I’ve been playing Souls games since I was a teenager. It’s been surprising to see it blossom from an experimental niche to a gaming mainstay, especially in the 2020s, where it feels like “Souls-like” is now a genre itself. I’ve been buying every game FromSoftware has released since Dark Souls II came out, but if I’m going to be honest, I’ve never finished them. I’ll get really invested, but always fall off around halfway through for various reasons. I think the closest I’ve ever gotten is Elden Ring, but even then, I just stopped being invested once I hit a wall and had other things to do in life. I’ve always wanted to find one of these games that could get me to hit credits. I think I finally have. Lies of P: Complete Edition is what I’ve been looking for.
Lies of P: Complete Edition is a dark adaptation of the classic Pinocchio story, taking place in the island city of Krat in the midst of an apocalyptic puppet frenzy. Most of the humans are either dead or infected with a mysterious disease, and a puppet named P wakes up at the tail end of that event. You quickly find the remaining survivors in a hotel, and you go out into the ruined city to find your father Gepetto and uncover what has happened.
Being a Souls-like, there’s a lot of familiar design language that’s just meant to be understood. It plays just like how you’d think it would. You find yourself navigating across linear levels with multiple branches to find secrets, fighting aggressive enemies along the way. If you die, you respawn from a previous checkpoint with your main currency, Ergo, in this case, lost and left at the spot where you died. This currency can be used to buy items or level your character up in a few key stats. If you make it far enough, you’ll eventually unlock shortcuts that’ll help future runs.
Lies of P: Complete Edition knows it’s a faithful version of a well-established and popular formula, and initially, my appreciation of it came from just how much they got it. So many studios are trying to make games like this that aren’t FromSoftware and add the wrong flourishes. They’ll have one foot in the game they wanted to make and the other trying to do Souls, cynically thinking that’s just the only type of game people want to play. Lies of P: Complete Edition doesn’t have this problem. The dedication it shows to recreating the formula feels designed with intent, to show players they have an understanding of the core aspects of the experience. Importantly, it doesn’t feel derivative. They get you comfortable with systems and mechanics you know and love, and then they introduce the new flourishes to show how they want to spice it up.
While a lot of my enjoyment of Lies of P: Complete Edition comes from how it just iterates and improves on a classic formula, what I think they really spice things up is how weapons are handled. With the exception of Boss Weapons, every single weapon you come across is made up of a handle and a blade. The handle changes how the weapon is swung, while the blade affects speed and scaling. I’m oversimplifying it, but the point is that in execution, this means that your play style will be wildly different from person to person based on how much they engage with weapon assembly.
In both halves of the weapon are Fable Arts, which use a meter you increase in battle. They can either buff your weapon or deliver a strong attack with a unique animation. Finding what works best for you, and switching weapons up whenever you go up against a foe you just can’t figure out, was consistently fun. There’s also Legion Arms to spice combat up further, where P can change his left arm to have a special function. This can be a flame thrower, shield, grappling hook, Gatling gun, and even more. These can be further upgraded to give you more flashy abilities with them, like the grappling hook being able to pull you towards enemies or launch into a really strong aerial attack where you flip up and slam your blade down.
I’m neutral on the concept of skill trees, but I never thought one could work so well in a Souls game. Across the game is quartz, which can be used to fill nodes in the P-Organ. These nodes are designed to give you passive benefits and require a gradually increasing number of sub-nodes that also give passive benefits across Attack, Survival, Ability, or Items. How you build this will naturally be related to how you want to best build your character. If you want to focus on the parry system, you can focus on skills that give you extended guard health restoration windows or longer stagger windows. If you find yourself taking a lot of damage and want to play it safe, maybe you can focus on more health items. Lies of P: Complete Edition doesn’t make you live or die by your build, and even has a respec option, but I loved the pace at which the P-Organ expands and how it fits into combing through levels to find secrets, which had me loving the inclusion of the system.
I loved how they presented all the customizable aspects of the game in ways I’ve never seen other games in this genre do. I went with a scythe and a grappling hook, slowly trying to master the parry system to be a stylish glass canon that very often got punished for trying to do too much. Every failure was a learning experience, and it was awesome to see my improved skill allow for a more fun playstyle. None of this is entirely unique to Lies of P: Complete Edition, but it’s the Souls game that made me finally understand the appeal of this and crave more.
Most of what I have to say about this game is glowing praise, but I think the two parts that I wanted more from were difficulty and level design. You’ll find that my thoughts on these parts still lean positive, but I see room to improve. These games are known for being extremely difficult from start to finish on your first playthrough, but Lies of P: Complete Edition has a different approach. It actually has a difficulty curve that starts easy, as if it assumes that players will be newcomers. I think this is a great idea, but as someone used to playing these games (and isn’t even that good at them), I was let down in the early section of the game, as I wasn’t challenged enough to immediately be intrigued by what the game was doing. It picks up fast after the first boss, but it took until the halfway point for me to really start having fun. The game initially only launched with a single difficulty, but post-launch patches added two easier difficulties. I did not play on either of these, but I’m glad they’re there for those who need them.
