After the first Dark Souls made history, its sequels and successors laid the foundation for the “Soulslike” genre: challenging games with mazelike worlds and deep lore. Some imitators, such as the 2D Hollow Knight, succeeded, while games like Lords of the Fallen were forgotten. In 2023, Neowiz’s Lies of P proved to be a dark-horse victory.
Lies of P was critically acclaimed, and many view it as one of the best in the genre. Of course, there are several ways to assess this idea. The game reimagines the story of Pinocchio into a dark fantasy RPG with all the tropes. Here is a breakdown of how Lies of P holds up as an entry from the Soulslike genre.
Lie’s Of P’s Inventive Combat
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Like any good Souls game, Lies of P provides a thorough challenge that only the most agile and strategic gamers can overcome. The path ahead is filled with powerful foes that can one-shot even the strongest protagonists. As such, the player must rely on their speed and ability to recognize the enemy’s movement patterns to overcome them.
The variety of tools given to the player is as massive as the power of their foes. P himself can choose between light swords and hulking blades to smash through enemies. On his other arm, P uses a replaceable prosthesis he can equip with flamethrowers, grappling hooks, and other weapons. Taking inspiration from Sekiro, the game also tests the players’ timing and precision to parry lethal attacks and earn a brutally satisfying critical strike.
Lies of P captures the challenge and punishment of a difficult game. The game is challenging by demanding the players’ precision, build, and understanding of foes. It also captures the genre’s punishment by maintaining the same “corpse runs” to collect your lost currency from the boss and demanding you maintain your skill.
It’s a Mysterious Steampunk World
The next way that Lies of P masters the Soulslike formula is by giving players a mysterious world rich in lore. The game occurs within Krat, an industrial city thriving due to their use of robot labor and the mysterious energy source “Ergo.” However, the automatons turned on their creators, wiped out all of the humans, and unleashed a “petrification” sickness.
Inspired by the Belle Epoque period of French history, Neowiz nailed the settings as equally beautiful and terrifying from their past destruction. Furthermore, the game decidedly falls into “steampunk,” which sets itself apart from the more traditional fantasy settings of most of the Soulslike repertoire. These elements create a foreboding “dark fairy tale” aesthetic that permeates the experience.
Furthermore, the city has equally intriguing lore hidden below. While the game has a small collection of talkative NPCs, item descriptions do the heavy lifting in painting the backstory of Ergo’s discovery, the alchemists’ machinations, and the “Puppet Frenzy” that overtook the city.
Linearity in a Soulslike
However, Lies of P demonstrates weakness from a Soulslike perspective through one crucial flaw: linearity. What made the original Dark Souls work as well as it did was its labyrinthian map and branching paths. Players in one area could seek an alternate route to gain new power and discover shocking secrets. Additionally, some maps were hidden enough to escape less curious players.
However, Lies of P remains frustratingly linear. Despite Krat’s vast size and deep lore, the maps follow one another fairly straight line. Furthermore, the individual areas themselves are equally straightforward. Much like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, the game becomes very sink-or-swim in its demands of the player’s skill.
Overall, using a more linear model is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a new entry in the Soulslike genre should set itself apart from its inspiration and become its own thing. Moving to a more linear model allows the storytellers and designers to “finely tune” the experience into a singular quest that players must endure rather than the open-ended stories of the original games. Either way, these choices turned Lies of P into a spectacular successor to Dark Souls and a franchise in its own right.
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