ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist

I went in expecting a competent follow-up to Ender Lilies and came out with something lodged firmly in my top-tier Metroidvanias list. Bloom in the Mist drops you into the Land of Fumes as Lilac, a small amnesiac called an Attuner who wakes up in a crumbling underground lab and very quickly discovers she can purify corrupted Homunculi, the artificial lifeforms that now roam a post-collapse kingdom. The setup is familiar - lost memories, a blighted world, a layered class hierarchy crumbling under the weight of its own sins - but the execution is confident enough that the familiarity works in its favour rather than against it. Think less "we made this world because Hollow Knight sold well" and more "we genuinely had something to say about suffering, complicity, and what it means to save someone against their will." The lore is richer than the main plot, so completionists who hunt down every character conversation at save points will get considerably more out of it than players sprinting the critical path. Combat is where Bloom in the Mist distinguishes itself most sharply from the first game. Lilac does not fight directly. Instead, she fields a roster of purified Homunculi, each mapped to a button slot, and you build your moveset by choosing which companions to equip. One might deliver a sweeping blade strike, another might parry and riposte, another might fire ranged blasts - and you can upgrade each ability in ways that change its function entirely, not just its numbers. Relics layer on top of that, consuming a limited pool of slots to adjust things like break damage output, SP regeneration, and healing during combat. The result is a system with genuine build variety that holds up past the midgame, which is exactly where a lot of Metroidvanias start coasting. Boss fights are multi-phase affairs with distinct attack patterns, and a handful of them are legitimately nasty - one recurring antagonist, Gilroy, will humble you promptly if you arrive underprepared. The parry mechanic, tied to a specific Homunculus, can feel mandatory for certain encounters if you have not been incorporating it into your kit, which is the game's sharpest design rough edge. Exploration is nonlinear and genuinely generous. Fast travel unlocks early and lets you jump to any save point without penalty, backtracking is softened by a map that colour-codes fully-cleared rooms, and the world spans locations from collapsed slums and bioluminescent underground caverns to a Sorcerer's Academy and colossal factories. The visual design is stunning throughout, a grimdark 2D aesthetic with animations a clear step up from Ender Lilies. The soundtrack, again composed by Mili, is hauntingly good - the kind of music that makes you stop moving and just sit in a room for a moment. Where the game stumbles is in its latter-half map management. The world is large enough that tracking objectives and mobile NPCs becomes friction-heavy, particularly given that map markers are generic and undifferentiated. Players who enjoy Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown's screenshot feature will feel that absence here. There is also no voice acting for cutscenes, which does flatten some of the emotional peaks, though the option to rewatch scenes from rest points is a thoughtful workaround. Critically, Bloom in the Mist is smart about accessibility without dumbing itself down. Multiple difficulty presets sit alongside a fully custom difficulty mode, so the Souls-adjacent challenge is opt-in rather than mandatory. A completionist run clocks in around seventeen hours - long enough to feel substantial, short enough that a second playthrough for a different ending is a realistic prospect rather than a theoretical one. Newcomers do not need Ender Lilies as a prerequisite; the world rewards prior knowledge but does not punish its absence. For RPG players who care about whether their choices have weight and whether the worldbuilding rewards slow readers, this one does the work. Monika, Scout Team