If you read my impressions piece of the Lies of P demo from earlier this year you’ll know that I had been as pleasantly surprised by it as anyone could be after being told it’s a soulslike based on Pinocchio. I had some concerns from the demo with things like responsiveness and resource generation but overall I thought it was a game with a lot of promise and quickly jumped up to my second most anticipated game of the rest of 2023. I wasn’t able to get to it on release (thanks to Armored Core 6 and Baldur’s Gate 3) but I’ve finally managed to plow through it with all the expectations that a game in Dark Souls’ shadow can generate. And I still can’t decide how well it stuck the landing.
The story of Lies of P is if you took faintest dashes of the Pinocchio story (Pinocchio, Geppetto, Jiminy, and lying) and dumped a big bucket of Bloodborne on it. Geppetto is the inventor behind an entire city’s worth of robot puppets that have gone rogue and killed thousands of people, Jiminy is a glorified AI tour guide called “Gemini,” Pinocchio is never called Pinocchio and is somehow proficient in all manner of weaponry, and lying is a mechanic the game has you use to complete quests and unlock certain game endings. The world is a dark, scary place full of rampaging puppets designed to be butlers, chimney sweeps, soldiers, etc., but are now turning their candlestick holders and guns on anything that isn’t metal… and you. After initially setting out to save Geppetto your objectives eventually expand to trying to stop the puppet rebellion and whoever was behind them going crazy in the first place, while also navigating a mysterious plague that is slowly turning anyone with it into stone. There’s some hints about the mysterious origins of the “Ergo” that powers the puppets and you’ll encounter “Stalkers” that are essentially the Hunters from Bloodborne but they’re all in animal-themed hats, which combined with all the dead/crazy people in a gothic/Victorian sort of world really lays the visual comparisons to the main reason to own a Playstation 4 on thick.
Lies of P’s combat is a strange hybrid of Sekiro and Bloodborne, and unfortunately the more I played it the less I felt like the combat actually “worked” the way anyone would have wanted that fusion to play out. Funnily enough with all the aesthetic Bloodborne comparisons the game actually plays more like Sekiro, so I’ll cover the Sekiro stuff first and then go back for the more minor Bloodborne features. Lies of P is a game that wants you to focus on parrying, staggering, and “perfect blocks” more than dodging, much like Sekiro, so you’ll find the dodge relatively ineffective against the majority of enemies whereas the game encourages you to block frequently. The catch here is that, unlike Sekiro, there is no “poise” system to punish you for failing to perfectly block attacks so instead if you don’t block an attack at the exact right moment you’ll still take damage like the worst shields in Dark Souls. Worse than that is even a perfect block still reduces your stamina, so even the most precise defense is not unbreakable, unlike in Sekiro where you could theoretically block forever if you parried perfectly every time.
This is the same system that was in the demo, and for the first ten or so hours I was willing to put up with it. Hard games are hard for a reason, after all, and I was waiting for the Genichiro-style boss fight like in Sekiro where I’d finally get a feel for this hyper-exacting form of defense. And I kept waiting. Along the way I did get better and started to take advantage of the relatively unique feature Lies of P brings to benefit perfect parries: weapon damage. Lies of P is obsessed with weapon durability, both for the player and enemies, and if you perfectly block an attack against an armed enemy you will slowly start to damage their weapon. Do it enough and it breaks, leaving them with a broken blade or even just a blunt stick which reduces their range and damage by about as much as seems reasonable… but not as much as you might expect. Call me crazy but I think that if you destroy an opponent’s weapon they shouldn’t get the special elemental damage or the ability to send you flying through the air just as easily as if the weapon were intact, but maybe I’m asking too much. Perfect parries and dealing damage will also lead to enemies entering a vulnerable state that will make them stunned if you hit them with a charged melee attack, but until you get used to the animations of the enemies you’re fighting (or you get a weapon with a good charge animation) often this felt more like a bait than anything else, as you make yourself vulnerable while you take the second to charge up your attack rather than in From Software games where breaking an enemy’s poise is its own reward.
