Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist Review
It’s not often that a game can come out of nowhere and become an instant new favorite of yours. The kind of game that you will go to the mat for and shout about until everyone in your inner circle is well aware of just how much you love it and that they should have it on their radar.
Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights was one of those games for me. And over three years later, it still sits comfortably in my top indie games, top metroidvanias, and top soundtracks of all time.
These are some big shoes to fill for a sequel. So, when Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist was coming out of early access and releasing across all platforms, I felt a mixture of hype and trepidation. Was it going to be more of the same, enough to be fun but not enough to be another die-hard love like the first? Or could it somehow recreate the magic of the original and ignite a whole new spark in my little gamer heart?
I am stunned, grateful, and elated to report that it is wholeheartedly the latter. Ender Magnolia not only retains the magic of the first game, but strikes that balance between fresh and familiar, exciting and nostalgic. The art style, the music, the combat, the exploration – everything is more than I could have hoped for.
So now the question is: how do I put on my objective reviewer hat to talk about this game?
The answer I’ve come to is simply that I can’t. And I’m not much interested in trying. You can find more dispassionate and technical reviews of Ender Magnolia out on the wide web somewhere. But if you want a personal account of what it was like for one enamored nerd to play this game? You will find that here.
Now, that’s not to say this game is perfect – no game is, and I can definitely talk about that. But without even needing to go any further, I can absolutely say if you are even remotely intrigued by either Ender Lilies or Ender Magnolia, it’s my personal opinion that you should take the risk and dive in. These games are incredibly special, and hopefully I can help tell you a bit about how and why.
Without getting any further ahead of myself, let me circle back and do a quick and dirty overview of what Ender Magnolia is for those who aren’t already familiar.
Ender Magnolia is a metroidvania developed by Adglobe and Live Wire, with Mili returning to compose the music, and published by Binary Haze Interactive for PC, Switch, PS4-5 and the Xbox’es. After a PC early access period that kicked off last March, it hit its full 1.0 release on January 22nd, 2025.
While Ender Magnolia is a sequel to the prior game, much of the story is self-contained, but for returning veterans many of the narrative tenets and trappings will be familiar, hinting at the connections looming between the first and second entries.
In Ender Magnolia, you play as Lilac, a mysterious young girl with the powers of an “Attuner.” With this gift, she’s able to purify corrupted Homunculi and recruit them into her arsenal, similar to how the priestess Lily could purify spirits affected by the Blight in the first game.
Unlike in traditional combat systems, the protagonist herself is not the one attacking and using various abilities. Rather, you build your kit by attuning corrupted Homunculi. First up is Nola, who becomes your sword and primary attack character. Others you encounter later will grant you everything from ranged attacks like guns and fireballs to parry abilities and even auto-attacks that fire perpetually in the background while you focus on basic melee, dodging, etc.
One thing that Ender Magnolia absolutely nails as a metroidvania is that it gives you access to a double jump and dash/air dash within the first 20 minutes or so. Movement is key – not only for exploring and unlocking the map, but expanding your kit and evasiveness in combat. Some of your Homunculi buddies will greatly aid in these avenues as well, granting you everything from a grappling hook to a ground pound, vertical launch, and beyond.
The key question I want to highlight here is absolutely critical for the success or failure of a metroidvania’s core design – and it’s this: does each new mobility tool added to your kit feel like a genuine upgrade or reward?
And my answer to that is: F*ck yes. Every time I beat down a crazed Homunculi, purified their corruption, and made them my new BFF, I was eager to click through the tutorial messages and go play with my new toy – rocket launching my ass across entire screens, smashing my head through ceilings, and springboarding my way into previously-unrevealed crevasses.
Ender Magnolia does a great job of the metroidvania conceit of both teasing you with visual queues in the environment a la “I see you, I can’t reach you yet, but I’ll be back for you soon” and also squirreling away secrets for only the most bullheaded of “I will ram into every wall and clear every inch of the fog of war from this map” type of adventurers.
Plus, the devs have slightly improved on the game’s map menu, making it even easier to tell when you’ve found everything in each section of each region (it turns from gray to blue, with clearly defined lines around where each section begins and ends).
And that slight iteration on the map is extremely emblematic of Ender Magnolia’s design: compared to the first entry, everything is just that little bit more well thought out, smooth, and frictionless in service of enabling the player to just get in, play, and get lost in the game.
Probably in no small part to those tweaks, Lilac feels that much more capable as a protagonist vs. her predecessor Lily. From seemingly small things like her dodge being better to more impactful things like her full kit being more varied, everything feels like it’s helping the player find, learn, and lean into really strategic build crafting.
Each Homunculi has three unlockable abilities. For Nola, she has a sword as well as a scythe and an axe – each with different attack patterns and balances for sheer physical damage vs. break damage that can stagger enemies. For others, they may have different types of projectiles or elemental attacks that can inflict status ailments on enemies like burn or shock or freeze.
