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Following the logic used in my Lords of the Fallen 2023 review , I have stopped doing some older reviews in light of playing and reviewing the newer game that most questions are surrounding if they should get or start with. And Lies of P is a great one to review due to the many questions and comments about the games crushing difficulty... As a preface, I have never summoned in a Souls game, however My wife is due to give birth to our second son... Yesterday, so I summoned on the last two bosses so I could finish the story and chose the ending that purposefully had one less boss to ensure I could see one of the three endings. I fully intend to do a second playthrough without summoning and defeat that final optional boss.
Lies of P landed on 19th September with near universal credit, scoring 8 & 9's out of 10's, with the 2 biggest criticisms being 'its a little too similar to Bloodborne' and that the game difficulty is harder than most other soulslikes, to the point of being unfair. Having completed the game myself, I don't think either of these are true.
Lets start with the setting and the story, as honestly, this is one of my favourite stories in a soulslike game to date. To my knowledge, only Sekiro (and Steelrising that I have yet to play) has a story worth following through dialog and the cutscenes. Many of the other games are told through Lore (and Vaatividya) Lies of P takes the tale of Pinocchio and cleverly twists the story into something much darker, even weaving in other fairy tales, some of which almost guaranteed to be DLC / made into a sequel, and some smaller details, such as a painting by 'D Grey' The story is excellent, with my only real complaint being the final boss doesn't really make an appearance until the final few levels, and I would have liked to known a little bit more about him. I didn't care about him, which is a shame as the rest of the characters have been done so well.
The Devs have cleverly created the backdrop of this game as the city of Krat, with so much information given it feels like a character of its own. The gameplay itself is very linear, so if you poke your head around every corner you will be hard pressed to is any content or items. Some reviwers weren't a fan of this, however I liked how tightly crafted the world was, with multiple shortcuts that felt natural and brilliant to explore. It wasn't on Lords of the Fallen 2023 or Dark Souls level of shortcuts, but still can stand tall amongst the likes of Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 in level design. On top of this, while there are no secrets in the geometry, there are little treasure hunts in the form of cryptic puzzle boxes instead, and while they weren't ground breaking, I liked them. I also really liked the variety in the level design of Krat Many levels are set in the city streets (which is why I presume some people think its too similar to Bloodborne) but with a area of discarded puppet failures, a museum 'of the future' showing off the cities inventions and a factory where puppets are created...I never got bored of the backdrops myself and while, yes, Bloodborne takes place in a city... This seems to be something that is now said about any soulslike set in a city (another recent example being the city area in Remnant 2)
The next complaint people make is often surrounding the difficulty of the game, even in relation to other soulslikes and the early game is REALLY hard... but not because of the difficulty, but instead due to the lack of communication to the player.
For me, Lies of P was a game of two halves. It took me 33ish hour to complete the game's 11 chapters. 16 of those hours was getting up to and past, chapter 4. And honestly most of the boss fights in those early chapters could be cheesed very easily... or I hated due to there 'unfair difficulty' Then 'the combat clicked' (i.e. I understood I was playing wrong due to how the dev communicated there combat system worked) so changed how I played and suddenly was having a blast.
This may seem a strange complaint. But communication really is key here. In the demo of the game, I hear dodge rolling was awful, with no I-Frames (I never played it myself, but this is what I have heard) the tutorial of the game reflects this dodging system. With three separate boxes explaining parrying at three different points, and not one mentioning the dodge roll. The first time the games systems mentions it it on the skill tree, with a skill to improve it as the base level is pretty bad. This was obviously the original intent, as I-frames were added post demo. However parrying here is so much harder than the game most similar to it, Sekiro, due to 2 changes. The first, is that you only get 8 frames to time your parry. This is 30% quicker than Sekiro's 12 frames. The second change makes this timing even harder, when you click the button to parry in Sekiro, it's instant. In Lies of P, you must wait for the parry animation to raise the weapon. Its only a second delay, but its a slight timing difference to learn on each and every weapon to take into account, on top of the roughly 30% less time and learning the bosses move set.
Saying parrying reliably isn't true, many people have mastered the system and can beat the game on level 1 using parrying ONLY... this system alone however does push the game into the realms of being 'too hard' to be fun, some may say 'git gud' but the devs changing this means they agree with me here. The things the devs forgot to do, was change the tutorials to account for that change, meaning many players will listen to the devs, and play the game 'wrong' and struggle to the point of not having a good time. If it was just me, I would discount this as a me problem. But out of the 4 people in my friend group 3 of us all made the same mistake. The second we started adding dodging into our gameplay, we all had and easier and a much more fun time.
Even if this was clear, I DO think it's to hard... I personally think they should make parrying iframes closer to Sekiro OR, get rid of chip damage to allow for mistakes OR add a P organ upgrade to increase the parry window while decreasing the stagger damage to aid players.
Any one of these, paired with way less delayed attacks and Lies of P would probably have been my fav souls combat of all time. But instead, I didn't like the parrying. The risk was too high and dodging is infinitely more easy.
Another, smaller, less annoying point of the devs not communicating very well is with the levelling system. When you leave the starting area, you can level up at the stargazer (Bonfire) however you can't on the second one you come across as it actually requires you to speak to a person in the hub area. But the second bonfire appears before her. I genuinely thought the bonfire was bugged, as he game had taught me at the last checkpoint that these were places you can level up. I don't care if I need to go to the hub, or can level up at each bonfire. But usually From Software is so good at communicating everything through gameplay mechanics that it really stood out to me when it failed, and the parrying/dodging mistake could have made me drop the game I was getting so frustrated at some points as I didn't understand what i was doing wrong, as I was playing in the manner seemingly intended by the devs.
Finally, despite the lack of communication I do want to praise the devs on something I think they have done better then From software themselves... And that's the games stability and optimisation, and that said knowing I have never had a crash on a from software game before.... But the game runs AMAZING. The steam deck can play thing thing between High- Ultra settings at a stable 58-60 FPS. Its possibly the best optimised game I have played on the steam deck EVER and I only had 1 glitch where I rolled out of an elevator and died. This achievement is even more impressive as its the studios first game (second if you include a port they did of another game)
Ultimately, I agree with the 8/10 reviews on a technical level. Its a fantastic game, with a great story, atmosphere and boss designs... But for me, it's probably a 7.. 7.5. as I know a lot of people, even soulslike vets who know to listen to the devs on how to play, will end up getting annoyed as they can't understand what they are doing wrong.
Edit- I forgot to mention but I REALLY like that your souls drop OUTSIDE the boss door, and wish FromSoft would do this. I like the risk in levels, but don't enjoy it as part of the boss encounter, I would rather focus on the boss.