Another Indie Double-Review ("Omno" and "Ender Lillies: Quietus of the Knights")

Hello, and welcome to what feels like the umpteenth multi-subject article I've put out this year! I suppose it should come as no surprise that there are so many small indie games out, given how much the pandemic has impacted the larger studios, but whatever. After the three subjects I played for my indie triple-threat article, I came across two other indie titles that looked interesting: Omno, and Ender Lillies: Quietus of the Knights. So let's dive in!

Available for: Playstation 4, Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows

If you'd never heard of Omno before opening up this review, you probably wouldn't be alone. Not only has there seemed to not be much press coverage surrounding this game, but even if there was, it has just about the least compelling title I've ever seen. But I digress. Developed by one person, Jonas Manke, a brief look at Omno shows that it's clearly a Journey-like: an ever-so-slight puzzle game with an emphasis on the experience of maneuvering through its world. Games like that are, as you may well know, hit-or-miss. Sometimes you'll get a game like Aer: Memories of Old, which a kind commenter happened to remind me exists. But on the other hand, you'll sometimes get excellent games like 2019's Lost Embers. The Journey-like, while always a gamble, is always worth a shot in my book. So what about Omno? Where does it fall on the spectrum. Well, despite the fact that I'm going to have to call out some negatives, Omno largely falls on the Lost Embers side of the spectrum, and it succeeds in a way that few Journey-likes succeed. 

In Omno, you play as a pilgrim with a staff, and your goal is to seek "the light," some far-off portal to paradise or something similar. So, pretty standard fare for a game like this. You're guided through the world by an adorable flying squirrel/chinchilla companion, and your journey takes you through a couple different types of biomes before all is said and done. 

In a game like this, the technical side of things is far too closely married to the story side of the experience, so I'm going to go out of my usual order for a second and talk about that. While the overall graphical style of Omno is nothing to write home about, one thing that can't be denied is the sheer creativity of the world. On your journey, you'll meet all sorts of fantastical creatures, all of which are uniquely designed and a joy to discover. This extends to the biomes themselves. None of them are as unique in concept as the creatures, but they were always interesting enough for me to want to explore, and unlike most times when I say that, there's actually evidence I can point to! See, once you enter a new area, you have the ability to pull up a "% complete" meter. As you complete puzzles and find text logs, you fill up that meter gradually until you've completed every puzzle and found every text log. In order to fill up that meter, you obviously need to explore the area thoroughly to find everything. Without fail, every single time I saw that I'd reached 100% completion in an area, I'd think, "ah man, I've seen everything?" So that right there is empirical evidence that I found these areas a joy to explore despite none of them being too inventive. Now, this being a Journey-like, soundtrack is a key part of the experience, so how does Omno fare there? Well I can give you the exact thought that I had during one of the game's cinematic creature riding scenes where the soundtrack really starts to swell: "this is a respectable Austin Wintory imitation." I'll be frank: the soundtrack isn't exactly memorable. I struggle to remember any of the pieces that played in this game, but the fact remains that while I was playing, each piece did what it needed to do. The piece that played during that aforementioned creature riding scene wasn't anywhere near as good as "Apotheosis," but I'd be a liar if I said that the piece didn't successfully establish this section as the "Apotheosis" moment. That's essentially what I mean when I say this is a respectable Wintory imitation: it captures a lot of the Wintory spirit, even if it doesn't quite deliver as much of an emotional punch. 

Gameplay is both where Omno excels in a way that few games like it excel and where it stumbles a bit. But let's get the good stuff out there first. Like all games in this genre, Omno is mostly walking with a bit of platforming and a bit of puzzle solving. While the puzzles usually tend to be an afterthought in these games, the puzzle design in Omno is excellent. After solving most of the puzzles in this game, I actively thought "that was well done!" None of them are particularly challenging, but they're always designed in such a way that you'll scratch your head for a little bit before finding out what you need to do. They're little bite sized puzzles that take up just enough space to not be a walk in the park, not be frustrating, and somehow be satisfying to solve all at the same time, and this is consistently the case. The entire time I was playing Omno I was fascinated by how consistently good the puzzle design was, so I made a specific note to give immense credit to the developer on this topic. Where Omno begins to falter, however, is in those other two aforementioned aspects of gameplay. Though there isn't that much platforming, our staff-wielding hero is a bit too floaty in his jumps to pull off precise maneuvers, and he's a little inconsistent in terms of when he chooses to actually land on a ledge or just rub up against it and fall down. Again, there's not too much platforming, so it's kind of a minor thing, but I noticed it every time. And in terms of the walking, it's another minor thing that was unfortunately a consistent hassle. You eventually unlock the ability to surf on your staff, and it's more-or-less signposted as a de-facto sprint, but that's really not the case. Some of these biomes are relatively large, and the default walking speed is none too fast, so in an effort to get around quicker, I'd hop on my staff...and maybe go faster for a second or two before slowing down to one mile an hour before hopping back off and just defeatedly walking the rest of the way. Perhaps that's my fault alone, perhaps I read more into this ability than the developer intended, but all I can report on is my own experience. But those are really the only gripes I have about the gameplay.

