Who’s Afraid of Pinocchio?: Thoughts on the Lies of P Demo

Note that this piece will spoil the content of the recently-released (as of mid-June 2023) Lies of P demo, and I will also spoil elements of Bloodborne (2015) as well.

 

            Round8’s Lies of P unabashedly borrows from the “Soulslike” action RPG template that’s so popular in gaming right now. If you’re familiar with the basics—attack and defense governed by a stamina meter, a high degree of combat difficulty, the threat of losing your accumulated experience points after a death but with the chance to return to the sight of your defeat and reclaim them, enemies respawning each time you either die or rest at a checkpoint, looping level design with ladders and doors and elevators serving as shortcuts—then there is, broadly, little here (or at least in this demo) that you haven’t seen before. If you’re already familiar with how these games handle themselves, then you’ll recognize a lot in terms of aesthetics (more on that momentarily…), mechanics and systems, controls, encounter design, and so on. This isn’t to say that Lies of P has no ideas of its own, as it does distinguish itself from its peers in some ways, but there’s also just no denying the clear line of influence either. Based on this demo, I think Lies of P is most immediately going to appeal to either A) people who have not played many games like this or B) people who play every game like this—for whom a new “Soulslike” is always an invitation. For those somewhere in the middle, though, who have played a fair few of these games by this point and don’t jump on every single one—people like myself who may be feeling a certain fatigue, even, with this (sub)genre at this point—I think there’s a real question worth answering as to whether Lies of P does offer enough novelty to justify its existence. The rest of this piece will be me attempting to answer that question in some detail.

            Fatigue with “Soulslikes” as a whole aside, the real elephant filling this metaphorical room and that represents the actual biggest hurdle in the way of people playing and evaluating Lies of P is going to be Bloodborne—the first game of this sort I ever played and what many consider to be FromSoftware’s best take on these ideas that they’ve been iterating on and playing with for a very long time now. The fervor and seemingly infinite credulity that inevitably stir up whenever rumors of a Bloodborne PC release or of a remake, remaster, or sequel start to circulate again speaks to this extant passion. For me, Bloodborne may be my favorite “Soulslike” on a purely aesthetic level because it is so absolutely steeped in the themes and imagery of Horror. It covers so many of these, in fact, that I think a sequel feels ill-advised, though it will likely happen at some point for monetary reasons. Werewolves, mad scientists, witches, vampires, ghosts, giant snakes and spiders and rats, disgusting parasites, evil pregnancies, evil religions, aliens, forces from beyond the stars, ample body horror, the concept of knowing too much and going mad as a result, all set against a backdrop of foggy city alleyways, abandoned places of learning that were the source of unknown horrific experiments, pastoral hamlets gone rotten with folk horror torture and murder, soaring cathedrals and ancestral castles: Bloodborne’s progression from quintessential scenes of torch- and pitchfork-wielding (mostly) human mobs to many-armed, many-eyed Elder Things is a trick that can’t be done (with the same impact) twice. The game just feels, overall, aesthetically and mechanically “whole” in a way that suggests to me that meaningful iteration would be very difficult, a feeling I also had about the action game Bayonetta (2009), which has since had two proper sequels and one sort of reinventive spin-off maybe-prequel, none of which have (arguably) managed to really follow up on that first game in a truly comprehensive and satisfactory way. That feels like an ill omen to me as far as a theoretical “Bloodborne II” is concerned, but I’m sure it will sell well either way.

            From its announcement trailer on, Lies of P has very obviously courted Bloodborne’s following. The aesthetics and setting scream it, and getting to actually soak in the game directly via the demo just drives the similarities home even harder. There’s a sickness overtaking the streets—a physical illness in humans and a madness in their puppet (former) servants which have taken to butchering their old masters. Everyone normal is in hiding inside their houses or within a sort of hub and safe space reminiscent of Bloodborne’s “Oedon Chapel,” while the blood-soaked streets are reserved for the mechanical, the mad, the sick, or those with the martial prowess necessary to violently quell the chaos. Instead of “Hunters,” there are various factions of “Stalkers,” who seem to serve a similar function in this game’s society. There are also references to the moon/stars and a “workshop.” The similarities with Bloodborne are not exclusively surface-level at all, and people making jokes about this being “store brand Bloodborne” or the Bloodborne we have “at home” (read: cheaper, less satisfying) do have some justification for those feelings, joking or serious.

