During my Easter break, I found myself sinking into a form of media that (surprisingly) wasn’t Common Side Effects. Alongside that, I realized that I’m starting to regress into the girl I was a few years ago under, what I assume to be, the stress of recently turning 17. That means I’m diving back into the things I liked as a 13 and 14-year-old. One of those includes ENA.
ENA started as an animated series by Joel G on YouTube. ENA is a character inspired by Picasso’s “Girl before a Mirror”. She represents two prominent sides of a person as two separate colors, split down the middle. These colors portray happiness and depression represented by yellow and blue respectively. The yellow side has a male voice (which sparked my love for voice actors that are the opposite gender of the character they’re voicing) and the blue side has a female voice. They both have very dynamic and contrasting tones that I absolutely adore. The series consists of 4 episodes all under 10 minutes (excluding “Temptation Stairway” which is 17 minutes long). All of the characters are incredibly interesting. My favorite, other than ENA, is Moony. She’s ENA’s friend and I just think they’re so cute together.
The ENA series is really high quality, and because of that, episodes took a really long time to release. In between “Temptation Stairway”, released 4 years ago, and “Power of Potluck”, the newest episode, my interest in ENA naturally dropped. I still admired the series and character, I just stopped involving myself in the media as much.
Until ENA: Dream BBQ came out on March 27, 2025 (3 days after my birthday!) and I found out about it relatively quickly. Probably because it was a really anticipated game so a lot of YouTubers and other creators that I follow played it and talked about it. I was quick to jump on the train as well, watching my first play through of it on April 12. Then I watched 3 more play throughs and multiple videos breaking down the plot.
I feel like I’m more than qualified to spoil the whole thing, but I highly encourage others to play it for themselves. It’s free on Steam! So here, I’ll just discuss my favorite things about the game and how much I love the Dream BBQ version of ENA.
This game is very similar to the Youtube series, which already felt like clips of a video game. It feels like a playable episode of ENA and I think that’s the perfect way to translate the series into a game. It’s incredibly surreal and confusing while also being fun and leaving a lot of the story to the audience’s interpretation.
ENA has changed a lot between the YouTube series and the game. Instead of yellow and blue, she’s white and red. The different sides of her even have different names, white is “meanie” and red is “salesman”! She even has a cute little hat. I still have a lot of love for the old ENA, the yellow and blue color combination brings back a lot of good memories, but Dream BBQ ENA is definitely my favorite.
I think my second favorite character is Froggy – a Japanese speaking man in a huge frog costume. He has so much personality and he’s very expressive. He even has an amazing ringtone when he calls you! I’m considering making it my own ringtone…
One of my (many) favorite parts of the game is when ENA, who you’re playing as, enters the “Lost Village” and knocks on the doors of the houses in the area until she finds the right one. Each house that isn’t the right one disappears with a unique animation and I just think that’s really funny. It’s also just fun to see all the different animations, it makes me hope to never find the right house just to see the animations.
Even though the anticipation for this game was high (to my understanding), it’s not as popular as I thought it would’ve been. Compared to the traction the ENA series received, the game has received a surprisingly little amount of attention. But that just makes the fan content a lot more special. Some of those TikTok editors make videos that seriously look like trailers for the game!
All of this to say, I really love ENA: Dream BBQ. I think everyone should play it or watch someone else play it because some of the biggest YouTubers that have played it only have half of a million views as I’m writing – which sounds like a lot but compared to the series’ combined view count of 47.5 million, it’s not!
I used to be into Ena years ago, and I recently saw many youtubers I like playing this game as well! I haven’t indulged in it yet, but I definitely plan too soon. Thank you for reminding me about this interest lol.
i never got into ENA bc i had an ex-friend who was super into it and kinda ruined it, and a bunch of other fandoms, for me. i really want to reclaim it though because i’ve always thought it seems really cool. i also love the new trend going around on tik tok that’s based off of ENA- im not sure if you’ve seen it, but it’s essentially introducing well known characters, expect they have the split down the middle design that ENA does and typically half is their original design and the other half is their older design, or their evil design, or the villian of their source media, etc. i find it all really interesting and id love to play this new game. very interesting and exciting stuff!
I remember seeing the yellow and blue girl and thinking she was so cool but had no idea who she was or what she did, so this is so interesting !
This game look interesting and sounds super cool! I really like the animation style, and it kind of reminds me of a show on Cartoon Network. Def going to check this out.