Folks, I hope I've made it clear that Omno gets a recommendation from me. What it lacks in compelling story or tearjerking visual moments, it makes up for in legitimately good world and puzzle design. If you purchase this game, you'll also be helping out a solo developer who, especially compared to a lot of other solo developers, did a really good job. I don't see a downside here! So if you own any of the hardware mentioned above, I'd say you ought to give Omno a shot! This being a smaller game with fewer moving parts than most, I'll be using my 2x scale, meaning that I can take off a maximum of 2 points for any given negative instead of the usual 1 point.

Let us review:

Minor hassles in gameplay - 1.0

The final score for Omno is...

9.0/10 - Exceptional

Excellent work, Jonas Manke, excellent work.

Available for: Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S

Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows

Ender Lillies: Quietus of the Knights is a prime example of why if you're feeling frustrated with a game that you've been enjoying, you should put it down for a little bit and come back later rather than giving up entirely. I was having quite a bit of trouble with a boss that came up at around the mid point of the game, and I decided I was through with it until a week later when I decided to give it another shot. After that point, I 100%-ed it. So clearly I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I wouldn't have gotten to experience the rest of the game if I'd given up at that boss. 

Ender Lillies puts you in the shoes of a little girl in white named Lily, who wakes up in a chapel with no memory of her past and is greeted by the spirit of an Umbral Knight who vows to protect her. The world outside this chapel has been ultimately destroyed by "the rain of death" which turned just about every living thing into monsters. Word has it that only the white priestess of the fount can cure the "blight" the covers the land and restore the kingdom, so Lily and the Knight set out on a quest to find this priestess. So it's kind of a Dark Souls style world breathing one desperate final breath, and that's pretty much all I can say about the story, because to be honest, I didn't really pay that much attention to it. That's not a strike against the game, it's just me being impatient and not wanting to do too much reading. 

In terms of gameplay, Ender Lillies is all about picking up new abilities and items and mix-and-matching them for your preferred play style. On that note, I'd like to mention that you should definitely use a controller rather than mouse and keyboard if you're playing on PC. I used a mouse and keyboard for the first half of my playthrough and it was beyond wonky. But back to the subject at hand. As I mentioned, you play as a little girl, so she's not actually doing the fighting. Rather, Lily calls upon various spirits of particular monsters that she purifies to attack for her in realtime (so don't think this is like Pokemon or something). For example, the Umbral Knight serves as your standard sword slash that you'll likely be using the entire run time. He is one of the few spirits with unlimited uses, which makes him consistently a good spirit to have equipped. But you might also consider using a spirit that attacks faster, such as the spirit of Hoernir, at the cost of having a finite amount of uses until you rest at a respite. To give another example, when utilizing the Western Merchant, he'll just float alongside you until you dismiss him or he runs out of his 50 uses, and he'll spend the time he's out on the field automatically barraging enemies with magic attacks while you do your thing. On the other hand, an alternative to the Western Merchant might be the Dark Witch, who has 70 uses but doesn't linger on the battlefield and has less accurate magic. You have a maximum of two loadouts of three spirits each that you can flip between in combat, so there's plenty of room for experimentation, and I hope that the examples I've given paint a decent picture of the variety of attack styles you can bring to the table. I was seriously impressed by the amount of variety on display here, and the process of cycling through these spirits to see which kinds were tailored to my play style was actually quite enjoyable!

Before I talk about the other side of the gameplay customization, I should probably talk about the moment-to-moment of gameplay. This is basically a Metroidvania, so you're moving around in a 2D space between several linked secluded areas, and as you gain abilities and progress through the game, you're gradually able to unlock different routes to different areas with hidden treasures or extra bosses or whatever. Combat pits you up against different types of enemies with different attack patterns, and survival consists of reading these attack patterns (helpfully denoted by a red blink in enemy eyes), dodging or parrying at the right moment, and attacking conservatively. If you've taken significant damage, you can use one of your 3-6 (depending on relics you equip, which we'll get to) healing prayers to restore your health, but once you run out, you can't pray again until you rest at a respite. In a more Soulslike than Metroidvania turn, these respites restore your health and healing prayers, allow you to fast travel and reassign spirit/relic slots, and cause all enemies to respawn. Finally, in a step away from that Dark Souls influence, death doesn't deprive you of your accumulated experience, so death is never an active setback. 

