So many new Metroidvania games come out every year that it can be hard to tell one from the other. Ender Lilies, a new addition to PlayStation Plus this month, might look like another run-of-the-mill Metroidvania at a glance, but with a few subtle tweaks to the formula, it manages to do something brand-new while still delivering everything you’d want from this kind of game.
Released in 2021, Ender Lilies stars, not a powerful warrior, but a small, frightened girl. The game’s story is told subtly through scraps of information found as you explore and in short cutscenes detailing its bosses. What’s easy to pick up is that your character, Lily, is also known as the White Priestess and gifted with the power to end an undead plague known as the Blight that’s infecting her world. She is, in fact, the last in a line of White Priestesses, the only surviving member of her order and the last person left who can stop the infection.
Throughout Ender Lilies, you do battle with hordes of monsters, all formerly living things infected with the Blight. Ender Lilies is a very combat-focused game. While it does feature the platforming and exploration players expect from a Metroidvania, its challenge lies more in surviving fights than using movement skills to get around its environments. Rather than fight directly, Lily has a unique method of protecting herself that sets Ender Lilies apart from similar games.
At the outset, Lily’s only means of defense comes from a knight sworn to her service. Press the attack button and Lily actually takes a step back to let her knight swing a sword in front of her. Functionally, there’s little difference between having a knight attack for you and doing it yourself, but the animation makes attacking a bit slower and more deliberately than in other Metroidvanias like Hollow Knight, and it reinforces the unique relationship between Lily and her knight.
As you defeat bosses and explore the world, Lily gains the help of more allies among the Blight-infected creatures she purifies, from a raven that follows her attacking enemies to a former nun swinging a massive flail in a circle. Rather than simple variations on your initial attack, each creature’s Spirit you collect has its own distinct use. Most offer some form of attack, but others provide defensive skills, important because without one, Lily’s only means of avoiding attacks is diving out of the way. You can equip up to six Spirits at a time by resting at the game’s equivalent of Dark Souls bonfires, and choosing which you take out with you is a huge part of Ender Lilies’ strategy. Once you’ve got enough Spirits on hand, you can almost always find a way through even the toughest situations just by rethinking what help to bring with you.
It’s possible to just view Spirits as tools for Lily, but each plays into the game’s tragic story. Everything you fight in Ender Lilies is a victim of the Blight you’re striving to end, joining forces with you to help in your quest. These backstories are especially important for bosses, many of which were formerly allies of the White Priestesses, or people otherwise committed to their cause. Cutscenes accompanying boss fights spell out how they met their sorry fate, and what their life looked like before they succumbed to the Blight.
There’s very little cheer in Ender Lilies, but there’s still beauty to its hopeless world. Despite mostly being set in bleak places overrun with monsters, Ender Lilies’ art is soft and gorgeous, its hazy lights and bursts of color coming across as even more striking compared to the grim scenes around them. Its piano score is likewise somber but beautiful, lending the entire game a melancholy air that could hardly be more different from the tone most action games try to strike.
Now is an especially good time to give Ender Lilies a shot if you haven’t already. Earlier this year, its sequel, Ender Magnolia, debuted on Steam Early Access. Replacing Ender Lilies’s dark fantasy setting with an eagerly grim sci-fi city, Ender Magnolia is already shaping up to be a strong refinement of what made the original great. The full game is due out by spring 2025, so there’s still plenty of time to check out its excellent predecessor before then.