Level design isn’t necessarily bad, they at least all look wonderfully aesthetically. The developer is clearly trying to mimic the early era of the series with more linear levels instead of wide open zones. I love the nasty surprises they have with the wide enemy variety placed in each level, and the secrets are engaging to discover. I think I just wanted more secret paths, or the ability to go find optional levels or paths. There’s one instance in which, after decoding a vessel, it took me to a whole new section of a previous level. I always appreciated the branching paths of the original Dark Souls, it’s why those levels felt like a living, breathing world. Lies of P: Complete Edition’s levels don’t really do this, even if they can loop back in on previous levels in clever ways on a few occasions.
What I was most surprised about was how much this game brings narrative to the forefront, which isn’t common for a game in this subgenre. So often, the story of a Souls game is subtly in the background, requiring players to really dig and find it. There’s a lot of merit to that non-traditional storytelling, and Lies of P: Complete Edition initially sticks to that. Slowly but surely, however, its themes are pushed forward in front of players. It was refreshing to see the usual nihilism subverted for a story of striving for hope in a bleak reality.
Hotel Krat is filled with NPCs that help you with the bare necessities on your journey. They each have quest lines you can choose to engage with, and doing so will often reward you by learning more about them. In every quest, you’ll always be given a moral dilemma tied to a binary decision: Do you lie to this person or tell them the truth? This simple binary choice has massive changes to the path of the game, keeping track of your decisions here to adjust your experience in small or large ways.
This combination of gameplay and narrative just worked wonderfully for me. I think it’s genuinely refreshing and nuanced writing to depict lying as not a morally evil action, as so many game writers do. These are people going through hell, and you can’t just be careless with their emotions. It also plays strongly on the core gimmick of the original story, but in a clever way I would have never expected for a game like this. I’m so used to kindness being rewarded by cruelty, so I was pleased to see the Lies of P: Complete Edition rewards players with signs of a better tomorrow for bothering to engage with the people trying to survive this experience with you. All the stylings of the genre, how it has you try to engage with the mechanics themselves to uncover secrets to the narrative, but it tries to uplift. These writers had something to say, and didn’t let the formula hamper them in delivering an in-your-face narrative right to the player.
As a Nintendo Switch 2 port, I’m decently impressed by it. From the get-go, you’ll see that there are more graphic options than many ports to the portable home console successor. When docked, you get Quality, Balanced, and Performance modes. Quality aims for 30 frames per second and a higher image quality, Performance lowers resolution to hit 60 frames per second, and Balanced tries to find a compromise with an unlocked frames per second. I found Quality too choppy to recommend, but Performance was a delight. I rarely noticed it drop from the 60 frames per second target, and didn’t find the lower resolution too distracting. Most of my time with Lies of P: Complete Edition was spent in docked play on a monitor, so I was pretty close to the screen.
Undocked play is in an interesting state, as of writing this. There’s only a Quality and a Performance mode, but Performance feels a lot closer to the Balanced mode, with an inconsistent frames per second. It’s playable, but not ideal. We were informed of a day-one patch to add a proper Performance mode when playing handheld, but I have not had time to experience it. I think the current Performance mode looks great undocked, so I’m a bit worried about portable play if the resolution needs to drop lower than that just to get it to hit 60 frames per second.
The other benefit to this “Complete Edition” is that it comes bundled with the previous DLC, including the Overture expansion. I find this worth it solely on the base game I played, having not had a chance to finish Overture just yet, but the first area showed me quickly that the developer, Round8 Studio, is very open to feedback. The enemies are more threatening, the level design is tighter, and the weapons are even more experimental. So far, it’s all the best parts of Lies of P, and not really any of the weaker elements.
Lies of P: Complete Edition was a delightful experience. Considering that this is this team’s first shot at a big console single-player release, I’m blown away that I was left thinking it was probably the best Souls game I’ve ever played. It’s good in ways that don’t have me dismissive of the rest of the genre, but instead have me wanting to tackle all of them from a new perspective. I want to go back and appreciate all of the FromSoftware games I never finished, since now I know exactly what parts of the game design I value. If you’ve never played a Souls game, I think this is a great entry point. The difficulty curve might dissuade enthusiasts, but if they stick with it, I think even they’ll find themselves rewarded by the end with wonderfully difficult fights. There’s something for everyone here, and if Overture is anything to go by, they know what they do well. I don’t think I’ve been more excited for an upcoming sequel in a really long time.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch 2
Review Copy Provided by NEOWIZ
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