The other aspect of gameplay that you're able to customize is the relics that you equip. As you progress through the game and explore different areas, you'll often stumble across treasure chests that contain new relics with various effects. However, you only have a certain amount of "slots" for relics (which can be increased by finding chains of sorcery in the world, yet another reason to do lots of exploring), and different relics take up different amounts of slots based on their overall usefulness. The relic that lets you parry attacks, for example, is kind of necessary and only useful if you practice, so it takes up exactly 0 slots so there's no reason not to have it equipped. On the other hand, a white priestess earring that gives you an extra healing prayer or the relic that significantly reduces the damage you take require 4 open slots to be equipped. In contrast, a relic that only "slightly" reduces the damage you take would require either 1 or 2 slots. So this side of the game is all about efficiently managing the space you have to equip the relics you need for a given situation as best you can. You can only attain a maximum of 20 slots, so you're always going to have to make solid decisions when you mix and match your relics. For example, in the final boss fight, I realized that I was doing most of my attacks in mid-air (for reasons that would count as spoilers). So in order to go into this fight more effectively, I elected to remove the relic that ups all the damage I do in favor of the smaller slot-requiring relic that increases the damage I do in mid-air specifically, so as to free up a bit of space for one or two more relics centered around health in case things went wrong. Outside of combat, relics also play a role in exploration. There are certain items, for example, that are placed in ridiculous places, and the only way to reach them is by equipping certain relics that increase your speed or jump height (things that are utterly worthless in combat) alongside certain spirits whose effects happen to move you up in the air or dart you forward. So you're going to be engaging with the relic system frequently, and I was quite impressed by how smartly this system was designed. Normally I'm not one to enjoy fiddling around and micromanaging inventories or whatever, but I actually liked coming up with specific loadout plans for whatever I was going to try to do next. I guess if a system is as well designed as the relic system is, it's just objectively fun. 

So thus far I've been pretty much ranting and raving about how good the gameplay in Ender Lillies is, but I have to mention that it comes with a pretty substantial caveat. Unfortunately, Ender Lillies commits what I consider to be the cardinal sin of game design: you take significant damage just by touching an enemy. That kind of thing is only acceptable if an enemy is covered in fire or spikes or something, and sadly, every single enemy in this game damages you if you come in contact with them. This was a constant annoyance not just because it's annoying to me personally, but because a lot of the time, I would end up dying because an enemy happened to move a little bit to the left. In a game as skill-based and sometimes difficult as Ender Lillies, deaths should always feel like my fault, but that simply wasn't the case. And that brings me to another big caveat that pretty much ties in with this one: the aforementioned boss that made me decide to quit until I changed my mind a week later, Knight Captain Julius.

Here's the thing: all of the bosses in this game take several tries to beat, and nearly all of them had me pulling my hair out by the end. But for all of them except Julius, when I got to that point of frustration, I always took a step back and thought "ok. I got farther that time. I know this is doable," and sure enough, I'd always triumph one or two more attempts later. That's the good kind of difficulty, and it's most of the boss fights in this game. But Julius is different, and for one reason and one reason alone. It's not that his attack patterns aren't properly telegraphed, because they're as well telegraphed as every other boss's patterns. It's not that he's particularly difficult or hits harder than the other bosses, because a later boss hits significantly harder and the final boss is arguably more difficult for reasons that would count as spoilers. The reason is that his movement is so erratic that he will make physical contact with you just by moving at least once when you fight him, taking away a good chunk of your health without even landing an actual attack. I had his attack patterns down pat and knew how to dodge them most of the time unless I screwed something up, but eventually all my deaths would happen because of the chip damage that the stupid physical contact would deal. I was dying constantly to this guy without making much progress through basically no fault of my own, and that was extremely discouraging, and as I've already said, it made me decide to quit. I was going to write this review and say that I had technically beaten the game because I had gotten the "A" (bad) ending, but eventually my conscience decided it wasn't cool with that, and I went back, this time with a controller instead of the mouse and keyboard, and eventually defeated Julius. But it was still a BS boss that I'm definitely taking points off for. The key thing I want you to takeaway from this part, given how strongly I recommend Ender Lillies, is that Julius, while horrible, is the exception to the rule. Most of these bosses are excellently done, it's just this one that stains the game.

On the technical side of things, I mainly have positive things to say. The art style is gorgeous, the enemy designs are the most creative I've seen since Scarlet Nexus, the soundtrack is simultaneously extremely varied and always excellent. I never experienced any glitches of any kind (audio, animation, sound, etc) nor did any assets fail to load, nor did I ever have the game crash. Make no mistake, this is one of the most heavily-polished games I've played this year. However, there are some small negatives. Firstly, the way the developers programmed enemy projectiles to be so predictive and/or heat-seeking is kind of BS. Secondly, while the visual effects on screen are always beautiful, they can sometimes get in the way and block that aforementioned helpful red eye-flash that denotes an imminent attack from an enemy. So the negatives here aren't exactly cause to riot, but they are responsible for a handful of deaths that I felt weren't entirely fair.

Given how much positive stuff I've said about Ender Lillies, I'd bet the final score is going to be a bit shocking. I don't think anyone will be outraged by it, but they might be surprised. I know that I, myself, fall into the trap of seeing certain scores and thinking "huh, that's a little low," but I have to reiterate that the score I've decided on is a good one that signifies that I think you should spend your money on this game. That's both a notice for you, dear reader, and for me as well, because I thought it seemed low for a game that I loved enough to 100% as well. But at the end of the day, a recommendation is a recommendation, and make no mistake: Ender Lillies is excellent, and you should definitely give it a try if you haven't already.

Let us review:

Cardinal sin of game design - 1.0

Knight Captain Julius - 1.0

Technical woes - 0.5

The final score for Ender Lillies: Quietus of the Knights is...

7.5/10 - Pretty Good

Excellent work, Binary Haze, excellent work.