Played this as part of a Halloween stream, and found it to be an incredibly average indie horror game. There are some nice touches, such as how the titular Mr. Hopp changes in appearance the further you progress, and the sound design is great, especially in a game like this where you need sound to be able to predict whether it is safe to move or not. The game is reminiscent of Clock Tower in a good way, mostly.

That being said, the game is absolutely dragged down by the gameplay, which consists of extremely janky platforming over objects on the floor. Very awkward to play, though this is the first one so I can't complain too much. Maybe the sequel is an improvement.

A spiritual successor to one of my favorite games, Bloodborne, Lies of P boasts some great boss fights, aesthetics, and level design, while also boasting a story and characters that are with few exceptions, unadulterated wank.

You play as Timothee Chalamet in his breakout role as Pinocchio as he investigates and fights through a robot uprising that has overtaken the vaguely-european city of Krat, which is all well and good. Plenty of dark spooky hallways, disturbing situations, and both mechanical and biological abominations are abound. What is also abound, are aggressively annoying and pointless quips from your un-mutable cricket "companion" Gemini, who fills the shoes of Pinocchio's tradition Jiminy Cricket, albeit with the personality of the MCU's worst offenders and a tendency to ruin whatever environmental storytelling the game attempts by loudly commenting on whatever is clearly in front of me. "Ummmm, that's messed up..." He comments as I look upon a gruesome scene, unaware of the fact that I was the player have a pair of working eyeballs and a burning desire to shut him the fuck up.

Ah, and speaking of shutting up, this game is surely a treat for those individuals who deride the storytelling of the Souls games with jokes about bosses crying "Zanzibart... forgive.me...", because I'm not sure that even Zanzibart himself has the boundless forgiveness to excuse some of the completely pointless, meaningless, and bizarrely worded dialogue in this game. Unlike the little cricket bastard, nearly every other entity in this game talks like a parody of a From Software NPC, and halfway through listening to a giant insectoid priest-turned-monster lamenting how he was "greedy for gold" for the ninth time after he killed me, I began to understand why Bloodborne didn't have any of its own beastly clergy members give monologues of their own.

To say the the writing and story of the game are bizarre is one thing, but it goes deeper than that, it's outright schizophrenic and reminds me half the time of the kind of bizarre storytelling in games like Deadly Premonition. The game can't decide whether it wants to be a slick, edgy, dark action game, or a bizarre surrealist comedy where characters spout nonsense while taking themselves completely seriously. It almost feels like watching theatre, though the performance in question is not particularly good.

That being said though, the gameplay and level design definitely make this a game worth playing regardless, and once you realize the futility of scouring for an option to disable that goddamn cricket in the menus and surrender yourself to the experience, Lies of P's absurdity almost becomes charming, in that schlocky, trashy sort of way.