In terms of gameplay, in fact, Lies of P even kind of outright borrows Bloodborne’s signature “regain” system, whereby players had a brief window after taking damage to recover that health by attacking enemies, though this game puts a bit of a spin on the mechanic by making it so that only damage taken while blocking is recoverable in this way. It’s an interesting choice, though also potentially an awkward one, since blocking and attacking both consume stamina, which means you’d lose both stamina and health while blocking initially and would then need to use even more stamina to try to regain that health. The awkwardness may be intentional, however, in order to force players not to just keep their guard up and to instead dodge and try to time perfect blocks to avoid all damage. Bloodborne itself took steps to encourage an aggressive playstyle through its design choices (like making shields both incredibly rare and not very useful). The efficacy of Lies of P’s block is somewhat dependent on weapon choice and stat distribution—the former of which determines the amount of incoming damage absorbed by your block and the latter of which sets the recoverable amount of health—but its usefulness, and the intention behind it(?), seems to come through most clearly with the mechanic of “Fury Attacks.” Certain enemy moves cause them to glow red as they wind up to strike, and these moves cannot be blocked normally or even evaded—They must be perfect-blocked by raising your guard in time with the enemy’s action, eliminating all damage.

 

From its UI to its mechanics and controls and its visual design (and its so on), Lies of P clearly resembles its inspiration. Bloodborne is the obvious influence, like I said above, but there are nuances to the execution that make this not exactly plagiarism. The backstab attack, for example, is accomplished by just pressing the normal/light attack button behind an enemy rather than requiring a fully charged heavy attack to the enemy’s flank. This particular example is more Dark Souls (or most other “Soulslikes”) than Bloodborne.

            What I don’t want to do here is try to tease out all the complexities of Lies of P. Not only is that probably technically impossible since I’ve just played a demo, but just like the demo itself is presumably representative of the larger whole while still being fairly brief, I think I can make my point with some representative examples myself. As I was talking about blocking above, I was starting to get into some of the game’s twists or “own ideas” I alluded to before. Continuing in that mode, one other interesting choice the devs made with the game was to de-couple stats from your appearance. In most other “Soulslikes,” the idea of pursuing “fashion” over function can mean foregoing armor that might be better statistically in favor of something that looks a certain way. In Lies of P, you have both normal accessory slots and also dedicated slots for the various components that are suggested to make up the machinery of the playable puppet—presumably “P,” or, we could assume, “Pinocchio,” though I don’t think that name is ever used in the game for some reason. Meanwhile, your physical appearance is a “costume” instead, made up of a whole outfit and a head accessory. Like I said already, this twist means that players can prioritize both stats and fashion without trade-offs in this game.

            Lies of P’s handling of melee weapons is also an interesting one—a sort of play, you could argue, on both Bloodborne’s “trick weapons” that could transform between modes and the modern mechanic of “crafting” that appears in so many other games. Weapons in Lies of P generally seem to be made of two parts: the business end of the weapon and its hilt. After acquiring a certain key item, you can mix and match these two parts from a checkpoint or a friendly NPC’s menu. The weapon bits have separate “scaling” with your stats that impacts their performance, so you could theoretically try to put something together that gives you the best possible damage output based on your specific stats. Additionally, the main weapon parts and hilts each have their own special ability that consumes the energy resource you generate from attacking enemies, so you might settle on a combination that has the particular special abilities that you want. This doesn’t feel too complicated (is not an outright, full crafting system) but still offers a bit of customization that simultaneously taps into modern design standards a little bit, recalls Bloodborne, and gives players some degree of choice about something like a build for their version of this twinkified Pinocchio.

