appreciated considering most soulslikes don’t include that and make you head to fan-made wikis for that sort of thing.

Gameplay-wise, if you have played Dark Souls or any of the similar games which have taken inspiration from it, the fundamentals of Enotria: The Last Song will feel rather familiar. Combat is challenging, but rarely unfairly so, with enemies coming back to life and healing items recharging when you rest at save points. The player acquires a resource called Memoria from defeated enemies, which can be used to improve your stats and upgrade your equipment. Jyamma Games has put effort into making Enotria’s combat more fast-paced and less passive; for instance, there are no shields, only a parry system relying on deflecting enemy blows at the right moment to negate damage. There are also no proper long-ranged weapons; if you want to take down your foe, you will need to go and engage them yourself in melee. The parry system is somewhat more merciful than it was in Lies of P; even if you suck at getting the timing correct, parrying at close to the right moment will still negate some damage.

Enemies of all kinds can be very aggressive and difficult to knock off-balance. Fortunately, all enemies can be stunned if you parry their attacks enough, leaving them open to a devastating finishing blow. I liked being able to reliably open up enemies to a powerful attack which would turn the tide of the fight, however I found that it also encouraged a rather formulaic strategy with boss fights and tougher regular foes alike of just continuously parrying until they’re stunned, making a mechanic designed to encourage aggressive play incentivise a more defensive, passive approach instead. I would have dodged more often but most ranged attacks track you as you move, and if nearly every attack can be parried and that is more advantageous, why not just parry until the enemy has opened up?

Enotria: The Last Song has a spell-casting system, called lines, which charge up as you deal damage to enemies but which go back to zero charge when you rest at save points or enter boss arenas. Spells range from magical melee weapons to summoning giant hands which slam on the ground to breathing toxic gas at your enemies. These lines can be further enhanced and customised with perks in the game’s surprisingly intricate Path of Innovators skill tree. However, I personally found the speed at which lines charge, particularly in the early game before you have upgraded them very much, to be too slow to be more than occasionally useful. This was particularly felt during the boss fights, which often didn’t last long enough for my slower lines to be used more than once. The fact that their recharge speeds are written in Italian (meaning I had to recall my high school clarinet lessons to remember whether “presto” means faster or slower than “adagio”) wasn’t especially helpful either.

Being able to experiment with different stat allocations via different roles was interesting, letting me try out different lines and weapons without needing to fully respec my character. However, the issue with this system is that it didn’t feel all that necessary to respond to the game’s challenges. Only a handful of the game’s bosses seemed to change up their strategy or weaknesses mid-fight, meaning that there was rarely any call for me to change up my own loadout at short notice. The passive abilities of the various masks weren’t always equivalent, either, with a mask which I obtained fairly early on which increased the maximum number of healing items I could carry being the one I mostly stuck with due to how incredibly useful it was. I only found myself swapping to a few other masks once I had whittled down my supply of healing items as some of the more lengthy boss fights progressed.

A clever element of Enotria: The Last Song’s exploration which I wish was experimented with more was the Ardore Burst ability. By pressing both LB and RB together, the player can use an Ardore Burst which can both destroy certain kinds of doors and, more interestingly, create temporary structures and platforms and, as well as interact with rifts which reshape the environment in a more major way. The centrepiece of how this ability was employed was an area in the game’s second region dominated by a giant statue the player could traverse across, with the player being able to edit the position of the statue via a rift in order to impact which parts of the two edges of the cave the player could access. It was probably the game’s most memorable and intricate area, and I would have loved to see more areas feature that degree of player interaction.

One departure that Enotria: The Last Song has from Dark Souls is the inclusion of a dedicated jump button. One might think that it would make the occasional platforming sections less frustrating, but unfortunately, not really. The game has multiple sections where the player must traverse a bottomless gap on a narrow bridge or railing while ranged enemies knock you off to your death, with the jump button only marginally making those sections less annoying than they would have been with Dark Souls’ control scheme.

Your time is also not overly wasted with backtracking, for the most part; nearly every boss has a save point right outside their arena, and you can fast travel between save points right out the gate. That said, the game could probably do with better directing the player regarding where to go next; the second area is surprisingly unintuitive to access and which I found pretty much by accident while going off the beaten track in a very early area I had no other reason to return to other than being very lost at that point, stumbling around for how to proceed.

The game isn’t all that long; with only three main regions and the adventure basically whisking you straight off to the final boss once you complete them, it will probably take around 12-15 hours depending on how lost you become at any point. There is a New Game + mode, however, allowing you to re-tackle the game’s challenges with your existing upgrades and gear.