Italy has been home to everything from Assassin’s Creed to Isonzo, and now a new Soulsbourne is joining them in the countryside. Enotria: The Last Song blends the feel of the Italian Renaissance with that of Ancient Rome to bring the genre something new. The game’s debt to the dev team’s land of origin runs deeper than aesthetics, though. During a recent interview by The Nerd Stash, Edoardo Basile (Enotria: The Last Song‘s Project Manager) said Jyamma Games has enough material to make ten more games based on Italian history, even if it has no immediate plans to do so.
Italian folklore was one of Jyamma’s major focuses during Enotria‘s development. You can see it in everything from the stylized, puppetlike masks to the unnatural storms that brew over the ruins of homes and churches long gone to rot. History, legacy, and decay are popular themes in folklore and Soulsbornes alike, but The Last Song‘s Italian focus is new. Edoardo Basile explained.
[W]hat I can say is we are Italians and we had to take eight months just to study our own tradition because we have so much stuff we didn’t even know about. And literally, like we can do another, like, ten games with all the tradition we have. So we can expect to have, of course, folklore creatures and stuff like that. [….] Probably in the future you will see much, much more.
Edoardo Basile, Project Manager
Interesting and deadly bosses and mobs are the spine of Soulslikes. In this area, Enotria is better positioned than most of its comrades in the genre. Italian folklore is rich with varied boogiemen, documented in medieval bestiaries and modern urban legends alike. Lies of P, with its sophisticated reading of Pinocchio, is a great example of what Soulslikes can do with such material.
Any dev can come up with cool monsters, of course. What makes Enotria‘s folkloric roots interesting is the cohesion and feeling they lend to the game. Pulling from a shared body of myths and legends in this way unites the rest of the content. We’ll have to wait until Enotria‘s release before we know whether we’re up for ten more games like it, but at least we know the developer has the fuel to pull it off.
