Sorry, this review is a LONG one. This game was long enough to have a lot of content to write about, not too long like a massive open world game where a lot of content is forgettable, and it’s also a part of one of the most beloved genres currently with many games to make comparisons and parallels to. I do put a TL;DR at the end, but if you want an in depth review that goes over the pros and cons I noticed in this game, enjoy the read.

This was a game I was really excited to play. While Bloodborne was my least favorite of the FromSoftware (FS) games to play, visually it was easily the most beautiful. Lies of P looked to be very similar to it and it hooked me in instantly. Tie that with the story being about Pinocchio, and I was all in. Taking a familiar "happy" story and giving it a much more dark and depressing tone is something I have a bit of a weak spot for. The icing on top was that this was essentially a first major release from an indie studio that looked like they actually could handle what they were trying to do. I love rooting for an underdog or looking at a new up and comer. And I would say they did a great job.

I won't try to make TOO many direct comparisons to FS games in the review, but there is obvious reasons why I will do it some. That and apparently the studio was making comparisons themselves so I don't feel as bad. I’ll try to get most of them out of the way first. Nearly all of the "Soulsborne" (SB) games use Dark Souls as the foundation, and this game does that as well. I-frames when rolling, killing enemies gives you a resource that's both a level up currency as well as general purchasing currency, dying drops it all, to get it back you must successfully make the trip back to where you died, you are given limited healing items, etc. etc. All of the basic mechanics that most people think of as being very Dark Souls are in Lies of P as well. It then takes the world aesthetic as well as the UI interface that Bloodborne has. It also has the mechanic of regaining health by attacking enemies. Lastly, I haven't played Sekiro yet so I can't talk about all the mechanics Lies of P might have taken from it, but I do know Sekiro has an emphasis on parrying in combat and boy howdy do they do the same in this game.

While those are the mechanics that it took from FS games, the question is did it do it well. I would say yes, and actually better overall in my opinion. Which should be expected, the FS games are 8-12 years old. I would hope a game released on average a decade after the games they were inspired by, would polish up the mechanics a bit. In nearly all FS games if you die to a boss, you drop your souls/echos/whatever wherever you died in the boss arena. In Lies of P you drop your Eros outside the arena. This is actually really nice. Nearly everyone on any subsequent boss attempt would B line for their souls and THEN begin fighting the boss. This only resulted in at best wasting some time before actually playing, or at worst eating up a heal. Placing them outside the arena so you can get them and immediately focus on fighting the boss each attempt was a REALLY nice QOL change. In Bloodborne, when hit by an enemy if you responded with an attack quick enough, you'd get back some of the health you lost. This is a cool mechanic that incentivized an offensive play style, but in my experience the window was way too narrow, and if an enemy was chaining attacks the mechanic was essentially useless. The end result from my perspective was a mechanic that taunted you with potential health returns but never really worked or was worth going for. It was just a dead mechanic I ignored entirely after the first 10 attempts. Lies of P does a much better job in my opinion. Now if you get hit, you lose health and can't get it back. But if you BLOCK a hit, you can get it back. This was nice since if you're blocking you're usually in a position to return blows when the enemy stops. It was also cool because it wasn't a one way thing, enemies have a similar mechanic making it a 2 way street. Like I said I still haven't played Sekiro so I can't talk about the changes/improvements to mechanics taken from that game. Overall, the result of these minor changes was a game that had an excellent skeleton and structure through polished mechanics. The ingredients to make a good game were there, it was up to how those pieces were put together.

