At PAX West 2024, VGG got a chance to go hands-on with Ender Magnolia: both what's available now in Early Access and a preview of unreleased content from the 1.0 build. We also got to chat with Binary Haze Interactive CEO and Creative Director Hiroyuki Kobayashi, about the progress the team has made in Early Access and what they've done to make this sequel a worthy successor to such a beloved indie Metroidvania.
Ender Magnolia
Developer: Adglobe, Live Wire
Publisher: Binary Haze Interactive
Genre: Souls-ish Metroidvania
Platform(s): PC, PS4/5, Xbox Series, Switch
When we made an appointment to check out Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist at PAX West in Seattle this year, we figured we'd do things right and first introduce ourselves to its predecessor, Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights.
As for me, I'd long been waiting for an excuse to carve out the time to play Ender Lilies, knowing it was a super popular and well loved Metroidvania. Checking out the sequel and chatting with the game's publisher was certainly a worthy reason in my eyes. Meanwhile, Julie, pretty much a total outsider to the Metroidvania genre up until this point, wanted to get a sense of what to expect from our time with the sequel.
So we started playing it together, and what we didn't expect was how much we'd both fall in love with the series and its desperate Metroidvania style. It's difficult but learnable. It's dark but hopeful. And despite never having played a game like it, Julie has put in the work and come away hardened by the 10-try boss fights and by limping to save points with a sliver of health left.
We both became fast fans, and came away from PAX looking forward to Ender Magnolia more than ever. Thankfully, mere days later, we were treated to a confirmed 1.0 release date of January 22, 2025 (PST).
In the first game, a beloved 2021 dark fantasy Metroidvania, you play as Lily, the last surviving priestess in a world ravaged by a debilitating rain known as The Blight. It corrupts and zombifies any living being and leaves the entire region in shambles. Lily is a priestess with the ability to purify the corruption, at the expense of her own health, and by working together with the souls of beings left behind and marred by The Blight, she seeks to restore peace to the land.
Ender Magnolia, which has been in Early Access since March 2024, picks up decades later when The Blight's spread has stopped and society is slowly starting to rebuild. Technology has advanced and cities have risen up. The Steampunk-like Land of Fumes replaces the gothic medieval vibes of Land's End from the first game, blending "magical and mechanical development." And with the new setting comes a more robust set of characters for players to interact with.
Because, where the first game had Lily teaming up with ghost-like spirits who never really communicate with her beyond their first introduction, Ender Magnolia sees the new protagonist — Lilac, a technician who can cleanse machine-like beings from a corrupting miasma — working with a race of artificial humanoids known as Homunculi. They are full-fledged characters rather than just an arsenal of weaponry and powers for players to choose from like they are in Ender Lilies.
"There are lots of differences [from the first game]," explained Binary Haze Interactive CEO and Creative Director Hiroyuki Kobayashi. "But the biggest difference is that the number of main characters has been reduced from Ender Lilies, so that they get a lot more story. They have time to talk to Lilac and become closer with her in this way. Whereas in Ender Lilies, there was a lot left to the imaginations of the players... this time, there are only 10 Homunculi in the game, so they get a lot more screen time and their relationship with Lilac is told on screen."
Reducing the number of characters affects not only the storytelling, but the combat, too. Players of Ender Lilies will recall being able to select from an array of spirits and equip a weapon loadout that they preferred. In order to preserve the deep loadout customization for players with this simplified cast of characters, Ender Magnolia makes it so that each Homunculus has three different weapons to equip.
For example, when we played the demo, the first Humonculus, Nola, was wielding a sword. Later, when we had the chance to hop into some post-Early Access content, Nola seemed to have a hammer-like weapon.
Like this example, addressing what the team and the community saw as shortcomings in the first game is core to the plans for the sequel. They are aiming to make the game better in every way possible.
"We wanted to keep the oppressive and dark, but still beautiful, atmosphere from the first game," said Kobayashi. "That was something players really liked, so we wanted to keep that. But there were things from Ender Lilies that players didn't like as much, like the difficulty suddenly increasing in the latter half of the game, or some of the attacks being too hard to dodge. We removed some of those stressful and undesirable difficult points from the game and worked on adding difficult points that are fun and enjoyable instead. We've really focused on that aspect."
As a new player who certainly appreciates a difficult game, Ender Lilies does seem to punish the player often, and we haven't even yet reached the notoriously difficult second half of the game.
With our brief demo of Ender Magnolia at PAX, which primarily gave us a quick look at the content available today in Early Access, we were taken by how smooth and responsive it felt to play.
The first thing I noticed about the leveling out of the difficulty Kobayashi described was that here, you only take damage from enemies' attacks... not from just bumping into them, a change from the harshness of Ender Lilies. But despite some clear shifts to make the combat more evenly distributed and welcoming to players, the challenge is still there. It maintained a feeling that we had to stay on our toes to not get utterly destroyed by the game's hard-hitting enemies.
Ender Magnolia certainly feels a little easier as a result, but easier and more enjoyable is a combination we'll take every time.
"We removed some of those stressful and undesirable difficult points from the game and worked on adding difficult points that are fun and enjoyable instead," said Kobayashi.
Another highlight of the first game for us was Japanese musician Mili's soundtrack. The haunting piano work and soft melodies that accompanied the meek Lily fighting through a bleak landscape helped to solidify that blend of oppressive and beautiful that Binary Haze was aiming for. Kobayashi confirmed Mili's return for the sequel and promised that the musical group would incorporate some new sounds fitting of the technological landscape Lilac explores in Ender Magnolia.
After defeating a tricky boss that we were barely able to slip past in the game's opening area, we were given a chance to peek at some 1.0 content that has not been released yet, in what the team was calling a "test map" that was far from complete but would give the vibe of what later parts of the game might look like.
We emerged into a beautiful natural landscape with some kind of red vine-like flora taking control of the land around us. With most of what we've seen of the game in its Early Access state being a more urban and industrial land, it was nice to see an area so overtaken by nature. Being able to hop into a save with a full loadout of Homunculi was also nice to get a feel for what a fully equipped Lilac is capable of, and despite only being able to spend the briefest moment in it before our appointment time was up, Ender Magnolia showed a demonstrated level-up in nearly every single aspect of its design.
Ender Magnolia is available now in Early Access and launches next winter for PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4 and PS5, and Xbox.
Watch the release date announcement trailer.
Want to see more like this? Check out all of our PAX West 2024 coverage.
Comments