I appreciate some things that this game does, otherwise I would've dropped it like every other Remedy game I tried. I finished it thinking that in the end I would've rather watched an Alan Wake tv series.

When you make a narrative that strives to be very out there and meta, you should ensure that the gameplay matches the weirdness or you end up with a disconnect. That's exactly what I felt whenever the shift happens from story to gameplay.

There's nothing interesting about Remedy's approach to survival horror, in fact they watered it down in many aspects. The levels are mostly designed around linear progression, puzzles are rehashed more often than not, enemy variety is very lacking and the resource gathering is made boring by the amount of powerups that are utterly useless and the dynamic drops. There's just no flavour to the design here, nothing about the gameplay makes me recommend Alan Wake II alongside genre staples like RE or Silent Hill.

It's quite a shame, since when it comes to the storytelling I really fuck with their inspirations and I won't deny their great taste in music and visual direction. I wish I could just watch a film or series that is just an expanded version of whatever that finnish fever dream movie was in the cinema level.

Maybe one day Remedy will be brave enough to not only make their narrative weird and meta, but also the gameplay.

Not terribly interesting, you take a fromsoft game and strip it down to nothing but the combat, you get this game. Walking from boss to boss in Lies of P has got to be the most empty I've felt playing any soulslike to my memory. Combat is fine, though for this kind of hard locked focus on it to actually work you'd need the consistency of Sekiro, which Lies of P doesnt even come close to.
The fresh ideas and feeling of exploration of demon's souls and dark souls 1 seem so distant now when you realize this type of slop defines the current "soulslike" genre, though fromsoft's recent output is also partly to blame. Well, at least Laxasia was a fun boss.

Unlike RE0 this one actually doesnt suck. Enjoyable, scratches that puzzle exploration itch. Only issue I have really is the doors in the mansion, it asks too much memorization work to remember what kind of key each door requires since theyre visually identical. You end up wasting a lot of time trying out every door whenever you get a new key.
It also felt bizarre to me just how few enemies the game threw at me by the last third even though I was loaded with guns and ammo. I played Jill on normal mode though, maybe it's a different story on hard but im not interested in finding out.
If I had to choose a survival horror I'd probably still play silent hill over this, even if resident evil 1 admittedly has better level design than any SH. I just dont find managing a super small inventory all that fun, even 8 slots on Jill feels suffocating.

Pretty decent action game but with some annoying elements.

The camera is very ass sometimes and is too close to the character most of the time, camera distance adjustment would be great. Also, in a game like this where combat is 70% the focus, when the camera clips through a wall, the walls should ALWAYS go invisible. There have been way too many instances where you get pushed into a corner and the camera ends up behind a wall and you get killed cause you cant see shit.
This is not the only aspect where priorities seemed to be set aside however, there have been a few scenes where either the darkness or strong colored lighting stand in the way of motion clarity, particularly in level 3.

On a more technical level there were some noticeable issues with targetting. Having no lock on of some sort means you need to implement auto targetting and that stuff is usually never spotless and indeed it is often very annoying in sifu. You sometimes snap to a different enemy in the middle of a combo if you happened to do a move with some pushback in the middle. I also attribute issues with the Y+B finisher move not initiating while in range to the auto-targetting (could be wrong though they might be unrelated). Small nitpick but I also think default binds for back step and evade should be lb+back and lb+forward respectively, just seems more intuitive to me.

Other than that the combat design is a bit confused, im not sure why having both the parry and the evade was necessary, most of the time evading is simply the better and more consistent option. I think the defense in this game is comparable to God Hand, where you also get 3 defensive options with dodging, backroll and sidestep but in that game all of them serve a clearly defined role and dont confuse a player at the start by offering options which dont show any immediately discernible difference in end result.
Also I feel gating off moves behind a skill tree in this game was a bad move, since they reset on death. You often dont get the chance to get used to actually having the move and before you finally start using it more, you get reset. The focus attacks and situational moves are fine though.

Finally im not so sure about the overall structure of the game. It IS unique, but they deliberately chose something that will appeal to a very select few autists like me and is not all that beneficial to the overall experience. Most people will feel enough satisfaction getting beaten up once and finally passing a level, Sifu however strongly recommends replaying the levels many times to get a low amount of deaths so you dont "soft-lock" yourself in later levels. This will no doubt alienate a lot of players, and that would be fine if what was gained instead was worthwhile but I'm not conviced that trade off was worth it in this case.

Overall I think the game was fun and will satisfy any craving for a punishing action game experience. The mechanics are engaging and sound for the most part, the aesthetics have a strong identity, The animations have that all important snap and are extremely satisfying every time you perform them and the soundtrack is solid, albeit more subdued than it should be. I recommend 👍

It's all right, probably about as good as you can get as a remake.
I ended up preferring the original, it's more attractive to me. The remake has this really dark and hazy look to it with most of the game having a very elevated black level that makes the game appear desaturated. The new soundtrack is also just a bunch of white noise, the original soundtrack gave the game a certain character that this remake misses for me. I also didn't really gel with how the script and characters have changed, a lot of them come across as crass or annoying, leon and claire basically don't interact in the remake which is really odd to me. The sherry stealth part in claire's story stood out as a particularly low point for me, it's a very typical modern AAA game type deal where interactivity is essentially ignored in favour of the player having to sit out a setpiece.
Highlight for me in the remake was in the sewers, that's the area that got redone most extensively and didn't give me the feeling I'm playing an inferior looking version of a game I like. All enemy redesigns were great as well, particularly the lickers and the plants.

Against all odds I managed to finish this game. Unlike other open world games I think this one has a little more meat to its combat, so it manages to stay interesting enough to finish the main quest at least. Unfortunately the whole experience is dragged down by unnecessary busywork and tacked on mechanics that are just there to cross off the obligatory AAA open world game checklist, it makes the experience much more annoying and tedious than it should be.
It also features by far the worst character writing in a Sony first party title - that is no small feat.