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Lies of P releases on September 19 | Summer Game Fest

LastBattle

Member
Colour me impressed! Plays and performs much better than I expected. Way too good for a devs first souls like attempt. Loving the atmosphere too! Still getting the hang of the mechanics but that will come in time. Beat the first boss which was a decent challenge. Definitely will be picking up Sep.
 

Ansphn

Member
Just played the Demo last night and this game is very very good. This is looking like the best non FROM software Soul-like I have played so far. It's a high quality game. Smooth, precise and it's look very good. The acting is not up to par but everything else is great so far.

One complaint

1. They need to unmap the dodge and run so I can assign different buttons for them.
 
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rofif

Can’t Git Gud
The trailers are really deceiving on the graphics. Even maxed out on PC at native 4K it looks like a fairly unexceptional PS4 game. A clear step behind Demon's Soul Remake.
Bloodborne still looks way better. now if only it was 4k60....
 

Giallo Corsa

Gold Member
Played this on my PS5 and :

Unfortunately, I have to agree with others that this is yet another Soulslike clone that doesn't do nor adds anything new to the now tired souls formula, everything is extremely derivative and boring.

Yes, it does play well - much better compared to most clones out there but other than that...
Also, everything feels so...I don't know if "pretentious" is the right word here but the devs are really desperate to shove the whole "lying" thing down our throats (it's Pinocchio based, we get it), when I saw the loading screen " now lying" (instead of "loading ") I gasped "oh for fuck's sake" out loud, it's just oh so stupid in the end.SO EDGYYYYY ! 111! AMIRITE GAIZ ?

Now, the graphics are just OK, main characters models are nice and detailed (much more so compared to FROM games) and they give this Korean MMO vibe quality-wise but the rest 8s completely forgettable - you could mistake this for a remaster of a late PS4 game upscaled and up-rezzed, the world geometry and (most) textures are really 1 generation behind and the lighting is nothing to write home about either.

It looks, plays and feels like a mediocre-to-good 6.5-7/10 game from what I've played and that's perfectly fine, I'm sure as hell not giving them 60-70 big ones though, this, for better or for worse, feels like one of those games destined to be put on Gamepass/PS plus extra sooner rather than later, it's just..."soulless".

PS: if you enable "quality mode" and then the "high framerate" option it unlocks a 3rd, 40fps mode.
 
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Just played the Demo last night and this game is very very good. This is looking like the best non FROM software Soul-like I have played so far. It's a high quality game. Smooth, precise and it's look very good. The acting is not up to par but everything else is great so far.

One complaint

1. They need to unmap the dodge and run so I can assign different buttons for them.
And the parry/block!
 

Neff

Member
Yeah I'm not feeling it. The level design is basic and I never felt excited to explore. The parry timing feels inconsistent and I think they should have given it a more generous window à la Sekiro considering how important it is for boss fights. Really don't like the heavy weapon degradation either. I don't ever want to hear any of Breath of the Wild's critics give this a pass. Impressive work for a small studio, but intensely derivative and adds almost nothing new.

It just made me want to play Bloodborne, honestly.
 

Mr Moose

Member
It's OK I guess. Runs pretty well. Tried the Steam demo, couldn't be bothered downloading on PS5 though I might try it there because the Xbox controller icons are confusing (using a DualSense).
 

ChoosableOne

ChoosableAll
I think there are too many enemies. Sometimes I had to fight against 5-6 enemies at once. The impact of the attacks doesn't feel strong enough; it feels more like Zelda combat. They've directly taken the world from Bloodborne, from the old-style horse wagon to the dogs with red eyes etc... It feels like Bloodborne with a Pinocchio mod installed. Many animations also come from souls games. I can't dodge or parry the way I want. I didn't really like the robot/puppet aspect either... It also reminded me of Resident Evil with its storytelling and gameplay features like finding keys to unlock closed doors. I'll decide whether to play it based on the reviews from users and media. Thanks to Gamepass, we have such a luxury lol.
 

Skifi28

Member
I was pleasantly surprised to see a consistent 120fps with no stutters, but the game itself didn't grab my interest. I'm afraid the more you try to copy a certain other game, the more your flaws stand out in the inevitable comparison.
 

