I wasn’t expecting to actually beat Enotria: The Last Song last night when I posted about needing to play video games, but beat it I did; I had beaten a late-game pair of bosses before putting the controller down the last time I had played, and the game made it clear quickly that the next place I was headed was going to be the game’s last destination. I’m going to jump straight to the chase and say this is a solid 7/10 as a game, with the caveat that a couple of the problems I had with it are potentially fixable.

The basics: Enotria is a Soulslike, which remains my current favorite genre of video game; these types of games are apparently never going to get old for me. The conceits with this one are as follows: 1) It’s sunny sometimes, and in fact one of the first things you’ll do is wander through a field of sunflowers, so it’s not quite as bleak as the genre usually gets; and 2) your builds are controlled by wearing different masks; the whole game is built around acting, and you’ll collect masks from boss enemies and mask shards from basic enemies that can eventually be built into masks. They basically take the place of your armor; if you put on a particular mask you take on the entire appearance of whatever you’re wearing the mask of. It’s pretty, there’s a lot of different weapons and magic to play with, the combat is solid; no complaints of any kind there, really.

Here’s the problem: the game starts by asking you to pick a difficulty level, which is the least-Soulslikey part of the whole thing– these games pick a difficulty, usually “brutal,” and you learn to adapt to it or you don’t. The two difficulty levels are “Story” and “Soulslike,” which … okay, “Story” difficulty is usually a shorthand for baby mode, but “Soulslike” sounds like hard mode, and the game doesn’t really give you any details, but a quick Google search made me think that “Story” was the base difficulty, so I went with that.(*)

Y’all, Story difficulty is crazy easy. There is a particular bridge at about the 2/3 part of the game that is broken in two places, and the jump is just a little bit harder than it looks like it should be– in a game with really no platforming to speak of, I almost wonder if the devs just missed how on-point you had to be to make the jump. I died more on those two bits of bridge than the entire rest of the game put together. No boss beat me more than twice, and I never once in the entire game died before recovering my stuff. I beat the final boss on my first try. There were bosses that I ran into by accident and low on heals and beat on my first try. Now, an easy Soulslike isn’t automatically a bad thing! The game’s still fun; there’s something to say about being a badass, obviously, and not every game has to involve beating your head against a wall. But I’d suggest if you’re used to these games, go with Soulslike mode to start.

Second, the game has a sort of paper-rock-scissors thing going with the elements. Enemies can be linked with certain elements, and if they are, they’re supposed to be immune to their element and weak to another. I say supposed to be because I never once found myself unable to hurt an enemy, no matter what weapons I was using. The elements all have Italian names and each element can proc a different effect if you get hit with enough of it, and those have different names too. Unlike most games, where, just for example, poison might slowly kill you and freeze might slow you down, the elemental effects have positive and negative side effects that, to be honest, I never bothered to memorize. The paper-rock-scissors thing is on the screen at all times and I never paid any attention to it. The game goes so far as to provide you with three different roles– effectively different builds that you can hot-swap between at will– with the idea that you might use each one to specialize in different elements. I never kept more than one active. There was no reason to.

It is, of course, entirely possible that this was because of Story mode, but … are you really gonna take out this big of a part of your gameplay for the kiddo mode in your game? Because it really seems like that’s what they did unless the whole thing is just broken from the jump. All I know is, I never paid attention to half of the subsystems the game uses. The game does have a New Game + mode, but I don’t know if that bumps you up to Soulslike difficulty or is just Story with spongier enemies or what. I might do a second run at some point to see what the other difficulty is like. I’d like to eventually platinum this, and I missed a bunch of story-related trophies on the first pass.

It’s probably worth pointing out that this is currently free through Playstation Plus, and it’s definitely worth recommending as a free game. Just start it at Soulslike, and hope that it forces you to learn the game’s systems a little bit better and doesn’t let you just go Big Hammer Goes Bonk or Fast Sword Goes Brrrrrr through the whole game. Or do that! Like I said, easy is fun sometimes.

(*) Do not allow yourself to be fooled; just because they called the difficulty “Story” does not mean that the story is going to make any sense(**). But you’re not playing these games for the story, are you? I hope not.

(**) Another missed opportunity; the game has a ton of little lore things you pick up all over the place, but unless you decide to invest the time to stop playing the game and read them– and I mean it when I say there are a ton of them– you’re not going to have any idea at all what the hell is going on.