Overall it all felt less clean than Sekiro, with the unnecessary extra step to take advantage of enemies with damaged poise and a complete lack of any sort of visual indicator as to how you were progressing in damaging their poise OR their weapons. It was around the halfway point in the game where I realized why the perfect blocking mechanics weren’t landing, and it was because you’re constantly fighting giant monsters for bosses. In Sekiro you’re almost always fighting enemies blade on blade, which makes the hit boxes and animations much more of a coordinated experience. The worst fights in Sekiro were the fights against enemies like the Demon of Hatred that were just monsters flailing around where the camera couldn’t get a good look at them while their hit boxes were overly generous at best, and that’s all Lies of P gives you for boss fights until the very end. Against most regular enemies the parry system felt fine, but as soon as you stepped into a boss arena and were inevitably fighting something five to ten times your size, suddenly the difference between a parry and chip damage was much more of a gray area. And that was before you factor in the bosses that have multi-hit attacks with one swing of their arm, which by definition were impossible to perfectly block every one of those hits.
The multi-hit attacks are the other issue with Lies of P’s combat, as so many of the bosses have amazingly spammy rapid-fire attack chains that aren’t really any fun to deal with given your lack of a great dodge or a true block button. These are the worst kind of speedy attacks too, where the enemies not only have rapid combo chains that don’t seem to end but also have the added benefit of the game giving them an auto-track while they’re doing the attacks. No matter how much distance you think you might given yourself mid-combo the enemy will still somehow have just enough reach to get to you, and might I remind you that even if you are doing perfect blocks on all of these attacks you’re still losing stamina for every one. So you have a dodge that won’t get you to safety and a finite blocking resource against combo attacks that can be six to ten hits long, which I’m sure you can imagine rarely ends well for our friend Pinocchio, especially since the game’s responsiveness isn’t on Sekiro’s level either; though it is much better than it was in the demo, to the developers’ credit.
The Bloodborne side of the gameplay comes from the game’s own version of BB’s “rally” system and just the overall tone set by the game’s animations. In Bloodborne when you’d take damage you could regain a certain amount of it by quickly attacking the enemy back, which encouraged a more aggressive playstyle than previous Souls games. In Lies of P there is a similar mechanic but the health that you can rally back is only generated if you block an attack without perfectly parrying it, which feels less good for two reasons: first it feels a bit condescending, like the game is giving you an alternative treat for failing to grasp its mechanics properly, and second since you lose stamina with every block, failed or not, you don’t have as much stamina after a boss’ insane combo chain to get back in there an get your health back. So while it’s a way for players that are less good at the perfect parries to push through the game, the parry system itself is so half-baked that it doesn’t work as well as the developers probably wanted it to.
What does work is the game’s overall feeling of brutality and style through Pinocchio’s animations. One of my favorite parts of Bloodborne was how confidently your character would do things, from casually pushing through the fog on the way to a boss to jabbing themselves with the blood vials, and Lies of P brings a similar energy to the table. Pinocchio has a very quick “crushing” animation for his healing, a very cool animation for repairing weapons on his arm, and the most bad ass “slide down a ladder” animation I’ve ever seen in the genre, and along with other details like Pinocchio’s arm sparking whenever he forces something open gives a real power to the character. The game’s finishing moves on stunned enemies are also similarly brutal, but unlike other games like Nioh and Sekiro each weapon only has one finishing move so you’ll see the same animation regardless of the size of enemy or where you’re striking them.
The game also tries to give you a feeling of power through the weapons, which for the most part are pretty interesting from a design standpoint. Rather than just having the stereotypical swords/spears/axes the game embraces the world it has created and has many of the weapons be jury-rigged amalgamations of whatever the desperate humans fighting for their lives could find. There’s more than a few swords but they’re occasionally made out of butcher knives or printing press paper cutters, while your spears are street signs and your hammers are this universe’s equivalent of car batteries on pipes, and alongside this is the game’s relatively unique feature where you can break apart weapons and combine their blades with different handles to make entirely new weapons. These designs and features not only help with the atmosphere but also make the weapons more interesting to discover, since much like Bloodborne the weapons aren’t “constrained” by conventional principles and as such you could find anything in the boxes you open or merchants you visit. A few of them even transform which further adds to the Bloodborne comparisons, though those that do typically only do momentarily for heavy/special attacks or occasionally just lengthening their handle at the cost of some energy (which you then lose upon death).
