Lies of P

 Thanks to a sale on the Playstation store, I decided to pick up the bizarre Pinnochio-meets-Bloodborne game, Lies of P, which came out a year or two ago (who knows what time is anymore?) I've now played through a bit of it, though I feel I must still be in the early chapters.

The game takes place in the fictional city of Krat, which became a beacon of advancement and industry with the introduction of "puppets," which are kind of late-19th-century automatons, invented by Gepetto. However, something went deeply wrong - the puppets have gone into a "Frenzy," slaughtering the people they were built to serve.

You play as what I believe is an older model of puppet who looks like he can pass for human, and seems to have some greater degree of free will. The game's story is unfolding gradually, but the overall setting is one of a kind of belle epoch France, with all the beauty of that era juxtaposed against the violence and horror of this robocalypse.

It's an interesting choice to take this particular story and adapt it in such a dark way, but I do think that the motifs of Pinnochio - the very notion of a puppet that yearns to be a real person - is clearly fertile ground.

Lies of P is a Souls-like in a few senses: you have a resource, Ergo, which acts similarly to Souls/Blood Echoes/Runes as seen in From Soft's games, as both your XP and your currency with which to buy things. You drop Ergo when you die, and must retrieve it so that it isn't lost forever.

One thing I really appreciate is that when you die to a boss, the Ergo is dropped outside the arena - so you aren't essentially obligated to keep going in there until you beat the boss if you want a chance to recover it.

Your weapons function in an interesting way - you can swap out different blades for different damage types, while the hilt will determine the stat scaling. The game also seems to encourage parrying and blocking more than dodging (either that or I'm just doing it wrong!) with a mechanic a bit reminiscent of Bloodborne's rally system allowing you to regain HP lost when you block for a short window. Perfect-blocking will prevent you from losing any HP, and some special attacks can only be blocked this way.

Currently, I'm on the second official boss - the Scrapped Watchman - which, I'll be honest, is the first fight that really feels like I'm hitting a wall. I've pushed him into his second phase several times, but I think I might need to adjust my strategy (probably dodging more rather than trying to block everything).

On this tenth anniversary of Bloodborne, it's fun to start playing another kind of gothic Souls-like. That being said, there's enough distinction from FromSoft's formula that I find myself needing to retrain certain mental muscles (luckily the button layout is more or less the same).