Lies of P

The reasons for my rule of not touching games developed by Japanese studios are many. (I should start writing them down; I feel like I've started forgetting them.) And that rule still holds. South Korea is culturally and geographically close to Japan -- at least when viewed from here -- but I haven't needed to think if they are close enough for Korean games to be included in the prohibition of mine. For the longest time South Korean studios seemed to release only pay-to-win MMORPGs in the West and those are easy for to me to ignore. But now there's Lies of P, a third person soulslike action roleplaying game released in September last year. It was on Game Pass day-one but I decided to wait for bug fixes and balance adjustments.

A stylish Korean soulslike

Lies of P is perhaps a poor subject of study on this matter because it intentionally borrows so much from FromSoftware's genre-defining titles. But just from how the protagonist looks, I can tell it's not a Japanese game. Even though the countries produce similar looking art, there are subtle differences I am unable to explain. Outside character art it's more difficult to tell in this case, again, due to how much was imitated.

The premise of Lies of P is funnily enough also very close to a year older French soulslike, Spiders' Steelrising, released in 2022. Steelrising is set in an alternate French Revolution where clockwork automatons roam the streets and you play one of such automatons. In Lies of P the danger comes from a puppet uprising (the same thing in practice). Lies of P draws its inspiration from The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, as one can guess from the title.

Loosely based on a 19th century Italian children fantasy novel

'Lies of P' is not a great name. I doubt any English-native studio would call their game that, nor have a 'P-Organ' in it -- assuming they were not making an intentionally comedic product. The single letter P does sound Korean in style: just look at the names of Korean pop artists and groups. I wonder though if NEOWIZ (stylized with capital letters like most Asian companies seem to do for whatever reason) also didn't use Pinocchio in the title to avoid possible legal incidents. Collodi's work has obviously been public domain for literal ages but with Disney it's better to be safe than sorry.

P gets sort of a talking AI guide, housed in a lamp hanging from his belt from where the guide chirps his advice and comments. The guide is called Gemini which is obviously a nod to Jiminy from Disney's Pinocchio -- the original story doesn't give a name to the talking cricket.

My knowledge of Pinocchio lore is almost non-existent so I was pretty much oblivious to any reference. However, from multiple passing comments on the internet I did learn that the cat and fox mask Stalker duo in the game are from the original story -- I wonder if Neowiz used the word 'stalker' in the sense it's used in Eastern European works as coined by the Strugatsky brothers. I also liked that they included Asimov's Laws of Robotics as a story element.

Country of origin shows in the writing

Lies of P would have benefited from having copywriters with better grasp of the English language. A lot of game mechanics-related texts are ambiguous or clumsily written. Particularly bad are the passive P-Organ skills. Dialogue has occasionally an unnatural flow, though it's not terrible overall. Lipsyncing on the other hand was so off that I doubt there was any actual attempt there. A lot of the NPCs are masked too, hiding their mouths.

The protagonist is a silent one, which I think was a missed opportunity with the humanity meter. He could've had a robotic filter to his voice that got clearer the higher his humanity was, similarly to how his appearance changes. Geppetto's voice I instantly recognized as Anthony Howell.

The game's environments are beautifully detailed and it also ran well for me. I played with mouse and keyboard because I wanted a bit of change from all the controller use of late. With few rebinds, Lies of P played perfectly fine although if they had wanted so, Neowiz could have made keyboard scheme to be considerably more powerful. Instead of mirroring controller compliance, they could have assigned each item slot to a separate button on the keyboard so that you wouldn't need to clunkily cycle through items.

Music is in an important part of creating the atmosphere of Lies of P. You can even find songs to play at the game's hub of Hotel Krat. A lot of the tracks, maybe even all of them, are sad or melancholic. I had to check if Neowiz had had the same composer (they hadn't) as in The Handmaiden film because there was such a similar tone to many of them. I wonder if it's a typical Korean thing, the somber melodies. Some songs are sung in French and I'm pretty sure the vocalists had Korean accents, which made for an interesting listening. It's not something I hear every day.

Don't marry a weapon too early

I decided to go for something slow and hard-hitting for my weapon of choice. I looked up what people thought the best weapons to be, and once I had acquired parts of one (Krat Police Baton handle and Big Pipe Wrench head), I stuck with it until the end. You can get pretty high damage hits with the part combo due to its Fable arts, and I did beat the game. But I regretted not having experimented around. With how non-boss weapons can be broken apart, to mix and match the handles and heads, there is a lot of variation -- at least on paper. There is weapon upgrading, though, so you do have to commit to something if you want to be as efficient as possible.

