I am going to start this review off a bit differently. When discussing a game I normally first give the basic premise behind the game. The problem is doing so would sound like I was describing an entirely different game, Hollow Knight, so I am going to address this first. There is no getting around how heavily Ender Lillies feels like it's taking from Hollow Knight. It's a dark Metroidvania with similar styles of building up the lore, both are about fallen kingdoms done in by some kind of plague, and a protagonist that lacks memories. Even some of the twists about the main character are similar. I looked up my original review of that game from 2018 just to see, and a lot of what I said about Hollow Knight is also going to apply to Ender Lillies.
At the same time, I don't think the game is entirely derivative. There is no way you are not going to see a lot of Hollow Knight in Ender Lillies if you played that game, and I'd be hard-pressed to argue with someone who feels like this game was a rip-off. But there is enough unique about its own story, a decent enough selection of abilities, and enough different enemy gimmicks that it manages to feel fresh in its own way. However much like with Hollow Knight, so much of the story that I didn't mention above is intended to be discovered as you explore, so I won't be going into more details than this.
Combat sees you assigning spirits for your attacks. A spirit with the main skill is an attack that can be used over and over again, acting as a basic attack. Any other spirits have a limited number of uses and a cool down before resting. I watched a few clips of lets plays to get a feel for how other people would play, and it does seem people found a lot more effective ways to play the game and considering the sheer volume of spirits available to you I like that so many of them are useful and give you a good variety of ways to play the game. As far as main skills I stuck with the first one, and for my other five equipped skills I largely settled on the poison cloud and ball and chain spirit (I forget the names), and a couple of others I'd rotate around. It's a bit frustrating that you have to level them up individually since some of them come late, but so long as you have a bit of patience and don't immediately dump your points into what you are getting you'll be fine. Learn what you like before upgrading.
One thing the game does is highlight any room on the map that has items currently undiscovered. I'm not sure how much I like this, as a big part of these styles of games is discovery, and this one kind of just tells you there is stuff here you haven't found yet, so I can see it taking away from the experience a bit. On the other hand, games like this can be especially frustrating if you aren't good at remembering a lot of minor details, meaning you could end up doing a frustrating amount of backtracking if you aren't taking notes. It's a feature that is going to vary from person to person on how much they enjoy it being there. I think I lean on preferring it not being there myself, something is satisfying about founding some of the obscure stuff purely on your own and not because the game goes out of its way to tell you something is there.
Beyond that, the actual combat is also a lot of fun. There is a good variety of enemies, all of which have their unique quirks and methods to deal with them. Even the same enemies in different environments can force you to change how you have to handle them. It may be tricks that other platforms have used in the past, like fighting the same enemies but now you are on a series of platforms over water, mobile platforms, or more constricted areas, but they are all done well and used with some fun enemies. It's a good example of not reinventing the wheel, but having your way of spinning it (Look, I didn't mean for the lame pun to be made here, especially since it doesn't make much sense the more you think about it, but once I typed it out it's the only way I could think to say it).
You do come with a fairly normal issue that all the backtracking to different areas, once you get new abilities, means you're going to be redoing a lot of rooms you have already cleared. It's a bit of a running flaw with all these styles of games, though to be fair it's a very minor one. I think it's just a necessary evil for the genre.
Ender Lillies does enough to keep itself feeling different from Hollow Knight despite the numerous and obvious similarities in terms of both mechanics and story. And even though they both feature a very dark atmosphere, the settings are both incredibly different. If you go into this thinking it's just a cash-in trying to capitalize off the success of another really small studio hit, you are going to miss out on something really fun purely on its own merits. I recommend giving Ender Lillie's a try.
Technical Notes on my PC:
Ryzen 5 3rd Gen 3600 (3.60GHz) (6 cores, 12 threads)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6GB
16GB DDR4 3200MHz RGB
1TB SSD
AMD B450 (Motherboard)
Game Ran a constant 60FPS.