While the game isn't perfect and I have my gripes, I enjoyed the game a lot overall and have a lot of positive things to say about it so let's start with those. First, I really like the weapon assembling system and how you can mix and match parts. While this game has a lot that's unique going on in it, most of it can be traced back to, or is an off shoot of a mechanic that exists, in a pre existing SB game. This is the one true blue original self defining mechanic I think this game has about it. Nearly every weapon you get in the game can be broken down into two parts, the blade and the handle. The handle has the weapon scaling attributes (if it benefits most from say a strength build or a dexterity build), the actual moveset of a weapon (The swings animations and combos), as well as one half of the weapon's Fable Arts (Special moves). The blade/headpiece on the other hand is what's actually upgraded at the in game's blacksmith, it contributes the other half of the Fable Arts offering a second special to choose from, as well as deciding the range of your attacks since you could have a meager dagger at the end of your handle, or an enormous axe head. These factors that can be mixed and matched offer a lot of player autonomy to create a weapon that fits their unique needs for combat. And to add on to all of this customization, there are ~10 "specialty" weapons (Usually boss weapons). These are weapons that can't be broken down into two pieces to be recombined like all others, but offer some unique Fable Arts, heavy hits, look flashy visually or while attacking, and so on. There's an absurd amount of weapon variety and customization to this system and it’s wonderful. One last thing about the weapons in this game, most SB games have a “weapon degradation” system. Eventually a weapon will break and you have to spend resources of some sort to repair it. In this game, instead of spending resources to fix your weapon or having it happen slowly over time as an almost background hidden mechanic, this is a front and center mechanic that adds another thing to juggle during fights. Your weapon has a durability meter that’s present at all times and things like hitting enemies, blocking attacks, and status afflictions lower it. The lower it is, the less damage you do. To repair it, you simply pull out the weapon grinder, and use it to sharpen your weapon mid fight. To fully repair a weapon from 0-100 it only takes about ~6 straight seconds. It’s not a long time generally speaking, but during a boss fight 6 uninterrupted seconds is hard to come by and could be used to attack instead. It becomes a balancing act of do you let the meter nearly empty then repair, or repair in small increments all through the fight. I prefer this system since it doesn’t drain resources, but also adds a small layer of multi-tasking to the fights.

As for combat, normally in SB games when you run out of healing items, you're shit out of luck until you sit at the game's equivalent of a bonfire. But this game has a fun mechanic where when you use them all up, every hit on an enemy builds up a meter that when maxed gives you one more Pulse Cell to heal. While this sounds like it makes the game easy, it builds the meter at a slow enough rate that it doesn’t feel like the game is just handing heals to you. I love this because it incentivizes aggressive gameplay instead of just running. And for boss fights it can be hype as hell to be on the edge of death but getting enough hits in to get one more heal to keep you alive. On the topic of bosses, the bosses in this game are great. The designs are really varied and badass. Tons of variety visually as well as attack patterns and mechanics. And out of all the bosses, I only felt like 1 attack was pure BS. Everything else felt completely fair. (Although 1 boss in particular felt like BS in its entirety but I'll get to that later.) One small and easily overlooked QOL addition about the bosses that I loved was the indicator for a fatal blow. In a lot of SB games, if you bring a boss to its knees, you can go up to them and get a critical attack for huge damage. Problem is, while it's usually right at their head, it isn't always. The positioning can vary slightly. And more often than not, when you hit them with any attack that doesn’t trigger the critical attack, it makes them get back up which means you lose your chance for the meaty extra damage. Lies of P does this wonderful thing where not only is there a little glowy circle where you need to stand, but also a clear indicator on the enemy when you enter the right position that tells you "hit your attack button now and you'll get the fatal blow." It's wonderful and I hope it becomes a standard in all SB games. (Also as an aside, the animation and impact of fatal blows feels SO damn meaty. They feel like you hit them like a truck. There’s so much impact when you do them and they feel SO damn good every time you do them.)

Next are the quests. Quests in SB games tend to be very cryptic. Not just in what you need to do, but also if you forget about a quest, tough shit. The game doesn't hand-hold at all. And whether you like that or not is 100% a matter of preference and not a design decision that is simply good or bad. But because Lies of P is fairly linear, I like that when you get an item for a quest, or unlock unique dialogue for an NPC, or when main story progression unlocks a unique interaction, the game tells you on the teleport screen. While I do wish this function was a toggle option somewhere in the settings, the creation of this function is a welcome one. While talking about side quests, the Cryptic vessels in this game are great. As I said, Lies of P is pretty Linear so you don’t have much reason to go back to previous areas in the game. There aren't new locations to discover or anything. So cryptic vessels are a fun incentive to retread older areas. And they aren’t just simply “Go here.” They’re fun little puzzles too.

