Enotria: The Last Song — The Rough Italian Souls-Like Hiding Real Gems

Sun and Death: An Original Promise

In a genre drowning in Nordic fog, gothic castles, and crumbling cathedrals, Enotria: The Last Song makes a bold choice: plant its setting in a nightmarish carnival Italy, bathed in ochre light and populated by figures from commedia dell'arte. Grotesque masks, Tuscan hills burning under artificial sunlight, a mythology built around a cosmic theater where gods are sadistic directors — the intent is clear and it holds up on paper.

Enotria's world is trapped in a frozen scenario, a play endlessly reenacted by beings stripped of free will. You play as a Maskless, the only being capable of breaking this cycle. The writing won't revolutionize anything — lore is consumed in fragments, Miyazaki-style, through item descriptions and sparse dialogue — but the world radiates a coherence and originality that stands in stark contrast to the countless Lordran knock-offs clogging the market.

Gameplay That Runs With the Big Dogs… Or Tries

The combat system's core follows genre fundamentals: light and heavy thrusts, parry, dodge, stamina management. Nothing surprising so far. Enotria attempts to distinguish itself through its Máscaras system layered on top. Each equipped mask radically alters your playstyle: stats, active abilities, passives, and even attack animations change based on your mask choice. Players can switch between three configurations mid-combat, offering welcome tactical flexibility.

On paper, it's clever. In practice, it's uneven. Some masks are clearly underpowered and can't compete with dominant builds, and the system's readability can discourage newcomers struggling to understand why their character suddenly does half damage after a Máscara swap. Tooltips lack clarity, certain synergies remain opaque without third-party wikis, and balance between options long suffered — though successive patches have reduced the most glaring disparities.

Parrying, in particular, deserves mention: its timing is demanding but satisfying when it clicks. The counter-attacks it enables are visually punchy and genuinely reward patient enemy pattern learning, which is the very essence of souls-like pleasure.

Level Design: Where the Game Really Delivers

This is where Enotria surprises most, and pleasantly. The construction of zones reveals genuine care for circulation, shortcuts, secret density, and spatial coherence. Certain levels — particularly the early hours around the city of Foresta and mid-game areas around ruined theaters — offer architecture that rewards exploration without ever feeling artificial.

The bonfires (here called Focaras) are well-placed, neither too close nor sadistically distant. Branch paths are readable. You don't get lost in identical corridors — the art direction serves spatial readability too, which isn't a luxury in this genre. Some late-game zones falter a bit, with more confined arenas that expose the project's budget limits, but the overall package maintains respectable coherence.

Technical and Presentation: The Pains of Independence

Let's be straight. At launch, Enotria was in perfectible condition, to put it diplomatically. Framerate drops, iffy collisions, capricious hitboxes, camera deciding to stare at a wall instead of the enemy shredding you — the initial technical balance sheet was that of a game needing six more months of polish.

Since then, Jyamma Games has maintained a serious update cadence. The latest, arriving in late March 2025, continues fixing collision anomalies and rebalancing several masks. The current result is markedly more playable than launch. PC performance especially has stabilized, and the most absurd bugs have been eradicated. Some roughness remains — a few stiff transition animations, particle effects that can clutter the screen — but the game no longer sabotages itself like it did at the start.

Visually, the art direction more than compensates for polygon limitations. Environment textures are polished, boss designs are inventive and rooted in Mediterranean folklore with real singularity. This isn't a game beautiful in the raw technical sense, but a game with vision.

Bosses: Highs and Lows of a Contrasting Bestiary

The boss formula in a souls-like is often what makes or breaks a reputation. Enotria plays a mixed hand. The best encounters — notably a mid-game duel against a towering puppeteer figure whose name won't be spoiled here — are genuine successes: readable in their phases, menacing without frustrating, with strong visual identity.

But the catalog suffers from obvious disparity. Some mid-tier bosses seem rushed, with poorly telegraphed attacks and patterns banking on randomness rather than skill checks. Level scaling between zones isn't always flawless either, with some difficulty spikes that seem more tied to inadequate playtesting than deliberate design choices.

Playtime and Replayability

Expect 25 to 35 hours for a first run exploring thoroughly. New Game Plus is present and encourages experimenting with different mask combinations, which comprises most of the replayability. Lore collectors and secret hunters will find reason to extend further, the world brimming with NPCs whose fragmented stories deserve attention.

There's no cooperative multiplayer or PvP invasions — the game is resolutely solo. This choice makes sense given an indie project's limited resources, but players living for From Software invasions will pass.

Verdict: A Rough Diamond Deserving a Second Chance

Enotria: The Last Song won't dethrone Elden Ring or even the best sub-genre entries. Its technical limitations, still-imperfect balance, and a few underdeveloped bosses constantly remind you you're facing an ambitious first attempt from a studio learning on the job. Conversely, its world is authentically original, its level design reveals real mastery exceeding its budget tier, and the mask mechanic offers sufficient tactical depth to sustain interest long-term.

If you've exhausted your souls-like backlog and want something daring to escape the genre's usual aesthetic, Enotria's worth your time — especially at its current price point and in patched form. Jyamma Games deserves encouragement to continue: the foundations are there. Now it must build on them with more resources and experience.

• + Radically original visual and mythological world
• + Solid level design, thoughtful circulation
• + Tactically rich mask system
• + Serious and ongoing post-launch support
• + A few genuinely memorable bosses
• − Still-uneven mask balance
• − Residual technical roughness
• − Some sloppy bosses, unclear patterns
• − Insufficient tooltips and tutorials
• − No multiplayer component