Enotria: The Last Song is a sunny soulslike that has an unusual sense of joy on the surface—but there’s a lot of dark stuff going on underneath. You can rest assured that your skills will be tested in typical genre fashion, and especially during the game’s opening hours, where things are at their most confusing. Here are eight tips to get you started.
The perks you unlock in Enotria’s Path of Innovators aren’t automatically applied to your character. Instead, you have a set number of perk slots on each mask you equip, and you’ll need to manually go in and equip your perks on each loadout.
You can do this at any reality thread (this game’s version of bonfires) that you visit along your journey, so be sure to swap them around when you buy powerful new options from the Path of Innovators.
Speaking of perks, I must recommend Preparedness. This perk is unlocked from the get-go and provides your character with a really cool passive ability. With Preparedness equipped, you’ll Unravel enemies slightly when dodging their attacks.
This can be surprisingly useful, particularly early in your adventure while you’re still learning the ropes, as it will typically apply enough Unravel to weak foes to stun them with a single well-timed dodge. In turn, this opens them up for a nice critical attack certain to drain their health.
Unlike many soulslike titles, which force you to reach a certain point in the story to unlock fast travel, Enotria: The Last Song offers you the ability to teleport between reality knots from the very beginning.
As such, you’re able to revisit any previously explored areas that felt a bit difficult during the first few hours, so that you can show those enemies your new-found power with a few more levels under your belt.
You’ll come across some crab enemies very early in the game, and they’re an excellent source of Memoria (XP). While they only grant 40 Memoria per kill individually, they have a relatively decent chance of dropping consumable items called Valuable Shells, which can be used to receive 2,000 Memoria at once. That’s a hell of a lot of XP during the first area of the game.
If you want to tackle these little crabs, fast travel to the Shores of Quinta reality thread. Turn around from where you spawn, and head into the little beach cave behind you where three of these enemies will be waiting. Slay them and hope for a Valuable Shell, then rinse and repeat as necessary.
There are a lot of pesky archers scattered throughout Enotria: The Last Song, but if you can get a feel for the timing of their shots, there’s some good news: You can parry them.
Even better, parrying the arrows of the weak archers will automatically Unravel them and allow you to approach for a one-shot kill. Hell yeah.
The game’s first major boss, Curtis, isn’t necessarily an overwhelmingly difficult encounter, but he hits like a truck, meaning a few missed dodges or parries can land you in a bad spot.
I’d really recommend that you aim to have around 20 points in your Bruiser stat to raise your health and defense, 20 points in your damage stat of choice, and a weapon leveled to at least +3 before you head in and fight him. You can farm the aforementioned crabs for Valuable Shells if you’re looking for Memoria to make all of this happen.
And hey, don’t worry about any materials you’ve used on leveling a weapon early in the game. If you find something else you prefer later on, you can head to an anvil and enter the weapon upgrade menu, then select “Refund” to receive all of the materials back for use on another armament of your choosing.
Keep in mind, however, you won’t be refunded any Memoria you invested. However, that shouldn’t be a huge deal as the game rolls on—it’s much more plentiful later.
Lastly, you should absolutely try to design your character’s stats in a way that best suits your early game build, but don’t worry if you find that you’ve tossed a point or two in the wrong place while experimenting. While I won’t spoil how, you will find an NPC later in the game that will let you respec, so you’ll be able to fix up your stat spread mistakes—or completely reevaluate your build if you prefer.
Good luck out there in the beautiful but dangerous world of Enotria: The Last Song. You’re going to need it!