Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist will be released in full on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC on January 22, 2025, approximately eight months after Entering Early Access on Steam Last May. In addition, The developer boasts “35 hours of content” in the final version, which is a huge leap from the original game, Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights, which How long will it last? 12 hour rates for the main story, and I ended up with 100% completion and the true ending after 14 hours (NG+ shenanigans notwithstanding).
Scientists are still struggling to quantify the strength of the restraint that led me to delay playing Ender Magnolia after finishing Ender Lilies earlier this month. First released in 2021, it was one of the few installments in our The best Metroidvania games a list that I hadn't personally played (it's there thanks to other people's recommendations, and now I see what they mean) and it was available through PlayStation Plus, so I bought it.
After staying up until 4 a.m. to finish it, I accidentally ended up liking Ender Lilies so much that I ordered a physical copy for PS4 just to collect. It is, as a friend of mine put it, Hollow Knight emo: a very clever 2D action platformer with a breakneck pace, a captivating narrative, some cool parries, and an absorbing RPG mechanic that allows for a flexible move set. There are a few imperfections, but my main criticism in the end was a good-natured demand for furtherSo the news of co-developers Adglobe and Live Wire felt almost like divine intervention.
In my experience, today's top Metroidvanias tend to last between 10-20 hours on average, depending on completion percentage. Hollow Knight is an outlier. an average duration of 27 hours and over 30 to fully complete it, not to mention the more extreme challenges. I remember spending 33 hours at 106% completion before all the DLC came out. If Ender Magnolia can really draw players in for 35 hours, not only will it be more than double the size of the first game, but it could also be one of the largest modern Metroidvanias.
Ender Magnolia has been well-received so far, with 3,765 “overwhelmingly positive” Steam user reviews at the time of writing, and should get even better with its 1.0 update. It follows a similar formula and setting to Ender Lilies – the little heroine Lilac (not Lily) explores a grim world with the help of homunculi (not spirits) – but has been praised for refining and modernising several elements, notably the map and difficulty.
The cyberpunk metroidvania RPG from the creator of Resident Evil and Dead Space has already doubled its Kickstarter goal with a romance that “echoes the depth” of Mass Effect.