"Lies of P" Review

Publishers: Neowiz Games, Fireshine Games

Developers: Neowiz Games, Round 8 Studios

Available for: Playstation 5, Playstation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, MacOS

Reviewed for: Playstation 5

When Lies of P was first announced, people were understandably drawn in by the concept: "What if we took the grimdark concept of Bloodborne and set it to the story of Pinocchio?" Yeah, Pinocchio. The fairy tale about the little puppet who wants to become a real boy and whose nose grows when he lies. Set in a twisted dark steampunk fantasy world. But while I have that period in cinematic history that Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland films belong to on the phone asking for its general idea back, I'm proud to report that Lies of P is the rare case of a game like this being made and not just ending with its concept. But before I give my high-level thoughts, let's discuss something so I can be as clear as possible. When it comes to the concept of a "Soulslike," do you include non-Souls From Software games in that equation? Is Bloodborne a soulslike, for instance? I don't believe so. In my mind, "soulslike" is a label belonging to games created outside of From Software. You can agree or disagree, but I'm laying that out there so that when I say that Lies of P is the best soulslike ever made, you don't misinterpret that to mean I think it's better than Sekiro. With that in mind, let's wish upon a star as dreamers do, and get this party started!

As I've already implied, Lies of P is loosely based on the story of Pinocchio, first penned by Italian novelist Carlo Collodi in 1883 and later popularized by Disney with its animated adaptation in 1940 (both were released in February of their respective years, I came to find out as I was doing research for this article). Of the two, Lies of P adheres more closely to the original novel than the Disney animation, but it's still a loose adherence. We all know the gist of the story: A puppet-maker named Gepetto creates a wooden boy that comes to life when he wishes upon a star, and upon gaining sentience, this little puppet has to work towards becoming a real boy by doing good deeds and avoiding the negative temptations that come with being human. Most famously, telling lies results in the boy's nose growing. Things are a little different in this interpretation.

Lies of P takes place in the hyper-advanced city of Krat, a french-inspired cultural epicenter of wealth and technological advancement. At the height of this city's glory, a brilliant inventor named Gepetto designed a series of "puppets": automata that serve their human masters in ways ranging from domestic functions such as childcare to law enforcement. These puppets were bound by a programmed code of ethics called "the grand covenant" to ensure a level of status quo, and the tenants of this code were rules such as "a puppet cannot disobey their creator" and "a puppet cannot lie." However, as often happens in fiction when a highly-advanced society flies too close to the sun, things eventually went terribly wrong. During a planned grand exhibition to demonstrate a new era of prosperity for Krat, all the puppets in the city suddenly turned on the human population in an uprising known as "the puppet frenzy." This alongside a terrible petrification disease that quickly spread through the city ensured that Krat fell into ruin almost overnight. What was supposed to be an exhibition to usher in a new age for the city ended up becoming, as one really bad line of dialogue puts it, "an exhibition of a nightmare."....English isn't this team's first language...but I digress. At the start of the game, you awaken as the titular hero of this story and quickly learn you're Gepetto's most special creation: a puppet unbound by the grand covenant, granted the free will to behave as you see fit. With guidance from a mysterious "listener" named Sophia (donned in all blue and represented by a butterfly, so essentially the blue fairy) and a node of the city's automated guidance system, Gemini (represented by a cricket in a lantern), you set out on a quest to end the puppet frenzy, determine its cause, and rid Krat of the petrification disease plaguing its few surviving denizens. 

For a soulslike, this is a pretty easy-to-follow story. There's plenty of extra little lore bits to find through item descriptions, optional dialogue, and reading the original novel (which I'm currently in the process of doing), but unlike in most games of this kind, the developers wanted you to be able to tell what's going on most of the time. This leaves ample room for what makes a first run of this story truly fun: enjoying all the little references to the original fairy tale. For instance, the first humanoid boss you fight in this game is called the "Mad Donkey," who is a bonesaw-wielding man in a donkey mask. That hardly needs any clarification, but it's still a fun moment when it clicks. It's a similar story the first time you summon npc help for a boss using a "star fragment" and realize that means you're getting help by wishing upon a star. It's a bunch of little things like that that give this easy to follow story frequent little a-ha moments! And that's to say nothing of the original lore that the developers came up with and the details from the novel that you might not be familiar with if you're like most other people and only know the animation. Hell, I purchased the novel specifically because I saw folks pointing out that boss x or boss y was a reference to a tiny passage in chapter z of the novel, so there's a lot of extra stuff to enjoy if you like really engaging with the story in your soulslikes. 

