Ender Lilies is a Metroidvania about a little girl lost in your typical Soulslike post-apocalyptic hellscape with the ability to purify the corrupted undead and summon their spirits to fight on her behalf. I was extremely leery about this premise for obvious reasons, not helped by the promotional art that emphasizes how pathetic and moe the girl is. (Notice that she is pigeon-toed in the above picture; that is her default standing pose.) Fortunately, the game never got creepy about it, but the aesthetic does still annoy me. The game itself is very good and I recommend it if you like Soulslike Metroidvanias.

So to address the elephant in the room first, yes, the artists are absolutely pushing the moe aesthetic. The girl is even drawn in an anime style with a big head and eyes plus stylized porcelain skin to really emphasize it. Her movements have a distinctly ethereal quality, as if she’s apart from the world and a fragile creature that must be protected. Except… they don’t seem to actually follow through on that last part. Lily is unbothered by mundane problems — she can’t drown, she doesn’t take falling damage, and she can walk barefoot through snow without flinching. What’s weirder is that she does react to the environment in cutscenes — they went through the effort of drawing her shivering with frosted breath, but they only used it for the cutscene at the start of the snow area and not while walking through the snow area itself.

It overall makes me confused what the artists were going for. The point of moe is to appeal to paternalistic instinct — you’re supposed to want to protect the vulnerable little girl. But that’s so inconsistent here. Lily does play the part of the scared little woobie in cutscenes, but in gameplay she seems so stoic and ethereal, like she’s apart from the world and thus unaffected by its dangers. Her movement genuinely feels great, like she’s superhumanly agile and implacable — despite being a glass cannon, she doesn’t even have a long stagger animation, and her movement options let you recover easily from mistakes. Possibly that was the point, emphasizing how special she is by showing she’s only hurt by the Blight, but it still feels like the art direction is pulling in two different directions. It overall left me feeling like Lily was objectified even more than typical moe — it’s purely aesthetic, with no attempt to make you empathize or sympathize with the little girl.

The story itself is your typical Soulslike plot: Magic corruption turns everyone into undead and this proves immortality is bad. In this case we double down by revealing that people deliberately turned their soldiers undead to fight the undead hordes, and this worked out exactly as badly as you expect. The plot is generally incoherent, and reads like they just grabbed a bunch of elements from Dark Souls and slapped them together without any understanding of deeper meaning. There was an ancient civilization that got genocided and everyone is convinced the Blight is a death curse of theirs, but also the Blight already existed in the ancients’ time, and a point is made of the invaders being surprised that the ancients’ priestesses look like them, but also we see other ancients and they look like normal humans. You’re supposed to have the ability to permanently kill the undying hordes, but enemies still respawn when you rest in typical Dark Souls fashion. The lore never coalesced into anything coherent.

The significant point is that there’s a line of women, the White Priestesses, who are resistant to the effects of the corruption and can thus act as a Blight sink by taking on others’ corruption, purifying (i.e. killing) them. (They’re apparently descended from the ancient genocide victims but are helping their conquerors because [not found].) The problem is that the Blight affects both the mind and the body, and while White Priestesses are immune to the mental damage they still suffer the physical ailments. The current White Priestess absorbed too much Blight and is now paralyzed and unable to contain it, causing it to spill out and destroy the rest of the country. Your ultimate goal is to save her by taking on her Blight and sharing her burden.

I thought this was interesting in that it’s effectively the opposite of Othercide‘s plot: You’re moving mountains to save a suffering girl rather than a suffering boy. It occurs to me how rare of a plot this is. How often do we see stories where martyred women actually get to be saved, rather than accepting that their purpose is to suffer for everyone else? I see the whole plot as an allegory for how patriarchal societies force emotional labor onto women until they break. It’s easy to see similarities between the Blight and the negative emotions women are expected to absorb when forced into the role of being everyone’s therapist. …Buuuut I just can’t believe any of it was intended; the incoherence in both the art and story make me dubious there were any clear thematic intentions here at all.

The game itself is very well-designed, to the point everything else may well have been secondary to the actual mechanics. Despite being Soulslike in aesthetic, it’s much more forgiving than most by virtue of not having a corpse run mechanic. It also uses a standard level up mechanic instead of a point-buy, which on the one hand provides less player choice but on the other hand is way more straightforward and eliminates the risk of players screwing themselves into a bad build. Combat is very Soulslike with a big emphasis on dodge-rolling and properly timing your attacks, plus a stun meter that staggers enemies when exhausted but constantly regenerates, encouraging aggressive play like in Sekiro. I found it very engaging overall; there was a lot of enemy variety, and enemy attacks were complex enough that they still occasionally tripped me up even into the endgame.

What I particularly liked, though, was the area design. Areas are frequently very interconnected, but they’re initially blocked off by impassable gates. Once you reach the other side, you can unlock the gates to get there more quickly in the future. Environmental changes like these persist past deaths, so it takes a lot of sting out of failure — if you manage to unlock the shortcut, you can just skip straight to that point next time instead of needing to go through the whole area again. This is a common Metroidvana feature, but Ender Lilies uses it much more frequently than usual. This interconnectedness also makes it easier to sweep areas for secrets, as nowhere is ever too far from a fast travel point. And as for secrets, they were nicely hidden without being impossible; I 100%ed the game without having to look anything up, which is rare in my experience. Hidden areas always have some tell you can spot if you’re paying attention; you don’t have to be paranoid about every featureless wall like in Metroid.

Also, this is a minor thing but I did appreciate it: The UI icon for not-estus-flasks becomes more eye-catching when you’re low on HP. This is a good way to remind the player to heal if their attention is elsewhere, and it also seems to be triggered at the point where a heal will no longer be wasted, which is really handy since that always bothers me.

The main gimmick of the game is that you fight by summoning the spirits of those you purify, which effectively means you recruit bosses after you beat them. I like this trope; it’s always a cool reversal when you get to use the same abilities the enemies use against you, and it also serves as a nice preview of what the abilities look like. If I have one complaint, it’s that there are a bit too many spirits. I’m sure they all have their niche, but there are a few pairs that are extremely similar to one another, and several that I just never got around to using at all. Given that you can only use 6 at a time, I think 26 total is a bit excessive. Also, some of them are just ludicrously overpowered; summons trivialize most bosses as per usual for Soulslikes, and Eleine’s homing missiles let you kill most enemies before they even notice you.

So overall, not anywhere near as bad as I was expecting, and actually quite good! The moe aesthetic is grating, but they never get overtly creepy about it as I feared. If they just had slightly more coherent art direction on Lily herself — like maybe she started as pigeon-toed but became more confident as the game progressed — it would have come together better.