Available on: PC, Mac, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Played it on: PC
Played it for: 35 hours
This game is an enigma. A flawed, frustrating, beautiful, deep, janky piece of art. Where to even begin...
Let's start with the positives. Lies of P is absolutely stellar when it comes to the realization of its main setting, the fictional city of Krat. Based on a visual motif of industrial revolution Paris and London, Krat is a dirty, fog-choked, messy city. Many Souls-likes fall flat in creating a hub that you could imagine as a populated, bustling town. It's common to traverse empty, body-laden streets in these sorts of titles, but few actually achieve something that is believably livable. Elden Ring's capital city of Leyndell comes to mind, which is striking and awe-inspiring at first glance, but traversing its streets still feels like a video game level that only exists as a playground for the combat. Krat goes far beyond that. Some districts offer dense apartments, others detailed shop windows still filled with glitzy goods that are now meaningless in the post-apocalypse, while still others boast theater venues that could support actual stage plays. This is Bloodborne's Victorian Yharnam, but given a homely splash of Yakuza's Kamurocho, and it is excellent. I have never played in another Souls-like setting that has felt this complete.
The characters, too, are nothing short of perfect. The entire cast is dynamic, emotional, flawed, and so very human. Some of our misfits live exclusively at your base of Hotel Krat for the entire game. Others are collected from the streets, given a home and safe respite from the dangers of the city. One of the critical mistakes that FromSoftware continues to make in its titles is to give you an interesting and often awesome supporting cast, and then kill off 97% of them over the course of their questlines. For me, this makes it very hard to care about the outcome of anything. Not so in Lies of P. The biggest thing that kept me going in this game was the cast. I actively wanted to keep them safe, see them be happy, and end the plight of the city so they'd be ok. Even characters I didn't like all that much, like the eccentric inventor Venigni, ended up quite thoroughly endearing themselves to me by the end of the game.
This also lends itself nicely to the main themes of the game. The familiar tale of Pinocchio is about how lying is harmful, and you have to be brave and tell the truth. But Lies of P takes that familiar framework and flips it, making the compelling case that lying is actually what makes us human. The game is laden with messages about it. When P dies, instead of the classic Souls-like, "You Died," screen, you get the message, "Lie or Die." When fast traveling to a new area, the loading bar is labeled, "Now Lying," with a graphic of P's nose growing as the bar fills up to 100%. Characters constantly remind you that the thing that separates puppets from humans is their prime directive, the Grand Covenant. The Fourth Law is that puppets cannot tell a lie. But P is special. He can.
The first lie you tell in the game is a necessary one, it gets you past Hotel Krat's security system so that you can progress the game. After that, the lies are up to you. You can be entirely truthful to all the people you encounter around the city, but... maybe you shouldn't be. White lies can help people feel better, in their final moments as they're plagued by debilitating illness. You might lie to be polite, because you're always expected to tell a lady she looks beautiful. You might lie to protect a friend's feelings when you know the truth isn't really worth telling them. Later in the game, you might hear something that nobody else can, and it reveals a truth so dark that it's simply not worth spreading. And the more you lie, the more human P becomes. He begins to look more human, his hair begins to grow, he starts playing music and experiencing true life. It's powerful, and it's complicated, and the game adds tremendous weight to your conscience as it progresses. But the ability to wrestle with the truth at all, that's human.
The soundtrack, too, is amazing. It is tense when it needs to be, it is quiet when it needs to be, and it excels in crafting a multi-faceted atmosphere. The records you collect from NPC questlines are somber, pining, hopeful, and full of soul. I loved listening to them every time I came back to Hotel Krat to resupply, level up, and upgrade gear. It is difficult to describe how much they add to the game, and, like lying, listening to these records will also make P more human, blending them into the game as something you are rewarded for listening to.
So, from the artistic side, this game is a marvel. It has weighty themes, fantastic art, marvelous attention to detail, and presents a cast of characters that is easily the best of any Souls-like I've ever played, even including FromSoftware's titles. So why on earth am I giving it a 6?
Unfortunately, the game only has so many positives, and this is where the experience will sharply differ between players. The meat and potatoes of any video game is not its set dressing. It is the moment-to-moment gameplay. The level design, the combat, the challenges. And these elements are where Lies of P sharply falls short.
To address the level design first, it is linear. Incredibly linear. This isn't the end of the world, I'm a bigger fan of linear games than open world games, but this game is a straight hallway from beginning to end. There are a few areas that are a bit more dungeon-esque with extra hallways and shortcuts back to the checkpoints, but for the most part you are never going to explore a hidden pathway for more than one extra room here and there. And in a setting with as much detail as Krat, this was a bit of a letdown. But it pales in comparison to my experience with the combat.
The combat is a bizarre mix of elements from other Souls titles like Sekiro, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, and even the first Dark Souls that have difficulty melding together. It has Sekiro's parry mechanic, where perfectly timed blocks will damage the enemy's poise meter until their health bar starts blinking white. Then you can hit them with a charged heavy attack to actually stagger them, like you would have to do for Bloodborne's visceral attacks, in order to get a, "fatal attack." But despite the name, these attacks are far from fatal. They deal a decent amount of damage, but it's not nearly as rewarding as Sekiro where it could wipe out a full health bar. The timing window for these perfect blocks is also extremely tight, far tighter than Sekiro, and the vast majority of enemies employ frustrating attack delays in their movesets that will be followed by a blindingly fast attack that both launches and hits in 3-5 frames. I felt as though I had no choice but to trudge through fully memorizing each boss's individual attack patterns and delays in order to parry them, since the delays are deeply unintuitive and the actual attack launch is too fast to allow a reactive button press.