The last big thing I loved that I want to talk about is the parrying. This game is pretty much built around parrying and it wasn’t until the third boss where I realized this. I was stuck in my ways only doing rolling. Could you beat the game only doing rolls? I’m sure you could, but parrying is huge in this game. When you block an attack, it lowers your weapon durability, but a parry doesn’t. If you block an attack you still take some damage, but if you parry it you take none. Also, if you have some temp health you can earn back by attacking an enemy, a successful parry also earns some of that back. A lot of normal enemy attacks (as well as some boss attacks) when parried bounce them off, stopping them in their tracks. For human sized bosses and all remaining enemies in the game, if you parry an attack you ruin the opponent’s weapon durability and you will eventually break their weapon, effectively neutering their attack damage by an ABSURD amount. Parrying attacks is by far the safest as well as quickest method to build up an enemy stagger meter leading to fatal blows. And the most glaring piece of evidence that the game was built around parrying, is Fury attacks. Enemies glow red, have an audio indicator, then use an attack that can not be blocked and can not be avoided with the I-frames that rolls give you. They can only be parried. So to summarize rolling vs parrying: Rolling gets you to dodge an attack. Parrying gets you to negate an attack, damage an enemy’s weapon, build up their stagger meter, potentially stop them in their tracks, can give you back temp health, and are the only means to negate a Fury attack. The best part? Parrying feels so damn fun to do. Having an enemy do three successive swings where you parry every single one of them feels so empowering. Fighting a boss and having their weapon shatter makes you feel like you outplayed them in the best way possible. Nothing makes you truly feel like you’ve mastered an encounter like fighting a boss and parrying every swing of their 8 attack combo. While you don’t HAVE to, parrying is definitely the way the devs intended you to do combat and it feels so damn good when you learn the timing to do it consistently.

I’ve gone over the good in the game, and while I enjoyed Lies of P overall, the game isn’t perfect and I had my gripes with it. The first and most obvious issue I had was that the basic enemies have so little variety to them. The idea of puppets (essentially robots) has so much room for design variety and creative ideas. While the miniboss puppets are really cool and memorable, the grunt enemies you see all over are so repetitive, basic, and forgettable with very little variety. They’re all dressed fancy, dressed like a guard, or that’s it. And even when there’s “new” enemies, they’re just reskinned ones. The chimney sweeps are identical to farmers. Only difference is one used a chimney sweep and one uses a pitchfork. The infected grunt enemies also all look way too similar. Purple, small, tentacles somewhere on the body, that’s pretty much it. Like I said the miniboss enemies were really cool and intimidating with the Jester guy, the clown guy, the monkey guy, the guard guy, the metal shield guy, the giant amalgamation with the huge cog wheel on his back, all such great varied designs. But the generic basic enemies? Disappointingly repetitive and boring. And of course the main bosses themselves have plenty of cool identity themselves.

Stepping up from grunt enemies to minibosses, the minibosses have WAYYYY too much health. Like holy shit way too much. They’re honestly comparable to full fledged bosses. In the late game it’s not as much of a big deal, but in early to mid game I think it’s an unnecessary difficulty. You’re new and still learning the mechanics, you don’t have great weapons or armor or legion arms, you don’t have many pulse cells for heals, you haven’t leveled up much for damage or your own health pool, and these minibosses are aggressive and hit like a truck. This just means that you have to beat them by playing perfectly since you slowly dink dink dink away at their health and if you make a mistake they chunk away at your health and you have limited heals to make up for it. I think they could have dialed them back just a bit on the health so you didn’t have to play so perfectly for so long early on in the game.

Going up to the top of the ladder from minibosses to bosses, I really REALLY wish they didn’t have spectre summoning pools spawn outside boss arenas until you die after your first attempt. Interacting with a door to be met by a cutscene gets me so excited. Walking into a room and being greeted by a giant monster appearing is such an epic surprise. Turning a corner and seeing that spectre pool just ruins all those potential surprise feelings you get when realizing “Oh shit boss time now.” Making it so they aren’t there at first and magically appear after you die one time would still let people ask for help but not ruin the reveal. As for the actual bosses themselves, I want to emphasize that this game being linear is not a bad thing. Just like how quests being cryptic isn’t inherently good or bad and it's just a matter of preference, it’s the same when it comes to a game being linear or nonlinear. Both designs have strengths and flaws. However I do think it’s worth noting one important flaw this game has with it’s linearity and that’s when you get stuck on a boss, you’re just stuck. You can’t go to a different section of the game and try to progress there, you can’t go to a different boss instead, you can’t go do a side quest for a reward, none of that. Literally the only option you have is beat your head against the wall with the boss you’re stuck on, or just grind against basic enemies for level ups and hope that’ll make the difference. Getting stuck on a boss is never fun in any SB game, but in this game it’s especially frustrating due to the game’s linearity for progression.