Heisenberg007

Gold Journalism
Played this on my PS5 and :

Unfortunately, I have to agree with others that this is yet another Soulslike clone that doesn't do nor adds anything new to the now tired souls formula, everything is extremely derivative and boring.

Yes, it does play well - much better compared to most clones out there but other than that...
Also, everything feels so...I don't know if "pretentious" is the right word here but the devs are really desperate to shovel the whole "lying" thing down our throats (it's Pinocchio based, we get it) that when I saw the loading screen " now loading lying" I said "oh for fuck's sake" out loud, it's just oh so stupid in the end.SO EDGYYYYY ! 111! AMIRITE GAIZ ?

Now, the graphics are just OK, main characters models are nice and detailed (much more so compared to FROM games) but the rest...you could mistake the game for a remaster of a late PS4 one upscaled/up-rezzed, the world geometry and (most) textures are really 1 generation behind, the lighting is nothing to write home about also.

It looks, plays and feels like a mediocre-to-good 6.5-7/10 game from what I've played and that's perfectly fine, I'm sure as hell not giving them 60-70 big ones though, this, for better or for worse, feels like those games destined to be put on Gamepass/PS plus extra sooner rather than later, it's just..."soulless".

PS: if you enable "quality mode" and then the "high framerate" option it unlocks a 3rd, 40fps mode.

Thanks. That's all I needed to know. I won't be playing this because:

aint nobody got time for that GIF
 

mortal

Gold Member
Yea, wasn’t feeling this.

I found it pretty average as far as Soulsborne clones go. It felt very derivative, to a fault.
Even the town square area in Krat felt like it was pulled straight out of central Yharnam from Bloodborne, only not as interesting.
The whole Pinocchio motif is a bit goofy, but I did like most of the 19th century inspired art design.
Beyond the art design, the level design is pretty underwhelming and basic.

Enemy balance was all over the place. Some were stupidly easy, especially with item and ability stacking, while others were very cheap with inconsistent telegraphing.

There’s some potential there, but it felt like a poor imitation of Bloodborne. Will be passing on this one.
 

simpatico

Member
I stopped getting hyped for Souls Likes. The demo is decent, but still enough turds in the stew to make it a skip. Enemies lock on to you during attacks, bosses aren't right. Regular enemies are too easy. Hitboxes are trash like you'd expect. Dodging is mostly useless. Blocking too. Game runs great on PC, but that's because it could be mistaken for a nice X360 title.
 
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TwinB242

Member
I like most everything about the game but the dodging and blocking does seem incredibly unforgiving and makes the game feel harder and cheaper than it should be. I got to the last boss and it has these long sweeping attacks that feel incredibly difficult to dodge, even though my timing seems accurate. Maybe its something with the iframes, idk. But even though I can hold my own in a Souls game im struggling a bit in this one.
 

Danjin44

The nicest person on this forum
There’s some potential there, but it felt like a poor imitation of Bloodborne. Will be passing on this one.
That’s becomes problem when they are too one the nose about where they getting “inspiration” from, and guess what…most people going to compare it to Bloodborne.

If you gonna just straight up copy them then it must be better game if not then it would be nothing more than poor man’s imitation.
 
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Agent_4Seven

Tears of Nintendo
The demo is huge. Just got to the Hotel and stopped playing. I think it's one of the very few best 3D Souls-like games I've played since Sekiro and which is not copy & paste overrated af Souls game under a different name from.... From. Steelrising tried to do something similar, but failed miserably imho.

Anyway, I'm it. Performance is not great on PC (stable 30 FPS 90% of time on a 3070), but at least it's not a VRAM hog @4K max settings without DLSS / FSR and traversal / camera stutters can be fixed with patches.
 
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Ansphn

Member
And the parry/block!
What's wrong with the party block? I like the new original system they did. The L2 eventually stuns the enemy and their life bar will glow, that's when you hold R2 to do a powerful attack, then you will see some kind of symbol on the enemy for a 2nd powerful attack by holding R1 that would knock the enemy down.
 

