Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist will launch in full on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC on January 22, 2025, roughly eight months after entering early access on Steam this past May. What’s more, the developer boasts of “35 hours of content” in the finished version, which is a massive jump over the original game, Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights, which Howlongtobeat rates at 12 hours for the main story, and which I finished with 100% completion and the true ending after 14 hours (NG+ shenanigans notwithstanding).
Scientists are still struggling to quantify the force of the restraint it took for me to delay playing Ender Magnolia after finishing Ender Lilies earlier this month. First released in 2021, it was one of the few entries on our best Metroidvania games list that I hadn’t personally played – it’s on there thanks to the recommendations of others, and now I see what they mean – and it was available via PlayStation Plus, so I snapped it up.
After unadvisedly staying up until 4am to finish it, I ended up liking Ender Lilies so much that I ordered a physical PS4 copy just for collection purposes. It is, as a friend of mine put it, emo Hollow Knight – a whip-smart 2D action platformer with breakneck pacing, a compelling narrative, some great parries, and engrossing RPG mechanics that allow for a flexible move set. There are a few imperfections, but my main critique by the end was a good-natured demand for more. So, the news from joint developers Adglobe and Live Wire felt almost like divine intervention.
In my experience, the meatier end of today’s Metroidvanias tend to average 10 – 20 hours depending on your completion percentage. Hollow Knight is an outlier with an average run of 27 hours and upwards of 30 for full completion, to say nothing of the more extreme challenges. I remember logging 33 hours for 106% completion before all the DLCs were out. If Ender Magnolia really can pull players in for 35 hours, it’ll not only be more than twice the size of the first game, it also might be one of the biggest modern Metroidvanias.
Ender Magnolia has been received well thus far, with 3,765 “Overwhelmingly Positive” Steam user reviews at the time of writing, and should only get better with its 1.0 update. It follows a similar formula and setup to Ender Lilies – small hero Lilac (not Lily) explores a dreary world with the aid of homunculi (not spirits) – but has been praised for refining and modernizing several elements, notably including the map and difficulty.
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