 

Like I said already, Lies of P’s influences are very clear in every aspect of its design. This includes the character sheet that displays your current stats, which is visually reminiscent of basically every “Soulslike.” I didn’t see an option to explain these stats in the demo, however, which is annoying. If you’re familiar with this style of game, you can probably guess most of this, and tinkering in the “level up” menu to see what stats impact what items on the character sheet also helps, but there are some things that simply seem unclear, like the “Legion” item on the sheet. That’s a word associated with the robotic left arm weapons you use, though what the value there on the sheet means is, again, unclear at a glance, as it seems separate from the damage value which is displayed elsewhere. Using phrasing from another menu unlocked at the very end of the demo in conjunction with the stats sheet values visible in the field after using my left arm weapon a little, I was able to figure out that the “Legion” stat refers to the total uses you get out of those arms. In retrospect, this feels obvious enough, though the lack of an option to get descriptions for the stats still stands out at a time when such explanations are usually more readily available.

 

While Lies of P is undeniably visually reminiscent of Bloodborne in its broad strokes, you can tell from the style of the architecture that this world is not actually a direct copy. The steampunk-y elements certainly differentiate it, but even the make and model of the buildings you see, both off in the distance and lining the crowded streets you explore, look distinct in ways that someone more familiar with the style of such things could probably better elucidate. Even insofar as the game is imitative, it feels like a pretty successful one. There’s a credible degree of detail in the world, including posters on the walls and debris in the streets and décor in the houses (and so on), that more or less parallels FromSoftware’s well-regarded standards for world-building via background objects and environmental detail. There’s a credibility and a placefulness to Lies of P that arises from its visual and level design in particular that makes it feel like a worthy… if not “imitation,” then “homage,” perhaps.

            As much as I am myself a fan of Bloodborne and its vibe, another association I, and likely others, have made is between Lies of P and American McGee’s Alice titles. Or, perhaps more broadly, between Lies of P and the concept of taking a children’s property—be it Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio or Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories, or etc.—and making it Dark. McGee’s Alice titles (2000/2011) might be some of the best examples in video games, reimagining the Alice character as a mentally-scarred adult working out the trauma of the childhood loss of her family in a fire through her “Wonderland.” The Alice games leveraged the strengths of some of the popular game design trends of their time to accomplish their darkening in a mechanically satisfying way. While both were platformers to an extent, the first took its action cues from shooters, while the second was more Bayonetta- or Devil May Cry-esque, with more of a focus on crunchy and stylish melee combat. In both games, however, the childlike Alice has been aged up and now slaughters various twisted creatures across an equally twisted version of Wonderland, using weapons both obvious, like a large knife, and less obvious but also still in keeping with the Alice-but-dark approach, like a croquet mallet and playing cards. 

Lies of P’s arrival, coming as it will after what feels like the pretty definitive final “no” from publisher EA on continuing Alice, feels appropriate, of a kind, and appealing. It is a dark take on the Pinocchio story, of course, where the wooden boy has been aged up and now slaughters renegade automatons in the streets of a gore-slicked city. His own puppet nature is most obvious in the form of his robotic left arm which can be equipped with various tools of destruction and which seems to twitch somewhat unnervingly during the character’s idle animation. The game is leveraging the very influential modern design template of a “Soulslike” here, a (sub)genre known for its melancholy and its horror elements. For example, while the seemingly friendly NPC Sophia is closely associated with the color blue and, thus, with the “Blue Fairy” character, there’s also a link between the color blue and the sickness in the game. There’s a least one very grotesque corpse that seems to be hollowed out, sprouting/spreading, mutated, and leaking turquoise that is suggestive of what an advanced case of the disease might look like. While there is definitely some degree of mechanical variation on the “Soulslike” template in Lies of P that will make it appealing to people, I think an arguably bigger potential draw will be something like what made the Alice games so interesting, which is getting to see familiar story elements incorporated and twisted in creative and disgusting ways. It’s been a long time since I read the original Pinocchio book, but one brief reference I was able to find is that the name of the puppet working the front desk at the game’s Hotel Krat is named “Polendina,” which is a reference to a mean nickname given to Geppetto in the book. Crickets are established as having a place in the folklore of the area as guides, and the focus on telling lies has been synthesized with the steampunk element of this take and has been made a defining part of the automatons’ character, sort of “Laws of Robotics”-esque, in that most machines cannot tell lies. I’m interested in how deep the cuts will ultimately be since the game seems to not just be building on the absolute most obvious elements of the Pinocchio story as it exists in the wider culture. There likely will be some fun to be had in finding the references and in pouring over their implementation in the game in search of meaning.

