Two metroidvania games I've played
What's better for a first blog post that to talk about games? In this case, one of my favorite genres, metroidvania. Hollow Knight: Silksong is without a doubt one of the most wanted metroidvanias in the recent years. So I thought about playing some "obscure" metroidvania games waiting for the moment Silksong is released in 2025 (because it's going to be released this year... right?).
I've been playing two similar, yet different games: Pronty and Ender Magnolia. They're very similar in how the story is planned and the structure of the story. Yet, they play very differently.
Also, a notice... don't expect a deep review or analysis of these games, I'm just writing what I think of them and nothing I write here should be considered objective.
Pronty
I bought this game a while ago in some Steam Sales and then forgot about it. Then one day, while looking something to play, I saw this game in my library and decided to play it.
The plot here is not very relevant, you wake up as a kind of aquatic-human creature in a base. The main appeal of the game is that everything happens underwater, yes, all the game happens underwater and to my surprise, it's great. A mechanic fish will follow always, and it's your main way of attacking and executing several abilities to get through the stages.
There's a wide variety of enemies and bosses, much more than I expected, along with a lot of different scenarios to explore. The power-ups or abilities are very original too. The typical metroivania abilities don't work here because remember, everything happens underwater.
In conclusion, I've really liked this little game (I've completed everything in under 10 hours) and it's a kind of a game I recommend to everyone, plus, Pronty (the main character) has very cute interactions with some characters and some events.
ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist
Unlike Pronty, I've been wanting to play this game for a while, because I loved the prequel, Ender Lilies. This game improves and refine a lot of mechanics and it's more polished. But there are some rough edges with the pacing of the game and the damage of the enemies.
Here, the plot is a little more relevant and I've been more invested. The game starts with our main character, a little girl named Lilac waking up in what it seems the slumbers of a city. From this, we discover she can "tune" (I understand this as calming them, or being friends with them) homunculus, artificial creatures powered by magic or something like that. She don't have memories of what happened to her or why she is there. It's something that will be revealed throughout the game.
In terms of gameplay, it's basically the same controls as its prequel, but with lots of refinement. Like in Pronty, Lilac won't attack the enemies directly, rather, she will command different homunculus to attack for her. There's a wide variety of them in the game, less than the prequel, but each one is more polished and with three different attacks.
The exploration is super fun, specially with the map. The map show you when a stage is completed, and also when the entire zone is completed. This alongside the ability to fast travel from anywhere make the exploration of this game one of the best for me. It feels like is respecting my time as a player, instead of getting in my way.
Now the bad things about the game:
- You unlock some power-ups too late, and some of them are not used widely.
- Normal enemies do a lot of damages, specially in the endgame with the best equipment. The last part of the game was hell due to not having a lot of checkpoints and having tons of enemies.
- Enemies with shields are the worst. No matter what you throw at them, it can be a melee attack, a bomb, special attack... They'll just tank the attack fine, without a scratch. To kill them you have to wait until they attack, then parry them or do some powerful shit to destroy them before they guard with the shield again.
Now for some conclusions... The game is fun, like, really fun. But the damage of some enemies made me drop the controller and do something else. It's longer than Pronty, I've finished everything in like 18 hours.
Conclusion
I realized while writing this post that in both games, the main character command another entity to attack for them. Pronty command the metal fish, while Lilac commands the homunculus.
I don't think this post has any kind of structure, it's just me rambling about these two games because I want to write something for the blog. And because I really like talking about the games I play. Also, English is not my first language, so maybe there are some sentences not grammatically correct or other words that would fit better, but hey... they say something like "Done is better than perfect"... right?