Each of these abilities can be complemented by Lilac’s gear. You equip carapaces (like armor) that can either buff your stats or give your block/parry different effects like sending out a shockwave or even healing you. You also get two bracelet slots that impact your stats, and a totem (aka another accessory) that can offer all sorts of benefits like additional heals.
And then on top of that, you have up to ten relic slots. Relics will cost different amounts of space to equip (and you can increase that threshold over time) and will be the most versatile tools for truly creating a “build.” They can increase the rate at which you stagger enemies + buff the damage you do to staggered foes. They can up the intensity of applying status ailments + buff the damage you do to status affected enemies. They can boost EXP and material gains, they can mitigate damage under different conditions, they can increase your movement abilities and so much more.
Suffice to say, I was constantly mixing and matching – and even minning and maxing – my build for different areas, chapters, and boss fights – finding new and advantageous ways to build out my kit as I got deeper and deeper into the game, going for that 100% map completion along the way (culminating in about 25 hours of play).
Now, I’ll hit the pause to take a moment to comment on some of the things that might not click for every player. First off, Ender Magnolia isn’t going to have the tightest, twitchiest platforming that some metroidvanias excel in – and its combat isn’t going to push most players as hard as something like Hollow Knight or Blasphemous will. That said, it can have a bit of a difficulty spike here and there (across both the platforming and combat sides of the metroidvania coin).
However, I’ll note that even newcomers to the genre have access to tools to deal with that as Ender Magnolia not only offers preset “easy, normal, hard” modes, but also offers difficulty sliders that let you customize things like how quickly enemies recover or balance the scales of damage dealt/received.
Also, some enemies feel a bit unbalanced, but even as I’m writing this review a new patch just hit PC (coming later to console) with rebalancing measures and bug fixes. For the most part, I didn’t encounter many bugs – definitely nothing more noticeable than an object or two not visibly loading into the environment – but even after early access there are just a couple of lingering oddities here and there, mostly very minor things like the odd typo. The devs are addressing these though and I imagine most will be resolved very shortly.
One thing that won’t be patched though is the story – which will be hit or miss for some, especially hinging on if you played and/or remembered Ender Lilies, which in and of itself was a bit esoteric. These games tell their stories with minimal (non-voiced) dialogue and intentionally hazy scenes, and they do the Souls-like thing of putting worldbuilding details into item descriptions. For me, I enjoy the story that Ender Magnolia has to offer but I have definitely seen different opinions online.
*Cut scenes are replayable from the menu as “memories” as a slight aid to accessibility for blind/low vision players or anyone who had trouble keeping up with the text in real time
Now overall, on the scale of truly great, mechanically sound, and technically challenging metroidvanias, would I put Ender Magnolia shoulder to shoulder with the likes of the aforementioned Hollow Knight or more recently Metroid Dread and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown?
If I’m being honest, not quite – but only just. Those games have some truly tight combat experiences and/or inspired level designs that help define and push forward the genre. Ender Magnolia is close to those in many regards, but if it’s not 100% at the same technical heights as those behemoths of the genre, why do I ride so hard for this game?
The key differentiating factor that helps both Ender Lilies and Ender Magnolia bury their hooks into my heart is their aesthetics. Their art style was the first thing that drew me in – I’ve often described it as something like the style of Child of Light meets the color palette and mood of Salt and Sacrifice with a hint of Vanillaware in there for good measure.
White flowers… black uniforms and blindfolds… there’s something here I can’t quite put my finger on…
And then once I heard the music? Forget it. I was a lost cause. It’s moody, it’s haunting, it’s ethereal. And then it’s playful and hype and jaunty and weird. It’s got notes of Keiichi Okabe of NieR fame tucked throughout its score (and Ender Magnolia seems to make this influence even less of a secret, iykyk). It is an instantly memorable sound that has, at least in my experience, stayed with me for years.
As I said at the top of this review, I was both hyped and anxious heading into Ender Magnolia’s release because of how much I loved the first game. But it very quickly became one of those games that within the first two to three hours, I was already lamenting that this experience would eventually come to an end. I didn’t want it to be over, even as I clawed every moment of free time out of my days that I could to ferret out every secret in every inch of the map and push the story forward – all the way to its true conclusion.
But have I even mentioned that I’m not *that* big of a metroidvania fan? Sure, I usually play at least one or two a year. And I enjoy them. But rarely do they make my top 10 lists for GOTY or other all-time rankings.
But the Ender games bust down my walls. Their combat and exploration draw me in, breaking me out of my JRPG addiction for a time, and their atmospheric vibes and especially their score just speak to me and resonate on a deeply personal level.
Hopefully me rambling about what it is that I find special in these games has helped you decide if this is an experience you want to have for yourself, or at the very least proved an entertaining read. I find it uniquely gratifying to do whatever small part I can to grow the spotlight on indie games that I love, and it is truly one of my favorite things in the world to see people discover and try a game that they would have missed otherwise had I not shouted from the virtual rooftops about what I loved and why I loved it.
At the end of the day, my review for Ender Magnolia is this: It is beautiful. And you should play it.
