5/5 ★ – Nirv's review of Lies Of P.

I never thought that a reimagining of the Pinnochio story would hit this hard, but this story fucking rules and the world/lore they created is awesome. AND THAT POST CREDIT SCENE ARE YOU KIDDING ME. You could tell me Lies of P was created by From Software and I would believe you. Nearly everything about this game was made to feel like a FS title, from the item pickup grey box to the level designs to the annoying status effects that instakill you. Some things I really loved about the game: NPC quests and indicators. Whenever you pick up an item for a quest or progress far enough for new dialogue there will be indicators next to a stargazer on the fast travel list. This is a really nice QoL feature so we don't have to have a wiki page next to us on how to progress. I also really liked the stalker fights. I think these are really cool flavor to the world. The game also ran pretty well and looks great, about as expected from unreal engine nowadays. There are some complaints though. The number of two phase bosses is ridiculous, it feels like there's more bosses with two phases than there aren't. And please just make it one health bar and have it switch phases at 50%. Another complaint is the blade and handle system. In theory this is a really cool system and works for the most part. But, having handles be specifically good at either Stab or Slash really limits the blades you can put on it without a detriment to effectivity. My final major complaint is I feel like they backtracked to previous stargazers via shortcuts way too often. They tried so hard to design levels like FS that they did it way too often. There isn't really a lot of linear levels and that got kind of samey over time. I also do wish there were some optional bosses/dungeons, everything is pretty main line linear as far as boss order goes. But overall, I feel this game is an awesome soulslike that is probably the closest there has been and maybe ever will be to feeling like it's actually developed by From Software. Definitely give this a play because the story alone is awesome.