There’s no shortage of Metroidvanias nowadays. It’s a genre that is jam packed with something like ten to fifteen entries a year, so you really have a lot to sift through. Luckily I’m here to tell you about one of the best ones of 2025, Ender Magnolia: Bloom In The Mist. A sequel to Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights. An equally gorgeous game that suffers from limitations in its scope and difficulty but now in the second entry has all those kinks worked out making this one of the upper echelon Metroidvanias on the market.

Our story begins similar to the last one, but decades later within the same world. The protagonist, Lilac, is woken up to a world run by machines called Homunculi. Unfortunately for us, the Homunculi have been corrupted by a toxic miss and turned on their creators, the attuners. Luckily, Lilac has the ability to purify corruption and convince the enemies to ally with them. This is similar to the original Ender Lilies, but instead the priestess Lily was purifying spirits from the corruption that plagued that land. This is all beautifully animated in a chibi, anime style. The environments are colorized in a pretty monotone fashion to make the bright color accents really pop. Drab and dark dungeons look amazing when your character fluidly runs through them in his bright blue coat, or does an attack unleashing bright red orbs. I could stare at this game’s animations all day.

This story element is where our key mechanics come into play. Some of the Homunculi you purify join you by giving you new abilities that can be assigned to your face and shoulder buttons and used simultaneously. Example: the first person that joins you gives you a basic sword slash attack, but others will give you charge abilities, homing fire, dashing jumps, or rapid fire pistols. All of them can be used at the same time but have varying cooldowns. There are ten different Homunculi but their abilities can be expanded and customized three times by finding crafting materials in the world. This extends the sheer number of abilities to 30 giving you a ton of customization on how you play. One charging attack Homunculi can be customized to have an explosion instead so its use case is now completely different. Even better still you can save loadouts and swap them at rest benches so there’s a lot of room for experimentation.

As in all Metroidvanias, the map needs to be big, sprawling with a lot to explore. Ender Magnolia is no different. Anytime I would hit a dead end, there were at least 3-4 more areas to check out, which generally lead me to new and exciting paths. I really never got stuck for more than a minute before finding the next place to unlock. This is especially helpful with a fast travel system that allows you to move between the many save points that are littered around the map. These were plentiful and especially helpful when they would be strategically outside of boss encounters (what a novel idea!) The boss fights were also some of my favorite parts of the game. They had some of the most inspired design art I’ve seen in the genre, and the fights themselves were challenging but never frustratingly so. This was an issue in Ender Magnolia for sure, but the difficulty has been lowered to a more approachable extent in the sequel. The leveling system is still very minute with upgrades being relegated to finding HP upgrades in hard to find places, but it's pretty slight.

That’s the generalized statement for Ender Magnolia, it’s bigger, better, more approachable. In the original, the boss fights were often annoyingly perilous, the soundtrack was repetitive, and abilities were drip fed to you. Now, we get fun, engaging boss fights, a beautifully full soundtrack scored with some of the most intricate songs in gaming, and abilities are front loaded but the customizations are drip fed instead. It’s an overall more fully featured package and a comprehensive improvement front to back. Even with the story, the first game felt like we were meandering while this provides an intriguing mystery to chase. There are side conversations with your Homunculi at save points that provide a lot of depth to the world when the previous games’ dialogue was a lot more hollow, lacking punch. Even down to the map. In Ender Lilies, you could see the section of the map you were in but now you get a more precise positional location so you can better track your exploration. It was always a big complaint in the first game, but now this is a vast improvement.

That’s my overall pitch for Ender Magnolia: Bloom Into The Mist being one of the best Metroidvanias, I’m sorry, best GAMES of 2025 so far. The piano scores are hauntingly beautiful, while the character designs are intricately animated. Boss fights are interesting puzzles to figure out and the plot moves at a brisk pace to not overstay its welcome. The anime art style may not be everyone’s cup of tea but that’s a small thing that is easily overcome by everything else this game does right. In a year that we have Silksong incoming, I feel like Ender Magnolia is at serious risk of getting overshadowed but don’t sleep on this one. It’s a top to bottom fantastic experience.