The ability to swap blades and handles not only gives weapons different attack animations but also is a way to mix and match the “Fable Arts” special abilities that are contained within each blade and handle. These are generally powerful attacks or buffs that you can spend your Fable resource to activate, ranging from a multi-hit super attack to temporarily perfectly blocking every attack that comes your way, all dependent on which weapon components you want to bring with you into battle. Fable, as I complained in my impressions, is not a static resource that you have by default and just need to recharge after using, but rather it’s an energy that you lose when you die (you can get it back along with your lost experience once you pick it up where you died) and gain far too slowly for my liking by attacking enemies. After I switched to a heavier weapon I discovered that some weapons gain Fable faster than others, which led to an interesting wrinkle in the heavy vs light weapon debate that rages inside me while most of the rest of the Souls community has agreed that heavy weapons are the way to go in the genre. For me I tend to like having light/medium weapons so I can get in more than one hit when a boss is open (plus there isn’t the three hour wind-up time to start a swing) but Lies of P rather aggressively pushes you towards heavier weapons with not only higher blocking percentages and faster Fable gain, but also the higher damage from said weapons means that when you fail to perfectly parry an attack you can get more health back quicker from less attacks through the rally system. The only trade off from the extra weight is slower movement and stamina regeneration, but certain items can help with that in a pinch, so if you are going to play Lies of P I’d recommend finding a heavier weapon you really like, if that wasn’t your inclination already.
But Lies of P brings more to the table than cool weapons and poorly designed blocking mechanics. As I mentioned in my impressions piece there’s a surprising amount of adjustments to the soulslike “formula” that you could argue are all improvements for the better, as though the developers weren’t just in a rush to make a soulslike but instead wanted to actually move the genre forward. Before I get into that though I just want to take a second to give them a big accolade for including the ability to quit the game at any time and restart where you left off. So many other soulslikes (like the ones by Team Ninja) just respawn you at the last checkpoint every time you quit, which seems like an oversight in games that can be such a prolonged slog. Lies of P’s adjustments start with little touches that everyone would probably agree are warranted, such as weapons repairing automatically whenever you rest at a stargazer (the bonfires of Lies of P) and the stargazers also showing you the locations of optional objectives you can complete or characters you can talk to. Souls games have long tried to find ways to show you that you have things to do in your hub/optional areas so players don’t miss out on content, and this quaint solution is absolutely a step in the right direction. The next little tweak is somewhat similar to Bloodborne with character outfits not weighing anything, letting the player Fashion Souls to their heart’s content and reserving the sort of defensive traits that are usually on soulslike armor to unseen equipment instead. This one is less of a solid execution, as unlike other soulslikes you only have two kinds of clothing in Lies of P (body and head) rather than the four or five you might see in other games in the genre, but I appreciate the effort to let players dress however they want.
After these minor positive changes come a few that might be considered a little more controversial if you’re a Souls veteran that has a more conservative take on how the genre should behave. Most of these are designed around making Lies of P slightly more forgiving for players that might have a harder time with the game, such as lost experience points and Fable appearing outside of a boss’ arena rather than trapped inside of it. Even if you die with said resources still laying on the ground you won’t actually lose all of it forever like you would in other soulslikes, and instead you just lose a percentage like in Shovel Knight and then the new pile is created where you died again. A big one that I personally really like is that once your primary healing item (the equivalent to the flask from most other soulslikes) is fully consumed you can regenerate up to one charge by attacking enemies, which gives players a reward if they suddenly “get good” without any healing items and can make seemingly lost causes when exploring or fighting bosses into great clutch moments that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. It’s undeniably generous but I think the fact that you need to still be actively fighting enemies to earn back the right to heal yourself again is a fine trade-off, though not one I expect to see in other soulslikes in the near future. Another change I like is that boss weapons are actually pretty good, compared to Dark Souls where they’re generally high investment for limited payoff in some grand metaphor for the decay of the previous age. Beating bosses should give you suitable rewards, so I think it’s nice that you can get cool greatswords, scythes, etc from beating bosses, even though one or two of them might be a little overtuned.
