GAME REVIEW: Ender Magnolia - Bloom in the Mist (2025)
A genuinely enjoyable Japanese-styled metroidvania
Back in 2021, Live Wire and Adglobe paired up to release a game called ENDER LILIES: Quietus of the Knights — a well-reviewed metroidvania game with a strong story set in a beautiful world, released via Binary Haze Interactive. In March 2025, these guys paired up yet again for the sequel, ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist.
Likewise in March, the PR rep for Binary Haze Interactive reached out to me to see if I’d be interested in checking out the game and writing a review, and after a brief look, I was very interested. However, despite starting the game immediately and enjoying it, unfortunately, I didn’t have much time for gaming this spring/summer. I keep my promises though, so I started the game over from the beginning this fall and now that I’ve finally finished, it’s time to share my thoughts. So, let’s dive in!
Premise
The game’s pitch was listed as such:
Decades after the events of ENDER LILIES, artificial life forms corrupted by mysterious fumes have turned on humanity. The crumbling kingdom’s fate depends on Lilac, an “Attuner” who possesses the power to purge evil from their bodies. Uncover the source of the Homunculi’s afflictions, and cleanse corruption out of ten plagued bosses in battle to gain both their friendship and fighting powers.
Art & Music
First of all, I absolutely adored the art and music. Immediately on starting the game, the atmosphere is wonderful — beautifully aesthetic, dark yet evocative, mysterious and lovely. The rich environments are paired by ethereal music, which I’ve even gone so far as to save to my digital library, which it seems I should attribute to an artist by the name of Mili. The dark, ambient music with a hint of Japanese vocals now and then really adds to the atmosphere of the game, though I will admit that having vocals in the beginning’s main hub was a bit distracting for me when I spent a lot of time in the area. This is a personal preference, but I might have preferred if there hadn’t been lyrics, even if they were incomprehensible (in Japanese).
The flipside of that was that the cutscenes did feel like they might have benefited from some voice acting, but of course, that would have just been an added bonus and perhaps they didn’t have the budget? I just happened to miss a few moments because I didn’t realize a cutscene was coming and the distraction caused me to miss some things. But! The upside to that was that the player can rewatch these scenes from the respites.
Gameplay & Mechanics
As mentioned, the game is a 2D sidescrolling action-adventure metroidvania game, AKA exactly my jam. And I really can’t express enough how much I enjoyed playing it. The player character, Lilac, gathers her move-set by tuning the homunculi, who join forces with her to, ultimately, make the world a better place for humans and homunculi alike. There are ten main bosses in the game, one of which is optional, with a few worthy mini-bosses along the way as well. The upgrades are pretty standard: dash, wall climb, and other usual suspects, making the game easy to follow for experienced gamers. Health upgrades are dotted about the game, with the occasional platforming challenge beforehand.
Boss fights were perfectly challenging in traditional metroidvania style, with a few being particularly irritating. Personally, I had my partner help me out with a few of them before I remembered that I could just adjust the difficulty in the menu. I also really liked that you healed after a boss fight, because, as much as I love a good Soulsborne challenge, getting the shit walloped out of you right after beating a boss has never been something I consider to be “good difficult” and just feels like kicking the player when they’re down (especially in games that don’t autosave — again, fortunately, this game does).
The saves are much like Hollow Knight and Silksong in that you rest at benches, and the healing system uses a similar style to the Dark Souls estus healing, namely a limited number of heals that refill when you rest. There’s also a lot of cool things you can do at these respites, like change and update your abilities, change your equipment, rewatch cutscenes (a huge bonus, as I mentioned before). You could also replay boss fights, adjust the difficulty, and eventually change the skin of Lilac’s outfit. This was also where the occasional conversation between Lilac and her companions takes place.
A couple of soft downsides included one particular boss fight who truly required you to learn to parry, so if your gameplay hadn’t involved using the parry homunculus at that point, it was really frustrating (this is one of the ones I got help with). As well, some of the setting design made it seem like there were not doorways where there were, so I missed a couple of really obvious things (like respites) because I literally didn’t know I could continue forward due to the look of the room.
A huge bonus point to the makers: I LOVED that they showed room completion on the map, simply by changing its color, once you’d found everything. Areas were segmented into smaller regions, so it was really swift and easy and not at all frustrating to complete the map. I’ll say it again: I loved that. To all other game developers? Please do this! I hate the tedium of running around and slapping every wall just to see if I missed something, but by showing immediately on the map the completion of a region, it saved so much pointless running around. Amazing.
Also, props for the customizable difficulty settings! That was really unique and I really enjoyed that I could make different aspects of the game easier, without altering the whole experience.
Story
Now, it’s worth mentioning that I haven’t played Ender Lilies, but the cool thing about Ender Magnolia is that it rewards you if you have, but doesn’t punish you if you haven’t. I don’t feel as though I missed anything by not playing Ender Lilies, but I do know that at least one of the characters comes from the first game.
I really enjoyed the story on the whole, and it’s pretty relevant in the present day, even if the concept is nothing we haven’t seen before. On the whole, it is about the suffering of both humanity and homunculi under both a Blight and a Rain of Death, which has forced everyone into miserable lives — the setting is literally called the “Land of Fumes.” The homunculi get corrupted by the Blight, while the Rain of Death and Blight affect both. Most of the characters — Lilac and her first homunculus, Nola, included — have lost most, if not all of their memories, though they begin to come back as the game progresses. The characters learn about the barriers, the Land of Origin, the cause of the Blight, and so on, leading to two potential endings, one of which requires full exploration of the world.
If I have any complaint, I did find that both of the endings felt a bit abrupt. It’s not that they were unsatisfying — both were appropriate for the work you did to get to them — it’s just that once you defeated the last boss, there wasn’t much to the final cutscenes either way. You don’t really get much of a sense of what you accomplished by finishing the game. It felt like there could have been a bit more of a payout somehow, maybe some flash scenes to show the NPCs reacting, or something. That said, it’s still a pretty minor complaint on the whole.
Do I Recommend It?
Absolutely! If you like metroidvania games, this is an excellent game to add to your collection. It has all of the usual trappings you’d look for from a solid metroidvania game, from the interconnected world to the bitchy bosses, but manages to be flexible enough for gamers of all skill levels to be able to enjoy thanks to the fun customizable difficulty settings. When looking up the general complaints about the game, the only one that I can agree with was the underwhelming ending. I’m not the world’s most skilled gamer (though I have beaten Hollow Knight, Dark Souls, and Dark Souls 3, so I’m no slouch either), so I can be a bit finicky about controls, especially in platformers, but I didn’t really find any issues there. I didn’t find the map at all confusing, either. In fact, I found it a lot more helpful than in a lot of other games of its ilk. On the whole, I found it to be a really engaging experience!
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