Enotria: The Last Song review: "A sun-drenched Bloodborne that doesn't quite live up to the inspiration"

If you look at it the right way, Enotria: The Last Song is Bloodborne after the sun's risen. Its world, inspired by the theater scene of Renaissance Italy, is drenched in golden light and filled with color. As you walk the streets of the Quinta, the first city you encounter, you'll find actors mocking each other in verse, musicians playing in loose groups, and marketplaces overflowing with sweet treats and clay amphoras of wine. 

Scratch beneath the apparently good life of the place, however, and you soon find the people are trapped in a horror equal to Bloodborne's Yharnam – even if Enotria itself doesn't live up to the inspiration.

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You begin Enotria as the maskless one; in a world trapped in an eternal scripted performance, you are the only one without a role, free to make your own decisions. Granted, most of the decisions you make involve killing things, namely the key players who set the eternal performance going. However, it is for a good cause, if you can kill all the bosses that put the world into stasis, you might be able to put Enotria's world into motion again.

Filling the fields, caves, cloisters, and city streets of Enotria are deadly enemies, each able to cut you down in a few unblocked strikes. To progress, you must be cautious and learn to time your attacks, parries, and dodges to survive. Dotted along the paths you travel, you'll find rest points where you can upgrade your character with the resources you've earned and refill your health bar and limited health potions. However, any time you rest, you also respawn all the enemies you killed. Enotria will be familiar to anyone who has played one of FromSoft's Soulsborne games or their many imitators. 

Enotria models itself on the aggressive ways of Bloodborne, rewarding you for getting into the thick of the fight and taking away most of the tools that would keep you at arm's length of your enemies. The game features no shields or armor and only a few ways to dish out ranged damage. You can't even block your enemies' assaults, only parry them with moment-perfect timing. 

If you can deflect enough incoming attacks, however, you will 'unravel' your enemy, leaving them stunned and open to a hugely damaging attack or even a finishing move. When facing a knight armed with a greatsword as tall as you are, it's deeply satisfying to deflect every one of their wild, incoming swings, only to counter them with an attack that kills them in a single strike.

However, this mechanical focus on parries may find you watching only your enemy's sword arm, looking for the moment they begin their attack so you can tap the left bumper to parry. A pity, as there's a beautiful world around you at all times in Enotria, and I spent hours just looking at its people's elbows.

Recreate yourself

Where Enotria stands slightly ahead of other FromSoft-inspired games is the freedom with which you can define your character. As well as the standard tools of an RPG, such as permanently upgrading your stats and weapons by cashing in experience and crafting materials to level up your character, increasing your attack power, elemental damage, and defense, there are many ways you can alter your character build temporarily.

Leaning into the theater setting and your role as the maskless one, you can put on the masks of your defeated enemies to adopt their traits. These passive buffs are like those you would unlock when you complete an armor set in other games. After you defeat Zanni, for instance, a gargantuan former acting teacher who has descended into eating his students, you gain additional healing potions. Whereas if you wear the Mask of Change, obtained by defeating the tutorial boss, you do increased damage with heavy attacks.

Enotria's skill tree works differently from many RPGs, with the perks you unlock only triggering if you slot them into 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 lowers your defenses but massively ups your stamina gain, while yet another imbues your weapons with elemental damage every time you cast a spell.

Alongside the masks and perks is the ability to swap between three loadouts on the fly, even mid-boss battle. If you're the sort of player that embraces theorycrafting, this feature may appeal. For me, I rarely used it, both because in the trickier fights I didn't have the breathing space to swap between builds, and because perfecting one build is time-consuming enough, let alone honing three.

Bitter battles

Boss battles in Soulslike games are often at their best when it feels like you are deconstructing an enemy that once seemed insurmountable. You have to study their attack patterns, looking for the gap in their armor and then dissect them. There is a taste of that in Enotria – you must learn your foe's movesets to know when to dodge, when to strike, and when to parry – but the health bars of the bosses and the amount you have to unravel them before they become stunned turn every fight into one of attrition. 

While there is a great deal 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, you can do little to bring that health bar down substantially quicker. Entering an arena to discover a boss began to feel like a chore rather than a moment of excitement, as it meant another hour or more of throwing myself at a brick wall until I was lucky enough to string together enough perfectly timed dodges and parries to bring them down. 

There are plenty of tools to keep you in the fight longer, such as perks that grant in-battle healing and items that permanently increase the potency and number of health potions you can carry. That said, I'd rather have shorter fights than the means to heal myself 10 times in the course of one extremely long one.

While I encountered bugs in Enotria, they were mostly in my favor with bosses freezing in place for half the fight, letting me rinse their health bars. Occasionally they worked against me, like a shortcut ladder failing to let me climb it, forcing me to take the long enemy-filled way. However, one persistent issue, particularly on entering the second region of Enotria's world, were significant, frequent framerate drops. I'm normally forgiving of low framerates, but in a game that demands so many perfectly timed button presses, it's frustrating that the developer hasn't managed to provide an environment that supports that level of play. 

I found myself circling bosses, trying to back them against a wall so my PC didn't have to render the scenic view on the other side of the arena. An interesting tactical challenge, but not, I think, an intended one. It's a shame a game drawing so much inspiration from the theater is let down by its performance. 

There is much to enjoy in Enotria, in particular its luscious world and unusual source material. However, it also does little that other games haven't done before – and better. Pair that with the poor performance and long-winded boss fights and it's hard to recommend to anyone but the most die-hard genre fan who has already played through Lies of P, Lords of the Fallen, Nioh, and, naturally, all of FromSoftware's games.