Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights is a well-planned and executed game from Binary Haze Interactive. It has some repetitive shortcomings, but the fun boss fights and massive levels will help you get through the grind.
Action-RPGs are the bee’s knees when done right. Give me Castlevania: Symphony of the Night any day and I’ll treat it like the Goonies, where I will stop what I’m doing to enjoy its splendor. Seriously, I will drop anything to play that game. I have the Twitch streams to prove it.
ANYWAY.
Binary Haze Interactive jumps into the foray of action-RPGs with its very own titled Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights. It’s a mixture of some Castlevania love with a dash of Dark Souls. Also, it’s probably one of the more gorgeous games to reach the Switch. Is it good, though? Let’s talk.
Stunning visuals
The first thing you will notice and appreciate about this game is how gorgeous it looks. From background to foreground to character models, Ender Lilies does not disappoint in the art department. The intricate details and small touches of creepy, dreary environments illuminate the unsettling storyline and coalesce together to form visual eye candy to make the journey easier to take. It’s easy to appreciate the game when you’re fascinated by the artwork. There were times during my playthrough where I couldn’t believe that the Switch could handle the goods. The visuals help to push along the storyline, where something abysmal has happened in the world and everything good has been turned or worse. It’s really a treat to see the broken backgrounds, the warped and ghoul-ish figures of what once was in the world. The accompanied vibes from the visual sell you the world you play in. You want that to happen for a connection to take place between player and story. The visuals are most certainly the bridge.
About that gameplay…
Gameplay is a hodgepodge, but more good than bad
There are wonderful elements at play in Ender Lilies’ gameplay design. Some of them work well, while others seem like they need a bit more added to them. The fighting and bosses? We’ll talk about those towards the end of this segment.
Elements that work in the game include the skills tree, which allows you to gather and switch between spirits in the game that help you along the way. Each spirit brings its own mastery of a weapon to the gameplay. Those spirits include a sword and the morning star. There are more, but let’s start there. The weapon portion of this gameplay design is fascinating. In the beginning, you start out with only your sword, but as you gather more spirits in your group, you can arm multiple spirits at the same time. For example, I armed the morning star spirit and the sword spirit. I can activate the morning star spirit, which will stand in one place and swing the morning star or place the morning star spirit in the air and it will spin the weapon violently and quickly. While this is going on, I can separately swing the sword at the enemy doing more damage. The use of the morning star is finite, you start off with 10 uses before it goes away, and there is a cooldown period for it. It’s a balance that is understood, as the game doesn’t want your character too powerful. That said, making sure to position the morning star spirit is imperative. If you place too far away from the enemy then you will do no damage whatsoever. It’s a consequence of button mashing at times. Anyway, you can have multiple spirits armed at once and ready to go at any given point in the game, which forces you to strategize positioning and timed execution. All of which gets better because you can upgrade the spirits to make them more powerful. You can unleash some powerful attacks if you activate them the right way in battle.
The caveat to this process is remembering which button activates which spirit, as some spirits will be more powerful than others. To be frank, the sword spirit was the strongest for the longest time, which meant the others were good helpers. Sometimes just swinging a sword is more efficient than multiple spirits planned out extensively. In other words, the effort of trying to get everyone in the right place may not be as worthwhile as just choosing one weapon. Also, there were times where I did hit the wrong button during battle, which meant that I unnecessarily launched a spirit and most of the time said spirit was in the wrong position. I did this quite a few times. Well, a lot. I did it a LOT. The thought process of strategizing when to launch what spirit and how to launch them was a bit much during intense fights, especially boss fights, which could be unpredictable at times. I’m sure someone smarter than me could do this better.
Fighting briefly aside, collecting relics and upgrades along the way made it easy to keep grinding this game. This game is built to be grind-friendly, as it will save your character’s progress, even if you die repeatedly. What this ultimately means is that you can make it to level 15 with your character, die, and still retain level 15, even if you start all the way over. All your effort is there, even though you have to go through the same level again. It’s player-friendly and the game certainly knows its own design.
Speaking of the game’s design, the common enemies are repetitive, so emotionally prepare yourself for a handful of the same enemies repeatedly as you dip through each level of the story. The difficulty of the game does perpetuate this feeling of repetitiveness, which occasionally makes you want to put the game down and take a breather. That isn’t a bad thing but feeling like you’re not making a helluva lot of progress against the same type of enemies really does dampen the gameplay design just a bit. For example, I felt like I was stuck on the third set of levels for the longest time because of how many times I died. That’s where the Dark Souls feeling comes in, which means Ender Lilies was certainly shooting for the patient gamer type. I am certainly not that gamer.
A huge positive about this repetitiveness is that it gives you a moment to explore the environment. The levels are HUGE, folks. For an action-RPG game of this type, it’s impressive to see the many different paths the game provides you because it’s built on such a big stage. If you don’t see a wall at the end of the level, then you can go in that direction. You can choose to go into doors, skip doors, or move to any open area. It’s impressive how massive the levels can get, and the game seems proud of the levels as it provides you with a wonderful flowchart in the top right of your screen. It’s a big game. You will get a chance to do some exploration and go off the rails just a tad while grinding the hell out of it.
Continuing with the good, the game’s bosses are massive and difficult. You will find a lot of good boss fights in this game that separate themselves from all the other common fights you encounter. The bosses are generally smart and don’t like dying quickly. It took me about 15-20 tries to get close to beating the second boss – and I grinded a lot before the encounter. The game doesn’t mess around, and it rewards your efforts for getting through the massive levels with an incredibly difficult fight. You certainly earn your keep with the boss fights. Good strategy and learning the boss’s moves will certainly keep you from wanting to throw your Switch through a window. The bosses are one of the highlights of the game.
Overall, the gameplay design works well with its skills tree backbone, the different spirits as weapons fall short on common enemy battles, but excels with level design/girth and boss fights. It’s not perfect, but damn is it good.
Conclusion
Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights is a well-planned and executed game from Binary Haze Interactive. It has some repetitive shortcomings, but the fun boss fights and massive levels will help you get through the grind.