 

I don’t think Lies of P ultimately channels the same exact early 2000s edginess that makes the original American McGee’s Alice so iconic, but there’s clearly a similarity in the adaptations. Both (or all three, if we include both Alices) are “mature” reimaginings and focused on action combat. Both takes age up their protagonists, making them dark-haired and beautiful avengers. I’m not trying to suggest any kind of direct line of inspiration, but there’s something so perfectly… symmetrical-adjacent about the above images: where these two children’s characters (one blue, one red) face off against such over-the-top monstrosities. You’ve got Pinocchio in the grip of some giant, electrified robot policeman (read: a grotesque distortion of an “adult” or authority figure) with glowing red eyes, while a knife-wielding Alice flees from a zombified, be-tentacled, giant card monster carrying a scythe at least as tall as it is. There’s an obviousness to the twists on the original material, an unambiguous edginess, that make them appealing in a kind of “doodles in a middle schooler’s fifth period science notebook” sort of way.

            I would say that this particular aspect of Lies of P, more so than the Bloodborne stuff, is what makes it potentially appealing to me currently. While the brief first announcement trailer did not do too much to get me excited, I initially found the later gameplay trailer to be much more appealing. Like all trailers, the focus there is on “sizzle”—epic music paired with quick snippets of gameplay chosen for their dynamism and with little hints of story and out of context character dialogue. It’s a potent sell for the game, but the illusion was broken for me after watching actual, less or “un” edited gameplay footage, where it became much clearer to me that Lies of P was a very conventional “Soulslike.” You traverse and fight without musical fanfare most of the time, exploring familiarly-designed areas and engaging with recognizable configurations of enemies. As dynamic as the trailer was, in the real game, you waddle around, poking carefully ahead as always, feet planted firmly on the ground… If there’s at least one mechanic or metric by which Lies of P and other, future “Soulslikes” will certainly be judged, it will be the presence or absence of jumping. FromSoftware’s last two games in this style—Sekiro (2019) and Elden Ring (2022)—have both had jumping, and I was actually playing Team Ninja’s newest “Soulslike,” Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty (2023), just before I played this demo and which also features that additional verticality that adds so much to both combat and exploration. At this point, any game of this type where you have to just trundle along across a series of planes is going to feel at least somewhat less adequate, and this is one potential issue with Lies of P, albeit one so inherent to its design that it’s not really “fixable.” It’s just really bad timing, in the end, though the same might not be so true of some of the other issues I’ll soon discuss. 

 

While it’s unfortunate that we seem to have already reached a stage where the PS5’s instant loading is no longer a thing, the loading screens in Lies of P are pretty charming. They provide the usual tips about game mechanics, characters, and locations, but the fine touches are what make them so good: specifically how the loading bar is Pinocchio’s nose growing across the screen and how the traditional “Now Loading” is instead replaced with “Now Lying,” which doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense as a replacement (unless you consider that all games are, actually, lies told to the player’s senses—false experiences and so forth), but it’s a fun detail that adds a bit of levity and suggests the developers aren’t taking this Edgy Pinocchio thing entirely seriously. One perhaps unfortunate loss in this regard was a previously seen bit of signage strung up with an executed puppet that used to read “APAB” in a trailer but has since been changed to “Purge Puppets.” That original acronym was a play on the real-world social justice rallying cry of “ACAB” (All Cops Are Bastards), and, to be honest, it’s probably for the best that the developers went with something less problematic/fraught, though I will also personally miss the audaciousness of the original.

