is having quite the moment. Having , it's now quietly gathering some decent buzz. That's thanks in no small part to an eight-hour demo that's proving popular on Steam, but in an hour-long demo at 2024, I found that it's also due to a smart, accessible, versatile soulslike that's continuing the genre's push into new types of narrative.
During the demo, I took on three bosses in a row, jumping directly to their arenas; a shadowy ritual hall; a shattered church with the faces scratched out of the figures in its frescoes; a neo-classical arena surrounded by a dizzying moat of wine. That meant that I had less opportunity to explore Enotria than I would have liked, but it also gave me a close look at how its world pulls from the cultural history and folklore of developer Jyamma Games' native Italy. Enotria spends little time dwelling directly on its narrative, preferring, like many soulslikes, to allow the world to tell the story for it.
Here that's built on the Commedia 'arte, a form of theatre popularized in Italy around the 16th century, and best known for its masked character archetypes. The exaggerated visages of those characters are resurrected in Enotria, allowing you to claim the masks of defeated foes to rebuild your playstyle around them. Slightly more subtle but just as present, however, is religion - my first fight takes place in a church, the faces of saints and angels scratched away from its hand-painted frescoes.
In another fight, my fallen foe appeals to a statue of.