Speaking of delayed attacks, this was, in my opinion, one of Elden Ring's greatest weaknesses, and it was violently frustrating to see it replicated here to an even greater degree. Some bosses would lift up their arm to attack and hold it for a full second or two before swinging. Some enemies would raise their weapon, take three, four, or five staggering steps forward, and then swing. Some enemies would jump in the air, hang there for what feels like an eternity, and then slam down with the force and speed of a meteor. For that last one, they also have full tracking while in the air, I've watched enemies jump up and then rotate 90-180 degrees to perfectly track me before suddenly rocketing down. It not only looks wrong, it also feels wrong. The telegraphing in this game is in very dire need of a full rework, and it's compounded by enemy health values.
This doesn't become so apparent until later in the game, but elite enemies are absolute damage sponges. They also hit brutally hard, often able to kill you in 2-3 attacks, which happened to me quite often. I struggled to avoid moves where they would hold an attack while walking forward and perfectly tracking every movement I made, giving me no ability to avoid their sudden supersonic blow. But rather than being glass cannons, they also exhaustively dominate encounters with huge health pools and unbelievable defenses. In some rare elite encounters, I would be beating on them relentlessly, proc'ing status effects, finally staggering them for a fatal attack, and then still they would still have a quarter of their health bar left. Combat made most areas feel like a slog as I doggedly pushed through encounter after encounter of these mechanics.
And speaking of slog, this game has a veneer of speed thanks to how fast attacks come at you when they do finally launch, but the rate at which attacks come out is even slower than Dark Souls 1, which itself is the slowest of FromSoft's lineup. One boss that comes to mind is a big swamp creature that you fight a little over halfway through the game. One of its signature patterns is three huge slamming attacks. There is a full five seconds between each of these swings. It's long enough to get in a hit or two with a speedy weapon, but not really enough to safely commit with a big weapon, and adds to the bizarre pacing of combat overall. These sorts of unintuitive patterns were very common, and lead me to the conclusion that speedy weapons were the objectively correct choice for engaging with the game. Every time I tried using bigger weapons, I felt like the game punished me very harshly because I couldn't snag good hits in the time between enemy attacks, and even when I did they weren't doing nearly enough damage or poise damage.
This leads into my final issue with the game. Most Souls-likes have some kind of special mechanic that separates them from the pack. Mortal Shell has the titular shells, bodies you inhabit that take the place of your usual gear and stat upgrades. Lords of the Fallen (2024) has the umbral world mechanic, a scary place you enter upon death that gives you an extra shot at survival, but sometimes must be entered on purpose for progression or challenge areas. Blasphemous has its Metroid-vania exploration mechanics woven into its questlines and combat powers. So what does Lies of P bring? Weapon building.
Almost every weapon in the game can be disassembled into a blade and handle, and you can swap these around to create a weapon unique to you. The handle governs the moveset, the blade governs the damage, status effects, and how fast it can swing. In theory, this sounds great. In practice, this means that no blade can deal a ton more damage than others because you could just unscrew the greatsword blade and put it on a dagger handle and break the game. So as I experimented with weapons, I found that big things were swinging slower... and that was it. It was still taking 3 hits to kill rank and file enemies, but speedy weapons could do it three times faster, and the damage values simply weren't different enough on bosses to make big weapons worthwhile. By the halfway point, I found no value in anything bigger than a one-handed sword because I could deal damage (and apply status effects) so much faster simply by hitting more often and being able to capitalize on openings.
Bigger weapons also didn't deal nearly enough poise damage to be worthwhile either. I found that I was still getting fatal attacks just as fast, or sometimes even faster by using small weapons because they could hit so often. The weapon crafting is a neat idea, but it seems to have added an unnecessary burden on the development team that they ultimately couldn't solve. If they have the time in a DLC or sequel, a great fix to this would be to limit what blades can be attached to what handles, allowing big weapons much more breathing room to shine and allowing Neowiz to appropriately crank up the damage and poise damage to compensate for their slow movesets.
Ultimately what this all created is a game that feels like it was overdesigned. It can't have full Sekiro parry-and-kill mechanics because we want it to feel like Bloodborne, which is largely where we're borrowing our visual aesthetics. It can't have Bloodborne's parry-and-visceral-attack mechanics because we want players to work for their staggers with the Sekiro parry. No blade can be that much stronger than any other blade because we want this weapon combo system and we can't let players get too wild with what they make. It can't feel too easy because it's a Souls-like, so we have to include extremely delayed attacks so that the game feels much harder than it actually is. It is a game that was pulled in too many directions, and fails to commit to any of them.
These are the novice steps of a development team who are just breaking into the Souls-like genre, so I don't want to be too harsh. Especially when other teams have made games like Thymesia and Mortal Shell, which are maybe a tenth the size of what Neowiz has created here. A good portion of their achievement is tremendous, and I think they should feel proud of the majority of this game. The aesthetics, the story, the music, the themes, all of these are beacons that other games would do well to aspire to. But the combat is the biggest issue here. As I was reading through negative reviews, players who struggled with the game almost universally cited the unrewarding and tedious combat as their biggest sticking point, which was certainly my experience too. I did leave this game being happy that I played it, but it was a test of will to stick through to the end, and I did so only because everything else was done so exquisitely well. My biggest hope is that Neowiz can use this as a jumping off point for what could be a hugely successful career, provided they can take some appropriate lessons, iterate their designs, and double down on what makes this game shine. And I absolutely think that they can do that.