            In terms of performance, the Lies of P demo appears technically sound. I played it exclusively in the mode prioritizing framerate, and it seemed smooth throughout. I don’t think I encountered any glitches, though I did spot a little pop-in occasionally with environmental objects/details and some flickering while swinging the camera around in dense environments that I’ve come to see over the years as pretty characteristic of games made using Unreal Engine. I don’t want to end up trying to catalog every minor annoyance I came across, though the little pop-ups telling you what items you’ve acquired may not stick around as long as they should so that you can read them, while the time it takes for a character to say their next voiced line of dialogue is a bit too long to feel natural. The translation/localization can be a little bit awkward in spots, for what that’s worth, though I don’t think it has much, if any, impact on actual gameplay and has clearly improved from what can be seen in earlier videos on the official YouTube channel. The one area of concern might be the explanations of some of the game’s systems or items, which are heavy on in-universe proper noun terminology already, and which might potentially be made more opaque thanks to word choice. Otherwise, I’d classify this particular “issue” as more charming than anything else in an age where a lot of overseas titles arrive sounding so convincingly domestic that it might make certain types of people nostalgic for the days of questionable translations and… interesting vocal performances. Although, to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with the performances in this demo.

The most noteworthy audiovisual problem in Lies of P is probably just how silent the game’s enemies can be. In addition to giving them a bit less screen presence, you also can’t always tell that they’ve aggroed onto you and are heading in your direction, sometimes even when you’re looking directly at them, and, on a related note, their aggro range feels a bit overly generous for this type of game—overly “realistic,” actually, if you wanted to use a more complimentary term. A lot of games have enemies that seem unusually unaware of the player’s presence. Wo Long is actually a great example of this, with enemies that are just so incredibly incapable of noticing the player standing nearly on top of them that it does detract from the experience a bit, even if it also facilitates pulling off a lot of satisfying “stealth” attacks. Lies of P’s enemies, on the other hand, tend to notice you from long range and very readily. A dog-type enemy barking seems to alert the whole area at once in a way that, again, could be classified as realistic. I guess this might not ultimately be a bad thing, but it would be nice to get more of a cue for when you’ve been spotted so that A) you know and B) to give the creatures of the game more of a physical presence. For such clanky-looking and contorting/twisty machines, they seem awfully quiet on their feet.

            Where the real issues start to arise is in the gameplay and in the “game feel,” specifically. There’s a certain stiffness to Lies of P that’s hard for me to qualify. Fighting weaker enemies works just fine, I think, though the potential issues start to appear when taking on groups or the larger, sturdier creatures that can’t be felled so quickly. The main problem that is actually a problem is with the game’s dodge, which just feels “off” in ways that I’m going to struggle to articulate. It doesn’t have enough oomph, for one thing, I feel. Like the enemies’ movements, it’s altogether too quiet, and it doesn’t move you far enough away to actually avoid most attacks, I thought. I found myself dodging multiple times in a row in order to make the space with enemies that I actually wanted. I also found the timing on the dodge to be hard to get as well, like the interaction between it and incoming damage was “mistimed” in a sense.

I struggled throughout my time with the demo with instinctively either dodging too early or too late. The “too early” was more clearly my own fault, I feel, as I wasn’t reading the enemies’ (intentionally) contorted and twisty movements properly, but the “too late” felt less like my own fault. My impression was that I would have avoided the attacks with that timing in another game but not in this one, like the invincibility frames in Lies of P’s dodge don’t come as early into the dodge animation/when you press the button to evade as they might in another game. I ultimately found something that felt sort of conceptually like a solution by dodging a bit earlier than I thought I instinctively should against most attacks, but I never truly got comfortable with it, and this is what probably most contributed to me getting stuck against the final boss of the demo, the previously shown giant crawling cop robot that gains an electric effect applied to its attacks during the second phase of the fight. One particular attack the boss does is to rapidly spin one arm or the other before slamming it down. In phase two, the initial slam also generates a patch of electrified ground that will “go off” momentarily, dealing more damage. Dodging just once to avoid the slam was not enough to also move me out of the potential damage zone, which feels likely intentional since it represents a change in the difficulty of the fight from phase one to two, though that likely intentionality doesn’t make the lack of power behind the evade feel any better as you scrabble around looking for an opening to stick your sword into. There are just certain enemies in Lies of P, both bosses and some stronger regular opponents, who just seem to have “too much health,” and it’s against these opponents who can tank your hits and who force actual engagement with their attacks that the frustrating nature of the dodge most comes out.