While it’s clear with these adjustments to the soulslike formula that the developers for Lies of P spent a lot of time looking into the genre, it’s also clear they may have gotten a little too focused on a few individual aspects that have lead to some questionable design choices. For starters there’s a complete over-reliance in the level design when it comes to the classic “surprise you thought you were safe” moments in soulslikes, those scenes where you see an item on a table or a bridge you have to cross when suddenly an enemy hiding around the corner stabs you or the bridge falls out from under you. The first dozen times these happen to you is fair enough, after all it’s the beginning of a soulslike and they have to teach you to be on your toes, but by hour thirty when there are still enemies on ledges ready to shove you into a trap or the bridge to the chest across the way collapses under you it all starts getting a little tiresome. Following along the “what else are Souls games known for” list are bosses with multiple phases, generally triggered by getting an enemy to half health or popping a health bubble in Sekiro. Lies of P LOVES having bosses with a second phase, but outside of the first few this second phase isn’t dictated by hitting half health but instead each boss is essentially two bosses in one, transforming into a completely different enemy once you get through their first health bar. This is a rare event in From Software’s Souls games, generally limited to cornerstone bosses, final bosses, or headless monkeys but in Lies of P from the fourth boss on it’s essentially just what happens with every boss. It makes the usual surprising, exciting moments where a boss turns it up to eleven in these games rather dull when everyone is doing it, and also makes the boss fights even more grueling/tedious because now you have to learn two completely different movesets for every boss, with of course very little time to learn the second phase since you have to get through the first phase every time.
Outside of over-indulging in souslike tropes there’s just some strange design and even presentation decisions in Lies of P. The game is full of classic soulslike shortcuts that help you get back to your previous stargazer, but more than once they’re right next to a new stargazer which with the ability to teleport between stargazers means the shortcut was completely pointless. Some other shortcuts lead to strange areas you’d never want to shortcut back into, like one around the middle of the game that just opens a door right into a pack of enemies. There’s also a lot of awkward in-game text and some strange dialogue as well, possibly due to the game being made by a South Korean team so we’re suffering from localization issues. Several items in the game, from a magical cube to your robot arm abilities, aren’t properly described by the in-game directions on how to use them, and there’s something especially weird with the game’s ability unlock system where the game makes it sound like unlocking multiple skills in the same tree with give you a bonus… but never does. Add on characters thanking you for doing things you haven’t done or acting like you have some big choice to make when you really don’t, and it gives the whole game an occasionally janky, unpolished feeling that it absolutely doesn’t deserve. Sure the game suffers from a little slowdown during a few especially fast moments and there’s some questionable responsiveness to the controls at times, but other than that the game looks great, sounds great (the voice acting is really good across the board), and only glitched out on me once when an enemy fell through the floor before I finished killing it. It’s just in these little moments where you wonder “why did they say that” or “why doesn’t this work the way they said it would” that you see some rough edges.
I had really high hopes for Lies of P but with all the issues in the combat system not quite hitting the mark and the boss design relying too much on massive attack chains and second phases, I find myself feeling rather glum about it. I haven’t played many non-From Software soulslikes outside of Team Ninja’s efforts with Nioh and Wo Long, so when I see people saying that Lies of P is the closest outside teams have gotten to capturing the feeling of From Software’s titles, I believe them (no offense intended to the twelve people that like The Surge). That being said Lies of P is missing the pacing and that last little bit of design insight that pushes From Software’s games over the top, so I’d call it more “ a good effort” than a crowning achievement in the genre. The developers have said that the game’s success is going to at least lead into some DLC, and the post-credit scene implies they have some crazy ideas for sequels, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they take another stab at it before the end of the decade and give us something truly remarkable. All the pieces are there, they just need to finally push it into place. As for a recommendation, if you really liked Sekiro to the point where you played it without the Kuro’s Charm and enjoyed fighting the Demon of Hatred, you might like Lies of P too. If you hated Sekiro’s emphasis on parrying because you weren’t any good at it then you should stay far away, but if you liked the parrying and wished you could have more weapon variety, you might enjoy what Lies of P has to offer. For everyone else I’d say just go play Sekiro if you haven’t already, since the combat flow is relatively the same and Wolf can actually block things effectively.