Really, the only complaint I have on the story or characters front is the occasional bit of bad writing I've already pointed out. It's not a huge deal because it's fairly rare, and it's worth noting that this is a Korean studio that previously worked in Korea-exclusive MMOs. 

That fact is part of what makes gameplay so impressive as well. These folks have never made a soulslike, and it would appear they've never even made a single-player game. And yet, they decided to go from Korea-exclusive MMOs to the global stage in an already saturated market, that's how confident they were with their team's talent and the strength of their concept. And you know what? That confidence was warranted. But before I get too deep into this, let's discuss the basics.

Like any good soulslike, Lies of P is an RPG with a heavy emphasis on skill over stats. With any given weapon you wield, your moveset consists of a light attack, a heavy attack, a charged heavy attack, and two special attacks depending on the weapon. Each weapon has a different swing timing and range, and your knowledge of these things matters just as much as the damage a weapon can do. You mitigate and negate incoming damage through dodges and parrying, can upgrade your weapons with materials found throughout the world, and you use the same currency to level up as you do to purchase items. All standard fare for a game in this genre. But despite being most closely compared to Bloodborne, I'd say this game is more of a hodgepodge of ideas from all of From Software's souls-style catalogue. It sports a control scheme almost if not entirely identical to the Souls games, a rally system akin to Bloodborne, and a heavy emphasis on parrying over dodging plus a robot arm system a-la Sekiro. 

With the emphasis on parrying over dodging, the rally system is centered around that parry system rather than around health lost in general. See, if you block an attack at exactly the right time, you lose no health, and if you block an attack at any other time, you suffer a bit of scratch damage. If you attack an enemy from there, you can earn those hit points back fairly quickly. So like in Bloodborne, you're rewarded for playing aggressively, but only if you make slight mistakes while playing defensively. It's an interesting take that I believe works far better than the system it's based off of: punishing you for damage haphazardly taken, but giving you the opportunity to make up for imperfect defensive play. 

But what makes Lies of P stand out from the crowd? Well, perhaps the most immediately noticeable thing is the weapon creation system. Each weapon you pick up consists of a handle and a blade (which is a bit misleading since the "blade" can be an ax top, a blunt item, a spear point, etc), and you have the ability to disassemble any non-boss weapon to mix and match the parts. Each blade and each handle has a "fable art" (the aforementioned special attacks) assigned to them, so part of what will determine your weapon assembly is the loadout of fable arts you get as a result. But more importantly than that are the stat combinations. Base damage is determined by the blade of a weapon, but the handle is what determines a weapon's stat scaling. There are 3 stats that determine weapon damage: Motivity (strength), Technique (dexterity), and Legion (magic). Each handle has a certain grade in each of these stats ranging from D to S. The closer the grade is to S, the more additional damage a point put into the given stat will apply to the weapon the handle is attached to. So if you like a particular blade and want to make the most out of it, you might swap out the handle or a handle with a better grade in your stat of choice. But it's not quite that straightforward. You see, the handle also largely determines your swing timing, your range, and your attack type as well. Attach a greatsword handle to a spear blade, for instance, and while you'll have increased reach, you'll also attack very slowly and you'll be slashing with that spear tip instead of stabbing. Some blades only do good damage when used to stab, some only do good damage when used to slash, and some are good either way, but the type of attack you do is determined by the handle. So stats are one thing, but functionality is also a key factor in your assembly choices. Thankfully, there are tools available to help if you have a weapon handle that works for you and you want to make it even more useful. Throughout the game, you pick up "cranks" for each of the three stats that can be applied to a handle to increase the grade for a stat of your choice at the expense of the grade for another stat. You're never going to totally upend the optimal stat distribution for a given handle, but these cranks give you a way to tweak the system more in your favor, at the very least.

