perhaps…on the nose…but what if i were to tell you folks the only ways to customize your player character in hit 2023 action adventure videogame Lies of P are to:
I laughed hard, caught me off-guard 
Anyway, if you don’t like P, there’s a simple fix:
Just add space to it.
Seriously!
I enjoyed the demo. the game is extremely campy. it leans into its own dumbness. I swear everyone talking shit hasn’t played it. it’s also a better souls-like than code vein. feels much better to play. I think about the anecdote about yoko taro just cackling the entire time he was making drakengard 3 and lies of P has that exact same vibe. and drakengard 3 is by no measure a good game but it’s absolutely worth playing! it knows how dumb it is. it loves how dumb it is. instead of “now loading” it says “now lying”. instead of “YOU DIED” it says “LIE OR DIE”. how can you not love that? how are we not all celebrating the fact that a game with such a magnificently stupid premise got funded, marketed, and released? and is actually doing pretty well?? come on!!
and I can’t imagine criticizing a game for not being rote enough! my only criticism of the demo was that it was too rote! if I want to play dark souls I’ll play dark souls. at least it mainly rips off bloodborne which makes it better than 99% of other soulslikes!
I’m sure the full game is decidedly mid and that’s fine. I’m glad weird dumb campy mid games can still come out with something resembling a budget. you should all be too!
seriously it’s like y’all hate twinks 
i have game pass and couldn’t get through more than 30 minutes of it. it felt floaty and sloppy where bloodborne is lean mean and sharp
I am 80% of the way through Lies of P and I think it’s good. It of course has the feeling like I’m listening to a fromsoft cover band but they mostly took the right lessons and are hitting the right notes enough that I can bop along to it. The changes they made to the formula (mainly the weapon assembly system and being able to “recharge” your last healing potion through doing damage after you run out) are good additions.
Like lonelyfrontier says the dodge is basically useless and the game relies heavily on parries, which can both break the enemies’ weapons if you do enough of them and also put them in a stagger state. They are fairly (maybe too) difficult to pull off a lot of the time so I wish there was a more powerful reposte mechanic for successful parries like in Sekiro, just putting mooks into a stun state for regular hits isn’t nearly as satisfying as the one-hit kills.
I found the game to be pleasingly earnest in it’s ambitions and that works for me (I’m mostly burned out on irony atm), and while I’m well versed in fromsoft games I have literally no background with Pinocchio, either the original stories or the disney movie. Are the books mainly a post-apocalyptic tale about Geppetto sending Pinocchio on missions to beat robots and zombies to death with a giant wrench? If so they really nailed it.
all the changes/additions lies of p made felt like things that are ‘smart’ game design choices but not remotely interesting in application. it made it a pretty depressing game for me so i dropped it quickly.
I bet the lies of p dev leads said “quality of life” a lot during meetings
I know you, fellow master of the P Organ, are aware, but it might be a little unclear for interested parties starting out, but in addition to perfect-guards and attacks both contributing towards depleting the enemy’s invisible posture guage,
You can extend the flashing-white-lifebar-state window with upgrades in the skill tree which you can access by talking to your Daddy and giving him crystals. Wasn’t clear to me at first but the Shot Put throwable items instant-stagger if they hit a white-lifebar enemy, PP (“powerful P”) knowledge.
I did end up committing mostly to the parry as the game suggests but you do unlock a double-roll in the skill tree that seems pretty viable based on others’ gameplay that I’ve seen on The Internet. Along with stuff like the exploding-shield shinobi prosthetic, Tim Burton’s cube-consumables that cause blocks to be perfect-guards for a short periods of time, letting you have a gun, etc, what kinda appears like a Turbo Sekiro sweat-fest is more flexible than it might initially appear.
Also Lies of P has better character movement, attack animation + spacing feel than Nioh so that makes it the best fake souls game by default bye bye.
Having not played Lies of P but having fun watching streamers play it but the biggest plus in its favor is it runs at a solid 60 so I don’t have any excuse for missing parries other than myself. I can’t blame the game for deciding one frame is gonna be longer than another when going for counters.