I think using only the Baton-Wrench made some bosses considerably more difficult as well. It's not the slowest bonker there is but having watched few videos, faster weapons seem so much quicker at killing bosses. I don't know how exactly the game decides stagger for enemies but my weapon of choice didn't really do a great job at it. Lies of P lacks a fast running attack too so my techniques from Lords of the Fallen and The Surge games didn't apply at all.

The Baton-Wrench has a short reach too, which can be highly frustrating. Enemies become weakened (flashing health bar) when enough stagger (?) damage is dealt to them. Hitting them then with a charged attack or Fable arts will disable them for a moment, allowing you to a sneak attack (or whatever it's called). However, many enemies and bosses have a tendency (almost as if they know) to skitter or jump back, away from your reach when they are weakened. With my weapon it was often impossible then to hit them then. Too late into the game I started using the shot put throwable that allows you to disable weakened enemies from afar.

Because of the short reach I used the Puppet String legion arm which can pull enemies to you or vice versa. The final upgrade allows you to launch yourself into the air for an attack with the latter use. It's an awesome, cinematic move -- when it works. I think it should have i-frames or at least be uninterruptable. If the enemy hits you when you're flying at them, the attack gets canceled. And it's very possible they move out of the drop attack's reach if they were in the middle of a lurching attack animation.

Challenging but not overly so

Each of the three enemy types of the game are weak to certain type of damage. With elemental damage the game is clear about it: use shock against puppets, fire against carcasses, and acid against humans. I perceived there to be a similar system for physical damage types even though Lies of P doesn't mention it, as far as I know. I appeared to have easier time against puppets with my blunt weapon while carcasses and humans not as much. This was quite apparent against bosses: I beat some puppet bosses on first attempts and the other two types took generally few more.

The most difficult bosses for me were both Black Rabbit Brotherhood fights, the Walker of Illusions mini-boss, and the penultimate boss of the game (if going for the Rise of P ending; otherwise it's the final boss). The first BRB encounter I ended up cheesing with throwables. I filled my belt slots with anything that can be tossed and threw them all at the Stalker leader who pretty much died from them. Throwables in general are your go-to solution if a boss is giving you massive trouble. You should probably weaken the boss first so that the throwables will actually kill them and you don't waste your stuff, though.

I used throwables against Walker of Illusions too and it was more than cheese: an exploit really. You aggro the boss, go back down the ladder you came from, then climb back up to stand just on top of the ladder and the boss won't aggro from your throwables. I found the boss impossible to beat otherwise. Her attacks are so erratic and relentless. And if you can't interrupt her illusion summoning, it becomes a complete mess. I really would have needed a faster weapon there.

In the second BRB fight I didn't use throwables; merely circled a pile of trash until the boss had a brief recovery window after one of his brutal attack chains to let me bonk him once or twice. It took a while but it got the job done. The penultimate boss didn't involve any tricks; I just retried enough times (maybe around 10). The main problem with the fight was how massive the boss's model is and how close the camera is to you: you can't see attacks coming properly. I reckon the fight would be much easier if the camera was zoomed out farther. The human-sized final boss afterwards took only two attempts for me to beat.

There's a general impression that soulslike games are somehow particularly difficult. Often they are only as hard as you want, although that depends upon the game. You can spend time farming levels to overlevel a boss or even invite another player to co-op in the actual FromSoftware Souls games, I believe. In Lies of P, you can summon an AI controlled specter to aid you on the proper bosses at the cost of a resource (which seemed rather plentiful). The specter can be detrimental to you learning a particular fight, though. Erratic bosses become even more erratic when they are attacking something else. You're likely to get hit by their backward swings if you try to go in for a backstab. The specter can be helpful for providing initial damage to carry you into a second phase before perishing, though.

I would say that among the few soulslikes I've beaten, Lies of P was the most difficult one -- maybe with the exception of what Darksiders 3 is on its Reckoning difficulty. (I've beaten it only on the second highest, Apocalyptic.) Bosses generally took around 5 attempts, though, so I would hardly consider Lies of P immensely difficult. And on replays it would probably be considerably easier. Sometimes when I had hard time I realized I wasn't blocking enough. You don't have to go for perfect parries for every attack; many times it's enough to simply tank attacks with block up and then regain health via the guard mechanic by hitting back.

Lies of P is a delightfully girthy game; it took me 46 hours to beat. There is just the correct amount of bosses to fight and areas to go through. I might buy it later on from a sale too: I believe the game will be getting paid DLC (which are unlikely to be included on Game Pass). There's a post-credits scene that teases something, probably a sequel, with a character called Dorothy -- from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum?

Edited 2024-03-29: Corrected a couple of typos.