I don’t tend to do impressions pieces about demos for games that I’ll probably play at some point, as I learned a long time ago that two pieces about the same game just led to repeating myself. I’m making an exception here with the Lies of P demo because it’s a game I’ve heard very little about until now and think more people should be aware of it before it comes out in the fall.
Lies of P asks a question we’re all going to be asking over the next few decades: has fair use gone too far? Horror movies about Winnie the Pooh might have most recently fueled this question but now we have Lies of P giving us a Dark Souls-style game starring Pinocchio, which as far as strange mash-ups go is probably one of the most surreal I can imagine. To the game’s credit the world they’ve made seems like it has potential, with Pinocchio’s father Geppetto helping the city of Krat develop thousands of puppets that eventually all go crazy and kill every human they come across. It’s the same sort of world that you normally find in soulslikes, a fantastical place that is now a shadow of its former self and you’re the only one who can pick up the pieces, but Lies of P may fall a little flat in its world building since this is all something we’ve seen before in a dozen other “robots turn on their masters” stories. Obviously the demo is only a snapshot and not the final product but it’s all very “I, Robot,” and comes across a little familiar but also inconsistent when the game starts spouting the “four laws of puppets” at you and says Pinocchio is special because he can lie. Sure, lying breaks the fourth rule of puppets but every other puppet in the game is breaking the rule for “not harming humans” so clearly rule breaking isn’t unique to Pinocchio.
But as I said this is a soulslike and Lies of P is one of the first non-From Software Souls games in a while that actually embraces the feel of the early Dark Souls while also adding a number of quality of life improvements and personal tweaks that don’t detract from the gameplay loop. The world is a dark and the streets of Krat feel appropriately closed in and oppressive, much like Bloodborne and the earlier parts of the first Dark Souls, and Lies of P really enjoys the classic “there’s an enemy right around this corner” ambushes that was so frequent in that game. There are a few other Bloodborne comparisons to be made as well, such as “quick stepping” being the primary way to dodge, faster healing, and a rally mechanic to help recover health when you take damage, but everything is a little slower than Bloodborne and Lies of P really likes emphasizing Pinocchio’s ability to block. This is where some Sekiro references might come up, as timing a block perfectly prevents taking damage and adds some additional benefits I’ll discuss later, but blocking in Lies of P is hardly the central focus of combat like it is in games like Sekiro and Wo Long, so it’s best not to think of this game with that mentality.
Not thinking of the game like Wo Long is another thing to like about Lies of P because the game demands more from you out of combat than Wo Long’s basic “dodge counter everything” strategy. The last boss in the demo is a surprisingly tough enemy that requires both blocking and pattern recognition to avoid several kinds of AOE attacks, which makes it a hell of a lot more engaging than how brain-dead soulslikes such as Wo Long can be with more simplified boss designs. Most of the other quality of life improvements I mentioned earlier focus on your experience gain and loss, with dropped currency waiting for you outside of boss rooms rather than within them and the game telling you not only how much you lost but also how much you need to level up again, but my favorite design choice was an adjustment to healing items. In Lies of P you have a certain number of charges in your healing flask (like most other Souls games) but this game adds a unique feature where hitting enemies restores flask charges if you don’t have any left, back up to one. As I’m sure you can imagine this creates a couple of unique decision making choices in fights where normally you’d desperately hold onto your last healing charge for as long as you could, but maybe topping off is better because then you can regain that charge again. Additionally this could be balanced by the game lacking other healing items, as sometimes in other Souls games you could brute force through a boss by just pounding half a dozen of your limited use items along with your normal flask, but I didn’t see any of those come up in Lies of P.
In combat the game feels like Dark Souls with the usual enemies that will overwhelm you if you rush into combat and stamina bar limiting how many times you can attack or dodge in a row, but there’s a strange focus on weapon durability that I have to mention. The game emphasizes within the first few minutes how when a weapon breaks it’s destroyed and even goes so far as to giving you a repair item right away while making a significant part of the UI dedicated to showing you your weapon’s durability, and I’m still not entirely sure why. There’s an interesting side mechanic in combat where doing a perfect block against enemies with weapons will damage the weapon in their hands until they break, but all that seems to do is reduce enemy damage since the weapon’s top half just snaps off. I never really found myself in a situation where my weapon was in any real danger of breaking (maybe within 25% or so) since durability regenerates when you rest at checkpoints, but maybe later there will be long stretches of game without checkpoints or enemies that damage weapon durability. Outside of those exact situations it seems unnecessary in both directions, since your weapon never seems to be in danger of breaking and your enemies will (generally) die before you perfect guard them enough times to break their swords or clubs for a very minimal benefit.