How these fights are supposed to go, I believe, is that you’re meant to dodge and perfect-block attacks while also pressuring the enemy with your own attacks in order to make them vulnerable to being rendered “groggy,” which is a state indicated by a solid white glow around their health bar. Hitting an enemy in this state with either a charged heavy attack or one of your special energy-consuming weapon abilities will cause them to collapse and will allow you to perform a special attack on them that takes a huge chunk out of their health. (Side note: I also think the build-up of this stagger effect could be clearer. I’m playing this game on a not at all small TV, and I can barely make out the progress of white that’s supposed to be, I think, filling in around the enemy health bars.) The major issue is that you have to be able to keep the pressure on your enemies to make this happen, and I wasn’t able to do that consistently (caveat: during my first playthrough, where I was wielding the biggest and heaviest weapon available and was also new to the game…), to the point that I didn’t really interact with this mechanic at all until the aforementioned final boss, where I was only able to do so finally because I summoned NPC help to distract the robo-cop while I smacked him in the butt. I’ve seen footage of other people positively dancing around enemies in this game, so this isn’t exclusively a problem with the game itself, but I think the fact that I never found the rhythm after multiple hours does represent an issue. Dodging just feels… dodgy. There doesn’t ultimately seem to be a natural rhythm to it, and while poor audio and visual feedback aren’t exclusively at fault, I think they contribute. You just don’t feel like you’re hurling your dangerous player character body through an enemy’s barrage in order to stab them in the heart. More like you’re stumbling around them drunk, shuffling your feet not at all menacingly or dynamically.

            The thing of it all, though, is this: I was originally planning to say that your dodge in Lies of P while locked on doesn’t feel good largely because it just seems like it’s meant to be the first phase of a two-tiered dodge like you get in certain titles like the modern God of War games (2018/2022) or in Mortal Shell (2020), where the first dodge input results in a little hop that’s meant to be tightly timed to allow you to stay close to an opponent for an immediate follow-up, but with a second press of the button resulting in a more dramatic, distance-creating roll that can be used to save yourself if you try to evade too early or to just physically get away from enemies. I was planning to bring this comparison up, but then I finally beat the giant cop—a narrow victory, even starting the fight with the NPC help—and went back to the hotel hub to talk with Geppetto to conclude the demo. After this conversation, however, you are finally given access to a new upgrade screen I’ll show off just below. From here, you use certain key items to add passive boosts to your character. These boosts are added in small clusters that, once completed, unlock an additional valuable boost. Here’s the image I mentioned. Take note of the unlockable passive ability I’ve highlighted… 

 

            That’s right—My feeling that your character’s base dodge is kind of “off” was actually pretty accurate, because it actually is a two-tiered evade, but the second tier (the additional “oops I messed up my timing!” or “I need to get out of here!” second evasive action) is just locked behind this upgrade system. I used my two available key items reserved for these upgrades to assign bonuses to this part of the upgrade grid to unlock the second dodge and then took it for a spin. Sure enough, it definitely makes evading in combat feel better. The fact that such a valuable quality of life upgrade that makes playing the game so much more accessible is a (technically optional) unlockable like this feels bad potentially. And, for the record, having this expanded capacity for evasion does not fully solve the issues with how the evade feels to perform. It just gives you a bit more leeway.

            On the other hand and at the risk of getting further lost in the mechanical weeds: As I’ve established already, there is such a thing as intentionally making design choices with games that force the player to engage in a certain way. Take Sekiro, for example. In contrast with FromSoftware’s previous action RPGs in the “Soulslike” style, it opts for de-emphasizing dodging in favor of blocking and parrying. It’s not that the dodge feels less powerful as an action, and it even still has a specific use in avoiding unblockable grab attacks, but the way that the game’s systems come together means that dodging most things isn’t as useful as a means to winning most fights. Blocking and parrying, as well as attacking, cause an enemy’s “posture” gauge to fill up, bringing them closer to a stunned state that enables a one-hit kill, while all dodging does is protect you from damage, without impacting the enemy. As such, playing Sekiro leads to you learning that in most situations you should block/parry rather than evade. Team Ninja’s Wo Long is similar. You can dodge in the traditional sense, but doing so causes your “spirit” (more or less interchangeable with “stamina” or “posture” here) to be impacted negatively and doesn’t deplete the enemy’s. Ditto blocking in that game. It’s only parrying that will at once both deplete the enemy’s spirit, bringing them closer to a stunned state that allows you to deal massive damage to them, while also raising your own, which allows you to more freely use your spells and special abilities and heavy attacks.