Games I have managed to play:
Bloodstained: Yep, this sure feels like a GBA era IGAvania. I’ve only got up to fighting the samurai guy once. There’s alot of yapping in this game. Just found the demon barber and its neat how much they let you tweak. It’s not quite the same environmental presentation high as SOTN but it is kinda neat how the blood splatter on enemies will effect the background and floor. Nice comfort food so far.
FYI the more I read this title the more my nascent pinnochio-meets-chalamet-meets-minnelli drag persona (“Liza P”) comes alive. Keep posting.
Eliza P would make for a neat interactive fiction premise
The P stands for “Product” okay that’s how I felt throughout my 8 hours with Lies of P. It does not have any new ideas, it is so incredibly by the numbers, I am certain I would have come across more shit I haven’t seen before if I’d replayed any of the major From games for the nth time than if I’d completed Lies of P. Like I was fuckin’ Babe Ruth calling shot after shot as I played, “there’s gonna be an enemy here, and an item there, and the shortcut’s right around the bend,” I’d never felt so confident that I could play a game blindfolded.
Really did not see anything remotely camp during my time with it. Calculated or cynical was my take cuz there’s no fucking joy in this thing, its environments are indistinguishable from like 1/3 of the single player games released since the HD Era, its cast mostly smooth babyfaced teens so devoid of character I could believe they were AI generated, its lore and dialogue loaded with Fantastical Proper Nouns reminiscent of the lowest tier anime and the only reason it’s noteworthy is cuz many of its glossary terms sound like incompetent innuendo. And I can’t believe that is intentional, like “P-Organ” or “Puppet Frenzy” or things of that nature are great but it’s much funnier when any of us say it than when you’re hearing it from yet another ‘the bugs are crawling under my skin!’ motherfucker squatting in that bland steampunk city. Like, this isn’t John Waters or Verhoeven or Obayashi, it’s not even a Troma movie or Batman 66, it is Every Game You’ve Already Played.
And that’s fine. It is an okay game. It doesn’t feel all that good but it also doesn’t feel all that bad. There is nothing really wrong with it aside from the fact that that I’ve played this game many times before and every other version of it was much better so why bother with this fuckin’ thing. I said that already but that’s all I kept thinking as I played it! I guess I was hoping eventually you’d go inside a whale or some other monstrous beast. Do you? Please tell me cuz otherwise I might keep playing, a repeat of when I blasted through Doom 3 solely so I could see what Hell looked like and it turned out it was just as dark as outer space, I don’t need to go through that shit again, maybe if the game continues to be halls and tunnels I’ll finally work up the nerve to uninstall it.
Anyway bottom line: I got more out of Gollum.
I did check the resetera thread for this game because I’m a little 
and there was lots of praise for Lies of P’s Quality of Life so yeah. Yeah.
Also as far as I’m concerned the most damning thing about how cut and paste this is is the inability to pause even though there’s no invasion component (as far as I can tell.) Like there’s no mechanical justification for this, it’s just inconvenient and obnoxious, but Dark Souls did it so.
Also all the bad Resident Evil style logs you find strewn about take up the entire screen and I was attacked numerous times while reading them, real cool shit, really thought that out.
Also I never laughed once when I died, actually playing a From game is often a comedic experience, I didn’t have that here, I just got stabbed or smooshed by mooks a few times, no good, no good, no good.
not true, they actually called it “quality of lies”
the side of the “lies of p” line I am on is whatever one is for people that have to like physically restrain themselves from making a “Friends of P” joke every time they see it referenced
This except I’m sonic and the slopmaker is companies making dark souls ripoffs/tributes/pastiches.
To each their own but as mentioned above I’ve slurped a lot of this slop (Nioh 1/2, Lords of the Fallen 2014, Mortal Shell, Remnant, The Surge, Wo Long etc etc) and this is probably the one I enjoyed the most. Nioh 2 may be better but I have a hard aversion to the Team Ninja style.
i fucken love nioh 2, it’s definitely slop but damn i love it
I enjoyed Lies of P more than all of Bloodborne and I only played the demo. Not really much interest in the full game after i saw the weapon system
Who knew this random Soulslike would inspire such fierce debate.
Anyway I’m still solely mobile gaming and most of it is garbo but I keep compulsively downloading shit onto my phone to try
