Ender Lilies is complicated. On one hand, it's a beautiful, atmospheric Metroidvania with some unique and interesting mechanics. On the other hand, it suffers from poor mapping, clunky systems, overly dense enemy placements, and balancing issues.

The biggest problem I have with this game are its overworld enemies. There are too many per room. Some rooms in the game had upwards of 20-30 enemies. Due to poor balancing, enemies 2-shot you for the majority of a casual playthrough. Combined with the sheer density of enemies, it makes exploration and navigating extremely tedious and frustrating. Enemies also tend to move faster than you, leading to many encounters feeling very unfair. The game uses a respite system similar to Dark Souls or Hollow Knight but without the corpse running mechanic. That unfortunately doesn't stop you from needing to perform runbacks that are significantly worse than both games due to the amount of enemies.

Due to the sheer number of enemies, you're caught between the decision to play hyper cautiously, adding 10 years of inch-worming per room, or to play like a speedrunner, ignoring every enemy and bashing your head against the wall in unknown rooms hoping to find the next respite point. The former playstyle doesn't work because you can't be prepared for every trap, and you'll encounter new enemies with unknown attack patterns. You will get hurt no matter how carefully you play. Unfortunately, because healing is limited per respite, not only are you not rewarded for playing carefully, but you're basically punished for it. The game introduces a flower system for gaining more healing (and ammo) during exploration, but these flowers may as well not exist with how infrequent they are.

Even as early as the second area, I really started to feel like enemy encounters were way too frequent and way too dense. This feeling kept up all the way until the final area of the game, regardless of atmosphere or challenges that existed in the area. Areas with high amounts of platforming or hazards were not balanced by having fewer enemies. While games of this nature usually focus on giving you interesting enemy encounters, this game just tends to give you more. I don't think I could walk 10 seconds without encountering an enemy. Perhaps not even 5 seconds.

Another very weird decision is that enemy gauntlets in locked arenas reset when resting at a save point. This made clearing these arenas feel much less rewarding and also made re-exploring these areas later extremely tedious. If I already went through these challenging encounters, then I shouldn't be forced to do them again, even if they're easy with much higher levels.

The Spirit system is the highlight of this game, though it does have some clunkiness to the system. In order to level up a Spirit, you need to use materials that are found in the overworld. These materials can also drop from enemies, but it's so miniscule that it's irrelevant (think like 1 material dropped infrequently compared to finding a spot in the overworld that gives 200). This made leveling a wide variety of spirits very difficult to do, leading to less experimenting and playing around with different Spirits.

This is a shame because the Spirits are the more unique aspect of this game. There are so many cool Spirits that I wanted to try them all out. It's obvious that tht devs wants you to constantly try different loadouts of Spirits, but the leveling system really doesn't let you.

Even still, the smaller amount of Spirits I was able to experiment with was a fun experience. I ended up swapping to different Spirit combinations whenever I was stuck on a boss, and it often helped me clear it. This type of unique problem solving for difficult boss encounters was extremely rewarding, so I wish the level system didn't make it so hard to do.

Finally, to briefly discuss exploration, the game is open enough that you can go anywhere whenever you want without any handholding, which made for a fun exploration experience. Having a way to quickly return to a respite from the menu and also fast travel to any respite made navigation quick and easy (though exploring each area was still tedious due to the enemies as mentioned above).

There were a few instances during the end of the game when I was doing 100% item cleanup where the movement tech needed to perform to get the items felt extremely precise, unintuitive, and almost exploitative. I often felt like I was learning "speedrunning tricks" rather than the intended solution.

Also before I forget, the map sucks in this game. The boxes are never the proper scale to room, and they offer no practical information on how to navigate from room to room. Rooms on the map will glow orange when all collectibles are found on that screen. This is really nice from a collection standpoint, but it's a little disappointing from a diegetic discovery standpoint. It would've been better as a post-game item or setting rather than the default setting.

- The parry is useless. I thought it would be cool when it was introduced, but I slowly learned that dodging is better in 100% of scenarios.
- Some bosses have attacks that require the use of dodge despite looking like you can avoid them in other ways. The over-reliance of dodge as a mechanic was excessive.
- The final area of the game is terrible. There really needed to be an item that nullifies the poison completely and not just slow it down.
- The stun on normal enemies is way too short; they get back up instantly. They might as well not have a stun mechanic on normal enemies.

Overall, despite its many flaws, I'm still giving Ender Lilies a recommendation. When you get past the clunky systems, tedious exploration through enemy dense halls, and its annoying map, you get a visually stunning game with beautiful music, combined with a unique and fun Spirit system that rewards interacting with it.