The specific names of all these different takes on similar ideas aside, the point is that these games intentionally penalize (or at least “do not reward”) players for trying to play the game in a less than desired way in order to force a particular playstyle that is synergistic with the game’s mood or themes and not exclusively just some “right” way to play. In Bloodborne, for example, having no reliable block but the ability to quickly, powerfully reposition yourself by dodging while also attacking very quickly and freely (an act that also heals you via the “regain” mechanic) encourages the player to be ferocious and bestial in their approach to playing a game that is explicitly about beasts and about how bloodlust turns men into them. “Parry or die” is a statement that might well be applied to both Sekiro and Wo Long, with the clear intention being that you either play those games like a ninja and an agile martial artist (ostensibly just some lucky militia soldier but also clearly the most skilled warrior in the land), respectively, or you don’t progress—at least not quickly or smoothly.

I think Lies of P’s problem, aside from the way that it feels, is in its messaging. For one thing, I’m uncertain what sort of approach to playing it is meant to best embody the spirit of a… killer puppet. For another, therein lies the Bloodborne thing again, sort of. The clear inspiration from that other title creates expectations that have to be overcome to avoid frustration, assuming that the fault is with the player, which I do not think is entirely the case. For the record, I think the intention is to perfect-block almost everything, as that not only doesn’t require you to engage with the awkward dodge and better leaves you in position to counter if an enemy is vulnerable, but it also negates all incoming damage and even turns aside the most powerful of physical strikes. It’s clearly the higher-skilled option and arguably the hardest road to take given that enemies move so (intentionally) weirdly and that it does open you up to at least some damage (whether you just normal-block and take chip damage or else completely screw up and get hit full in the face), which further makes it feel like the “right” option. I have mixed feelings about this, however, as a key element of Sekiro’s specific design that makes a “parry or die” approach work is how messing up the timing for a parry and getting a normal block instead doesn’t penalize the player like it does in Lies of P since there isn’t chip damage as a general rule, at least with the default settings on a regular playthrough. You lose “posture” from blocking attacks without parrying properly, but that’s not as severe of a penalty as actually taking away health. For more players to adopt what seems to be Lies of P’s intended approach to combat encounters, then, it feels like the timing on a perfect block might need to be loosened a bit, and even if the dodge is intended to be a less useful secondary option, it should still feel more natural than it currently does so that players can lean on it slightly while acclimating to what the game actually wants from them.   

            I watched a streamer play the Lies of P demo and felt somewhat vindicated that she almost immediately identified the dodge as sort of problematic (for a variety of reasons), though even at that time, when I was stuck on the last boss and pretty annoyed with Lies of P, I didn’t altogether share her extremely critical (even dismissive) perspective on the whole thing. To be fair to her, she did stop playing before you get access to some of the more interesting elements of the game, like weapon-crafting and the upgrade grid. While I haven’t seen an overwhelming amount of criticism directed at the dodge elsewhere—and haven’t exactly made a dissertation’s worth of effort to find it—I do see it come up as a specific point of criticism here and there. Of course, I’ve seen other people react very enthusiastically to the game as a whole via Twitter and YouTube, and it’s also likely that the quirks of the title become more manageable with time. Every game has its elements that require adjustment, and since I came to this brief demo experience from Wo Long, which plays very differently to this, and with the expectation that I’d be returning to that other playstyle shortly and so couldn’t quite truly commit to this one, I wouldn’t count Lies of P out based solely on my subjective, very specific point of view. I do, though, think there may be some things legitimately off with at least the dodge in particular that could be tweaked to make the game feel less awkward to play, regardless of the team’s intentions regarding dodging versus blocking as defensive options. 

 

One of Lies of P’s big mechanical twists on this particular game formula is its handling of enemy special attacks. While you can seemingly negate all damage from any attack in the game with a perfect guard, these particular attacks must be perfect-guarded and cannot be dodged, a very strange design choice that goes against the grain of most action design. While I may or may not play the full release of Lies of P and may or may not write about it again, I think its takes on the ideas it borrows are interesting so far. One other one, to throw in another example, is how all enemies also seem to have the “regain” ability, and can recover from damage you deal to them by attacking you back, so slipping up against tougher opponents can actually cause you to lose progress toward defeating them.