Beyond this, despite the complexity of the weapon system, another thing that sets Lies of P apart from its peers is the simplicity of its combat. It's obviously the soulslike gameplay loop you're used to, but with less complications to contend with. In most soulslikes, you have a variety of different damage types you can apply to weapons and a variety of status effects that can be applied to you. And when it comes to bosses, each have different strengths, weaknesses, and immunities to take into consideration when preparing for the battle. 

In Lies of P, you have exactly three types of damage you can apply to your weapons, each serving as a foil to one of the game's three enemy types. Electric damage works well against puppets, fire damage works well against monsters, and acid damage works well against humans. No boss immunities, nothing to complicate matters, it's just that straightforward. Certain weapons come automatically imbued with these damage types, but as the game progresses, you also pick up grindstones that allow you to add these damage types to weapons once or twice per time between bonfires (called "stargazers" in this outing), which guarantees you some windows of time to do that type of damage with regular weapons. Beyond that, you also can pick up consumable abrasives of these different types as well as throwables, and there's one Sekiro-style robot arm for each damage type as well. So, if you go up against a puppet boss, you can have an electric weapon/several temporary electric buffs, a handful of throwable electric canisters, a canister that coats a portion of the ground in electricity, and an arm that spews out a stream of electricity. You've still gotta play well, learn the boss's attack timings, etc, but no matter what you're up against, you have several options at your disposal to hit the enemy where they live. 

This ample ability to be prepared also extends to status effects that can be applied to you. Unlike with damage types, there are as many negative status effects as there typically are in soulslikes here: corruption, decay, overheating, electric shock, physical shock, etc. But Lies of P simplifies even this by dividing them up into physical and special ailments that you can gain resistance to or cure all buildup of by using special ampoules. For half of the ailments, you'll use ampoule x. For the other half, you'll use ampoule y. And these ampoules drop with decent enough frequency that you should never get caught with your pants down. So in the earlier example of being up against a puppet boss, if you know that the boss can instill an overheat condition on you, you can also carry a couple of the relevant ampoules with you and your loadout is a decent setup for success provided you do things smartly. 

So let me give you an example of all of these ideas brought together. In New Game + I came up against a boss that was a first try victory for me in the original playthrough. This time around, it was kicking my ass, so I was having to try and be smarter about things. Because this boss was a a monster, I knew that fire was going to be the kicker, but my attempts to kill the boss with my regular weapon imbued with a fire grindstone weren't quite cutting it because of the boss's speed compared to the swing speed of the weapon I was using at the time. So, I decided to go back to the drawing board. I took the blade of the salamander dagger, which does fire damage without the use of an abrasive or grindstone, and I combined it the handle of a spear. This dagger blade worked well for both stabbing and slashing, so by converting the attack type to stabbing and using a spear handle, I was able to give the dagger blade better reach than it normally would've had. After fully upgrading the weapon and applying a crank to maximize the stat scaling, I took this new weapon and its inherent fire power and took a couple more cracks at the boss, ultimately felling it on either the second or third attempt after taking this approach. I had done a similar thing for a late game boss in my original run in order to maximize the possible use of acid. By the time New Game ++ rolled around I was able to get first try victories against these bosses with just my usual weapon of choice, but if you find yourself stuck at any point, you're always encouraged to go to the workshop and do some theorizing about the perfect weapon you can tailor for the task at hand. 