Quests in this game are great for learning about character backstory and seeing their personality come out, but that’s it because the rewards for quests in this game quite honestly are just ass. I guess compared to FS games there really isn’t many things like armor and weapons and spells and rings and key items for quests and keys for optional rooms to be given as rewards for quests. But man, I was TIRED of completing a quest and then the reward was 3,000 Eros in the form of a Ergo fragment/chunk/crystal. This happens like 80% of the time. It’s funny because when you beat a miniboss, it’s a great reward to look forward to every time. A new weapon, or a quartz piece, or an amulet, it’s always something you get excited for. Yet completing quests always made me roll my eyes. All players should only do quests for the story and not the rewards.

The last major gripe I want to talk about is something that’s not as obvious and that’s the lack of skills to level up in. For this part I’m gonna make direct comparisons to Edlen Ring because it really shows how limiting this aspect of the game is in Lies of P. As you play Lies of P, most players will really only choose to level up 1-2 stats some, and then 1 stat almost entirely. I’d estimate it’s a 10/20/70 split. Whereas in something like Elden Ring, it’s more common for players to split up their stats much more. With Elden ring to use a weapon they’ll typically require one stat in particular to be much higher than others, but some other stats will still be required. Maybe it’s a high dexterity weapon but still requires some strength to use. Or it’s a faith focused weapon that also requires some dexterity to wield. With Lies of P you don’t need any stat to use any weapon, they just have proficiencies with certain stats, so you don’t need to split your level up amongst different stats. You can get by just fine by putting some levels in vitality until you have a decent health pool, some into capacity so you can use the objectively best armor without fat rolling, then you literally dump the rest of your level ups into the one combat stat you’re deciding to play as. If you’re a fan of Legion arms you can split it up a bit by putting some points into your Advance stat making the split something like 10/20/20/50, but that’s literally it. There’s not much decision making into what you want to level up in this game and that feels really boring. Compare that to Elden ring which not only has the importance of requiring certain stats just to wield certain weapons, but there’s EIGHT stats to choose from. And they’re much more important to balance compared to Lies of P. In Elden Ring there’s 8 to choose from, a bare minimum 3 will be important, 2 will be important long term, and for people who aren’t doing “pure” builds then the reality is 4-5 of the stats are likely to be important throughout the game. Making a decision to level up in Elden Ring feels much more important and nuanced than making the decision in Lies of P. In Lies of P you have 6 stats to choose from and only 3 are important with only 1 of them being important long term. Unfortunately this is something that’s baked into the game and can’t be “updated” or tweaked. If they do a sequel or a similar style of game in the future, I hope they’ll revamp the level up system then.

Okay, time for a quick lightning round of stuff that was less than stellar but couldn't be grouped up with anything in particular. The voice acting in this game is really inconsistent. Some people like The King of Riddles voice actor did an incredible job, some like Sophia did a fine job, and some like Simon Manus were just bad. The camera overall does a fine job but holy shit when it’s bad it’s BAD. It’s noticeably bad in buildings and closed off environments where it gets pushed up against a wall and the game seems to default the camera to showing from a top down view so you can see literally nothing but your scalp. Makes responding to enemies a guessing game. Enemies frequently body block you in corners. Would be nice if rolling could allow you to roll around them but I died more times than I could count because I backed up into a wall and when I tried to roll to the side, the enemy’s deceptively large body hitbox prevented me from moving and I could literally not move at all. I could have tried to parry and kill them but as stated before, the camera liked to go to a top down perspective making parrying an enemy’s attack nearly impossible so I just died 99% of the time. The second fight with the Black Rabbit Brotherhood is just awful. Truly, terribly, awful. I go much more in depth on the log entry I made about the game dated October 2nd 2023 if you want to read my full rant about it, but to quickly summarize, since this game emphasizes parrying, multi enemy fights suck because it’s impossible to accurately parry the attacks of 2-3 enemies. So it just devolves into “spam the parry” and hope it works. I was able to beat it by being extraordinarily patient and careful and using a ton of consumable throwables, but seriously that boss fight is ass. Absolutely the low point of my time with the game. How they introduce NG+ was inexcusably bad. After you beat the final boss and credits roll, the game then asks if you want to boot up NG+. The way it's worded I assumed if I said no, it would load me back to the last stargazer before the final boss so I'd be forced to beat them again if I wanted to do NG+ again, so I chose NG+. Thing is if I said no it would have sent me to the hotel where I could have gotten the post game lore and items and achievements, but now if I want them I have to beat the entire game again. This is honestly unforgivable and an update should go out that the only way to do NG+ is from the home menu or maybe a letter left by Sophia somewhere in the hotel.