            As a free demo, the value here is ultimately quite good. It took me just shy of 7 hours to do what felt like a completionist playthrough with a bit of struggling at points and with some tinkering with various things in the corpse-strewn streets even after I had run out of forward progress to make. While other completion times could certainly vary depending on skill and interest in poking absolutely every corner, what you get seems pretty substantial. I actually anticipated the end of the demo multiple times before it arrived, and even when you do reach the official end, you’re still allowed to keep playing within the trial areas. What you get for free is fairly substantial—five main weapon types to play around with (even if they are mostly just different swords), three secondary arm weapons, two small-ish but also nicely interconnected zones and one final pretty small one, as well as three bosses (two big machines and one human), and a reasonable amount of friendly NPC interaction. As a taste of the final product, it’s not bad at all, and the experience might be enough to fully satisfy those with only a mild curiosity about Lies of P. If there’s a downside to this demo, it may actually be the drip-feed of mechanics, which could be nicely paced in the grand scheme of the complete game but which may leave you feeling a bit underwhelmed or under-powered during this demo experience. There are some very useful things you only just get a taste of via the upgrade menu you only gain access to after not only the demo’s toughest boss, but also the point where the devs officially thank you for playing, signaling pretty explicitly that the experience is over. If I had turned the demo off for good at the roadblock of the last boss or even after the message popped up thanking me for playing, I think would have left with a less positive impression than I currently have.

            That impression is still mixed, however. I was almost ready to give up on the demo entirely before I finally beat the electric cop-bot at the end, but my mood changed somewhat going into what currently amounts to an “ending” for this little trial version of Lies of P. While I’d had to summon NPC help to win the fight, which soured the victory considerably for me, I had still won it, by the skin of my teeth, in that really thrilling way that makes challenging action games like “Soulslikes” so satisfying. In that final attempt, I’d also gotten in some good timely evades and blocks, and when I was back at the Hotel Krat hub, listening to a somewhat mellow record I’d earned from a side quest and just kind of soaking in the vibes—the opulence of the hotel, the post-boss-fight elation, the fact that this was a Dark Pinocchio game where you can watch an image of a record spin and where listening to said record apparently has some sort of mechanical effect on your character… When this was all followed by the conversation with Geppetto and the revelation of the newest and last upgrade system in the demo, with its valuable dodge extension, I had this sense of satisfaction about the game and a sense that maybe it was actually good after all. And that sense of satisfaction, together with the fact that I was working on this piece, propelled me into a second playthrough to try prioritizing a different weapon and see if my previous knowledge changed things. And while a good chunk of that playthrough was better (where I found myself dealing with enemies more smoothly), all the old issues with dodging and whatnot came back when I reached the late-demo enemies and the middle human boss fight. (I did not elect to fight the world’s largest cop again.) So my final feelings right now are more tentative. I do think Lies of P justifies its existence, but I’m unsure if I actually want to experience the unique or intriguing things it offers in full if it means dealing with what feels like such fundamental dysfunction with certain foundational mechanics. 

 

One answer to the question of what Lies of P has to offer that might justify its existence in a marketplace already filled with “Soulslike” games is definitely its story. Where the now classic FromSoftware Souls formula, which also more or less applies to Bloodborne and to imitators like Mortal Shell, usually puts more of an emphasis on uncertainty with regard to plot in favor of a focus on characterization and mood and theme, Lies of P takes after the likes of FromSoftware’s own Sekiro or Team Ninja’s first Nioh (2017), in that it features a more defined character and what seems like a more “active” or explicit present-tense plot. The fact that the game is technically an adaptation of Pinocchio could be one of its biggest draws. As an adaptation, there’s a bit of intrigue, as apparently the story of Pinocchio seems to exist within the game’s world. The fact that that name is never actually used—that the player character is referred to without a name by NPCs and simply as “your character” in tutorial prompts—might actually gesture toward some fun plot significance.