Enotria: The Last Song Is Dark Souls On Holiday (2024)

When you think of the word ‘soulslike’, you’re likely to conjure images of desolation and darkness. Dark Souls tells stories of broken worlds and cycles of undeath. Bloodborne is a cosmic horror masquerading as a gothic disease-based horror. The Salt games are foggy and devoid of friendliness. Lies of P takes place in a city of decay and murder. An oppressive, heavy feeling has become a core characteristic of the genre.

Enotria: The Last Song makes the bold move to set one on the idyllic Italian coast. Two hours with the demo and I felt like I needed a dip in the pool and a glass of white wine. As a veteran of soulslikes, it was refreshing to explore sunny fields, lush mountains, and a vibrant, colourful town on the Mediterranean coast.

What Enotria Isn’t

After a typical tutorial that takes place in a nondescript cave, your first taste of the wider world of Enotria is the blazingly bright view of a field full of sunflowers. In the distance, a fort town and the horizon, across a gentle, lapping sea. No looming castles or graveyard mounds, no streets laden with corpses. This is a bold direction for a genre where traditionalists are vehemently vocal about what they like and dislike about the games they play.

Making this all the more jarring is the fact that Enotria doesn’t diverge from the formula in any other way. The combat is a punishing blend of stamina management, Sekiro-style parrying, and slow weapons that require methodical positioning. Build development requires effort and thought. Exploration is open-ended, with lots of hidden nooks and crannies to discover. Everything about the experience itself screams ‘grimdark frustration and misery’, so the fact that the world is a bright and beautiful one elicits some cognitive dissonance.

This might not be so obvious to those who haven’t played soulslikes before (oh, you lucky fiends), but to those of us used to the grimdark, Enotria induces a different, subtler sense of unease.

What Enotria Is

This sense of unease plays wonderfully into the themes Enotria is going for. Billing itself as a dive into Italian folklore, there’s something rather fairy tale about playing it - in the Brothers Grimm fashion, not the Disney fashion. The mundane obscures the danger that lies around every corner and makes you doubt the glorious facade before you.

Your foes are farmers and labourers, revellers and dancers - sure, they’re mannequins wearing masks, just like the player character, but they play their roles perfectly until they start attacking. These character types are present in other games, but usually as fodder - weak chaff to harvest on your way to the big brutes of a zone. Here, there are no pushovers.

Soon after entering the town of Quinta, I found a small group of revellers near a friendly NPC. I passed two of them to grab a chest down an alleyway, only to get stabbed in the back by suddenly aggressive merry-makers. Seconds later, I respawned a few feet away, and the murderous demons were back to their eternal dance.

Flipping enemy design on its head and making even the shabbiest farmer with a pitchfork a true threat that may take multiple attempts to take down is a wonderful way to wordlessly introduce a world like Enotria’s; one that looks stunning but will tear your confidence down with each crushing defeat.

Without this commitment to presenting an authentically bizarre world of beautiful sights and discordant enemy design, this would be yet another generic, challenging souslike in a sea of generic, challenging soulslikes. Making the setting the idyllic Italian riviera while locking in with difficult, classic gameplay is a genius move by Jyamma Games that sets Enotria apart from its brethren.