But with all of that talk out of the way, I don't want to be misunderstood as saying the game is easy. Here's the thing: there's always going to be disagreements surrounding whether one soulslike is more difficult than another...but I've never seen so little consensus as I have with this game. I don't think I've seen one person agree with another on Lies of P's difficulty. Jim Sterling, for instance, found the boss fights with the Black Rabbit Brotherhood wonderful, while a lot of other folks have said those fights are terrible and unfair. On the opposite side of the coin, Sterling has stated that the Archbishop boss fight felt legitimately impossible, and that fight was a first try sub-minute victory for me in all three of my playthroughs. I've seen the sentiment thrown around that Lies of P is the hardest soulslike ever made, but for me personally, the hardest time I ever had with a boss saw me lose maybe 20 times, and the runner up to that was 12 times at most. To avoid giving the impression that I'm patting myself on the back for a moment, that 12 try victory was about a 12 try victory every playthrough, and every boss ranking I've seen has placed that particular boss on the easier side of the spectrum. There's just no consensus, so there's no way to tell you whether or not you're going to have an easy time or a difficult time with it! So here's my two cents: Lies of P is not "easy" or "hard." It's a fair challenge that gives you every tool you need to make things easier on yourself, but the difficulty you'll have with it will largely depend on how a certain boss or a certain area clicks with you. I didn't struggle very much in this game, so a lot of it seems to have just naturally clicked with me, but the same cannot be said for a boss that almost nobody except me seems to have had much of a problem with. So you should simply take everything I've said about combat thus far to heart. You'll always have ways of re-approaching a situation with a different strategy or loadout at the ready, and like in any good soulslike, I promise you you will come out on top one way or another. 

We're moving on from combat at this point, but yet another thing that sets Lies of P apart from its peers is the unprecedented degree of technical polish. When this game was announced, everything about it made it seem like it was going to be a Focus Home Interactive-style eurojank affair held together with paper clips and rubber bands, but that's not actually the case. This is by far the most polished soulslike ever created. The framerate is solid and unwavering, there is no texture pop-in or glitches of any kind, no crashes, nothing you'd expect to see...I've been playing Spider-Man 2 recently, and the fact that Lies of P is technically flawless while that game has several bugs pop up every night is nothing short of astounding. One of the best parts of this game's technical prowess is the aesthetic of Krat itself. This is what Bioshock Infinite's floating city of Columbia wished it was. Columbia was an unremarkable, unbelievable little plastic Disneyland ride of a turn of the century aesthetic that fell apart the minute you asked the question "why are there minorities on this self-segregated flying city that took off flying because the citizens hated minorities in the first place?" Krat, on the other hand, truly feels like a functioning city cast down at the height of its prosperity, and what little themes of puppet servitude it has are just present enough to showcase how much the city came to rely on that servitude without the game becoming the "press x to emancipate" affair that Detroit: Become Human was. 

As a close second to the overall aesthetic of Krat, the game's soundtrack is also second to none. Just pull up youtube and look up the song "Feel" from the OST and you'll understand what I mean. In a similar vein, the audiovisual feedback for blocking and parrying keeps the list of excellent technical features going strong. When you perfect block an enemy attack, the resulting clang is thick and satisfying, and when you've perfect blocked enough, either on your last block of your next attack, you shatter the enemy's weapon with an equally satisfying *CLANG*. 

Yet another massive design strength of this game is its level design even when divorced from the aesthetic. You're never going to get lost in Krat, and if you visit a location even once, chances are good that if you come back to it later on, you're going to remember the layout of the area exactly.

Folks, I could keep going on and on and on, but I think I've made my point. By every conceivable measure, Lies of P is an astounding and unique achievement. A strong concept backed up by strong attention to detail, level design, technical polish, gameplay polish, gameplay simplicity, and an easy to follow story that rewards you the further you dig into it. It lacks the flaws that other games in its genre almost always have, and it avoids the pitfall of employing cheap tricks to kill you that other recent soulslikes like Lords of the Fallen evidently use. Excellent boss design, satisfying gameplay, and a constant sense of forward momentum due to the intuitiveness of boss encounters and level layouts all come together to form a game so excellent that I could continue ranting about it for pages longer if I weren't trying to get all caught up while I'm on vacation. For my part, I can't think of any flaws I would bring up. Even things that I thought I might take some points off for in my original playthrough eventually faded into the background as I fell more and more in love with this game.

So, with that in mind, Lies of P is 2023's second...

10/10 - Masterpiece

Excellent work, Neowiz, excellent work!