Overall, I really like the game. A 3D SB game as a first major release from a studio is not an easy thing to pull off. The genre is really hot right now and it undeniably attracts a certain crowd of gamers that are especially critical and gate-keepy. While things have eased up a bit, it’s still hard to toe the line between making a SB game that’s similar enough to Dark Souls that the die-hards will still enjoy it, while also making it different enough that it has its own identity. I think Lies of P manages to do that. They definitely did a FAR better job than I expected them to do for their first game, I’d argue this is the best SB game made by someone other than FS. I would LOVE to see this studio make a second SB game. If they polished up the shortcomings that Lies of P had in a second SB game, I think it could stand shoulder to shoulder with a FS game

TL;DR The atmosphere is beautiful, the bosses and miniboss designs look badass, the weapon selection is varied and satisfying on it’s own without even factoring in the forging mechanic, the actual combat is one of the most satisfying I’ve experienced in a SoulsBorne game, the emphasis on aggressive combat makes the game much more intense, and the game has some wonderful QOL polish to standard SoulsBorne mechanics that I hope become standard. The game isn’t without its flaws though with the entry level grunt enemies being uninspired when it comes to variety, minibosses are disproportionately tanky in the beginning, the linearity of the game makes difficult bosses especially demoralizing, the level up system only has 6 stats to choose from so decision making there pretty shallow, and quests are great for character development and backstory but piss poor for the actual rewards. Overall, if you like Soulsborne games, this game is wonderful and I highly recommend giving it a try. If you have Gamepass there’s literally no reason not to give this one a whirl.

I FUCKING LOVE STUPID MEANINGLESS EQUIPMENT BONUSES IN VIDEOGAMES!

Only 1 weapon at a time? Just 4 armor pieces? Simplified nae nae ass UI? Stats that are readable? "+15% damage"? "+2 STR"? "+50% fire resistance"? What is this, elementary school?

GIve me 19 slots total of equipping shit. I wanna have 4 weapons, and 5 armor pieces, and 2 talismans, and 6 yokai abilities, and 2 titles (80 hours in I still don't know what the hell they are). Each of them with like 3 or 4 passive abilities that do nothing by themselves.

I want my boots to give me “-2.8% running stamina cost”. I want my headpiece to give me “-11.4% fall damage”. I want my left ring to graciously bestow upon me “+3.9% damage against humans”. My sword doesn’t have “+2.7% damage against armor” AND “-4.2% stamina consumption” AND “+3.1% backstab damage”? Literally. Unusable. Throw it in the trash.

You know how cool it is having to decide which bow to use between “+5.2% critical damage” and “- 7.5% max fall off damage”? I'm already killing most enemies in less than 3 seconds, I don’t think these numbers have any impact at all, it’s great. Oh, and GOD forbid if one of them isn’t also part 1 of 7 from a set whose only bonus when completed is giving me "+6.4% defense when HP drops below 30%".

Gamers need to accept that the true fun in forging/tampering equipments can only really happen when you have to do 30 minute side quests to check one fucking spot in the middle of nowhere to obtain the rare item “Poop rock” to which if you have 27 of them you can craft a special set of boots called “The hard worker” that gives you “+3.3% healing effectiveness” and is also the only way to progress in one NPC’s series of 6 side quests that you need to do to get the true ending.

Western game devs.
Take notes.