You’re going to read a lot of reviews saying 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Lies of P is almost the exact same game as Bloodborne, and it is; it has a similar Victorian aesthetic, a focus on parries and dodging over tanking hits, and a story that ventures into the metaphysiജcal and Eldritchian. The weapons are large, unwieldy, highly modal, and unremittingly awesome, bosses are imposing, and NPCs all exist in shades of untrustworthy grey. It’🐓s Bloodborne, there’s no denying it.
But Lies of P is a refinement of Bloodborne more than it is a simple copy. It distills that special quality of Soulsborne games, stripping away and reworking some of its more frustrating design cliches to make one of the most engaging, competent entries in the genre, rivaling even the FromSoftware influences it wears on its frilly steampunk sleeve♌. Not better than Bloodborne necessarily, but more elegant.
Lies of P is a dark take on Pinocchio, taking place in the baroque wonder city of Krat, which is tended to by android Puppets as 🍸its citizens go about their everyday business. Until, one day, something goes wrong. As you awaken in an abandoned train car, it’s clear things have gone south, and the Puppets have risen up against their human creators. By hacking, slashing, doꦐdging, and parrying a constantly evolving mixture of robots, mutants, and rogues known as Stalkers (not Hunters, this time), you must uncover the secrets behind the Puppet Frenzy, and put a stop to the malignant forces driving Krat to ruin.
The Puppet designs look fantastic. Right down to the lowliest butler, everything gives off a threatening sense of t𝄹he uncanny valley. Krat is a grimly gorgeous world, its world building overflowing with attention to detail. From the run-down Malum District to the glitzy Rosa Isabelle Street, each map is an interconnected maze full of shortcuts to uncover, hidden rooms to find, side missions to complete, and of course, convenient places to be ambushed. It’s not the most sprawling or expansive world ever made, but it trades scale for depth, like o꧋ne of the coiled springs tucked away in P’s Legion arm.
With that said, the first two thirds of Lies of P are by far its strongest. As the game goes on, things become more and more corrupted, the Puppets give way to more biological enemies♛ of tendrils and pustules, and the environments move from Krat and into an overabundance of toxic sewers and poisonous swamps. Told you it was like Blꦏoodborne. It loses its sense of identity, even if the underpinning game design is still impeccable.
Mechanically, Lies of P is almost identical to Bloodborne. It’s faster than the likes of Elden Ring or Lords of the Fallen, with your positioning being just as important as your equipment. Each encounter is about carefully managing your stamina, heaꦆlth, and the weight you’re carrying, all while learning attack patterns, hoping to master the perfect blocks that stagger your enemies and get some massive damage in. Once you’ve got the tempo down, fights become elaborate rhythm games, with each parry resulting in more mechanical gore being blasted across the arena.
This is a Soulsborne game, though, so for each perfect block you pull off, there’s likely an hour of practice and dying that came before it. It’s still a brutal game full of surprising ways to beef it, and enemies can be utterly relentless, even near the end of the game when you’re all kitted out. Fortunat🔴ely, Lies of P i🌳s far smarter in its use of difficulty, instead of just sitting back and being happy about killing you in a bullshit way for the umpteenth time.
It manages to rectify one of my biggest bugbears of Soulsborne games by minimising the amount of backtracking you need to do after dying. Dea🍨th will still set you back, and you still run the risk of losing your Ergot (Lies of P’s take on souls or runes), but the time between checkpoints is shorter than your usual Souls game, and the shortcuts to skip areas entirely are more frequent, all to reduce how long you spend throwing yourself at the same segment over and over. Once you’ve proven you can beat each section, the game very rarely asks you to do it again (let alone do it a hundred more times) just to get back to the boss you’re stuck on. Ergot is even left outside of boss arenas if you fail to beat them, meaning hard-earned resources aren’t lost if you suddenly hit a wall.
It’s because of this that Lies of P feels like Soulsborne for people who never clicked with the genre. It maintains its sense of discovery and brutality, but it never veers too far into the sadistic side just 💃for the sake of it. You can get meaty combat encounters, deep worldbuilding, and a s🐬ense of challenge without feeling frustrated.
When all is said and doneꦆ, though, being inspired this heavily by what is widely considered one of the greatest games ever made is hardly a bad thing. When Lies of P shines, it even outdoes FromSoftware itself in its nuanced execution. When it falls back on what came before, it does so with a confidence and understanding of the g𒐪enre that makes it stand out.
4/5
Lies Of P is a soulslike game developed by Neowiz Games. Pinocchio wakes up in a train station and players are tasked with guiding him through Krat in search of his creator, Gepetto. An array of weapons at their disposal, most of which are compatible with the lead character's mechanical arm.