Lies of P also has other strange resource bars to mention as well, but rather than saying their real names I’m just going to call them the magic meter and gun meter. The magic meter is used in the demo to power the super abilities of your primary weapon, each of which comes with two different special skills that are tied to the “blade” of the weapon as well as the hilt. Part way through the demo you gain the ability to mix and match blades and hilts to use whichever two abilities suit you best, though this also changes how the weapon attacks when you do it. These abilities range from increased attack damage for a short while to a super multi-hit attack, but the problem is that the energy for these abilities charges so slowly they’re practically an afterthought when you’re playing the game. Unlike Dark Souls 3 or Elden Ring’s energy bars, Lies of P’s magic has to be charged up in combat and charges so slowly that you’ll only get a chance to use your special abilities either once per boss fight for cheaper skills or once every two to four attempts at a boss fight for the skills that cost more power to activate. The gun meter is more like your weapon’s durability but it’s so fragile that I almost never wanted to use it, and half the time I did want to use it the game wouldn’t let me. Soon after the first boss of the demo you’ll reach the game’s soulslike-required hub world (complete with a lady that you have to use to level up, which I’ve hated since Dark Souls 2) and you get a weapon you can attach to your left arm that essentially gives you pull attacks like Nero in Devil May Cry, but you can only use it about six times before you run out of juice. So once again it becomes more of an afterthought in your kit because it’s made of tissue paper, but then even when you do try to use it in important situations like a boss running away from you the weapon just bounces off, making me wonder why they gave us a weapon to only bully basic enemies. At the very end of the demo you’re given an electrical shock arm but by that point the demo was over so I didn’t have an opportunity to play with it, but at least it implies more depth to this secondary weapon category.
There are certainly a lot of implications of “more depth” beneath the surface here, as despite having played an impressively long demo I feel like there’s so much that hasn’t been explained or shown to me. Right at the end of the demo you get a brief tease of a skill tree system where you can invest resources into giving Pinocchio some extra bonuses like increased damage to sneak attacks and the like, but the full extent of it isn’t entirely clear. Similarly, Lies of P’s demo seems to completely lack the helpful “more information” pop-ups that every other soulslike offers to explain (for example) the difference that “motivity” has on your stats versus “technique.” Hopefully these are things that will be added to the game before release, along with some adjustments to weapon movement and dodge/blocking windows. I absolutely HATE how some of the weapons in this game make you move when you use them, primarily the rapier making you take a silly little backstep before you lunge forward whenever you use it, and the game’s blocking never seems to respond as quickly as you need it to. This is once again another Souls game where there are no animation cancels but even without that Pinocchio seems to quickstep or raise his sword to block just a hair slower than you expect, which I hope gets changed in the final game because it just makes these moments feel clunky. On the positive side of more depth there was an implication at the end of the demo that you’ll encounter more characters that will give you the option to invite them to your little community or not, which is something we haven’t really seen outside of Bloodborne in this genre and I hope it has the same kinds of opportunities and implications in Lies of P.
On the technical end most everything in the demo looks great, from Pinocchio’s creepily attractive face to the blue particle effects of energy that swirl around every save point. My one critique for the visuals is that the “blood” effect on Pinocchio goes away at clearly designed triggers in the level rather than staying on you until you hit a checkpoint like in Sekiro, but I’m sure there’s a reason for it. The sound design could use a little work in distinguishing both the sounds of different types of enemies and your own actions, since with almost everyone around you being puppets everything can sound kind of samey in certain instances. Frequently when backstabbing enemies there’d be a little growl that would make me convinced I was about to be attacked by a robot dog, for instance, but that could just be my ears and new headphones. If I did have one major complaint about the presentation it would be with the dialogue boxes as you converse with characters, since there’s just enough of a pause between characters speaking sentences that you’ll always find yourself wondering if the game wants you to press A to go to the next screen or wait for the screen to progress automatically. It not only makes the dialogue feel less real but it also just leads to frustrations as you might try to start skipping the pause manually only to skip a whole line of dialogue instead, which makes your options either accidentally skipped dialogue or painfully drawn out dialogue, neither of which are great choices.
I’ll close these impressions with something about Lies of P that we know almost nothing about: the lying system, because of course they’re going to make Pinocchio lying a main part of the story. There’s two instances that I found in the demo where you can lie, once to progress the story and another time during what I believe is the demo’s only sidequest, but the demo doesn’t go into any explanation about the consequences of lying. Articles on the internet say that how often you lie and what you lie about will affect the game’s endings, but how much it does and which of these endings is the “good” ending is another matter entirely. NPCs in the game encourage Pinocchio to lie about being a human, since everyone still alive in the city is terrified of puppets, and the developers have suggested that the more he lies about being a human the more Pinocchio will believe it himself. That sounds like a good thing to me considering that puppets are the ones killing everyone, and the whole story about Pinocchio in the first place is how he wants to be a real boy, but on the other hand every time you lie an ominous red message appears talking about how your internal circuits are rewriting themselves, so believing this transformation (if true) is a good thing might be up to your own interpretation until we actually know how the endings play out. I have mixed feelings about adding a real “morality system” to a Souls game though, especially if your “lie points” accumulate like Light or Dark Side points in Star Wars RPGs and it might actually encourage you to skip side quests and the like just to not take a hit to your lies in either direction.
I was suckered into playing Wo Long Fallen Dynasty by its demo due to the flashy visuals and hoping Team Ninja could stick the landing on a fusion of Nioh and Sekiro. Conversely I knew almost nothing about Lies of P or its developers before last week and it’s not horribly flashy, but at least this demo feels like it’s a solid soulslike made by people who appreciate what makes a Souls game tick. It’s impossible to know for sure if the world will stay as interesting as you explore it more, if the developers will make the timing for dodges and perfect blocks feel more responsive, or if the lying mechanic will actually be worth it, but what I can say is that I will definitely be keeping an eye on this one. Give the demo a try yourself if you’ve enjoyed any of the From Software games, you’ll probably find something to like in Lies of P, if only from the absurdity of murdering a hundred robot butlers as Pinocchio and the loading screen saying “Now Lying” as a cartoon doll’s nose elongates.