Ansphn

Member
I like most everything about the game but the dodging and blocking does seem incredibly unforgiving and makes the game feel harder and cheaper than it should be. I got to the last boss and it has these long sweeping attacks that feel incredibly difficult to dodge, even though my timing seems accurate. Maybe its something with the iframes, idk. But even though I can hold my own in a Souls game im struggling a bit in this one.
Blocking and getting hit does not take down your stamina. Instead it takes down a little bit of your health that you can recover by attack the enemy right back. They want players to be more aggressive.
 

The Cockatrice

Gold Member
The demo is huge. Just got to the Hotel and stopped playing. I think it's one of the very few best 3D Souls-like games I've played since Sekiro and which is not copy & paste overrated af Souls game under a different name from.... From. Steelrising tried to do something similar, but failed miserably imho.

Anyway, I'm it. Performance is not great on PC (stable 30 FPS 90% of time on a 3070), but at least it's not a VRAM hog @4K max settings without DLSS / FSR and traversal / camera stutters can be fixed with patches.

What? Something wrong with your PC brother. Im getting 160+ FPS with DLSS at 1440p. 4K would prolly drop it a bunch but still over 100.
 

adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
I heard this has a 40hz option on consoles, true ?

Just a bit hesitant of downloading 20GB for a 20 minute demo.
 

Bartski

Gold Member
Blocking and getting hit does not take down your stamina. Instead it takes down a little bit of your health that you can recover by attack the enemy right back. They want players to be more aggressive.
its basically bloodborne rally but only on block chip damage which is actually a neat idea.

I like how enemy weapons can break when you parry making them unable to block you.

Also the weapon handle and blade switching has an interesting feature where the move set is attached to the handle. So you can mod the long sword blade from the strength preset to a sabre handle to swing it. Could lead to some very powerful setups.
 

FingerBang

Member
I have mixed feelings about this game. The settings and the story are interesting, but the fighting system is off for a few reasons:

  1. The evade/roll is laggy. Between pressing the button and actually rolling, there's a few hundred milliseconds of lag that make the move hard to rely on since you need to time the lag with the enemies...
  2. ...which as a tradition in all the fucking souls-like games, have exaggerated animations and delays in their attacks. Seriously, this fucking trend needs to die.
  3. They need to fix the i-frames in the roll. Again, not reliable at all in a game that is supposed to be similar to Bloodborne?
Overall it's good for being a non-AAA game, but the combat doesn't feel good for the reason I mentioned above.
I heard this has a 40hz option on consoles, true ?

Just a bit hesitant of downloading 20GB for a 20 minute demo.
It's absolutely not a 20-minute demo. I played more than 2 hours and I'm not done yet.
 
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Gambit2483

Member
Played the demo....Was Pinocchio always so feminine looking?... 🤔

Artistic Choices aside, it's a pretty "good" SoulsBourne game. Enjoyment will most likely come from the characters/settings/story
 
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Eiknarf

Banned
Great perfomance on the ps5.

But the combat feels off to me, it's basically a copy of Bloodborne, but something is weird on it... Maybe the evasion iframes or the hit reactions. It doesn't feel good to play.

Also, swinging the sword on enemies feels floaty.

Which is a pity, since the art style and the setting are interesting.
I noticed that from the gameplay they showed a few months ago. I'm glad you confirmed it.

I need to FEEL the hits!!
 
Great perfomance on the ps5.

But the combat feels off to me, it's basically a copy of Bloodborne, but something is weird on it... Maybe the evasion iframes or the hit reactions. It doesn't feel good to play.

Also, swinging the sword on enemies feels floaty.

Which is a pity, since the art style and the setting are interesting.

There's a lot of things that are up with it.

Bloodborne stands apart from the other Miyazaki-directed Souls games and most Souls-likes (sans Nioh) in having a lot of different moves available to the player at once. You have your basic weapon's moves, your transformed weapon's moves, your transformation attack segues, the sick dodge-into-dash attack, whatever gun you have equipped. And they're all designed to give your character versatility to handle different situations. Lies of P gives you an anemic moveset by comparison and you're never walking forward thinking about how you're going to handle the next encounter both because the mechanics don't leave much to think about, and because the encounters themselves are all basic.

The other strength that Bloodborne has is how compact, how dense the level design is, with every area being meaningful in some way. That's enhanced by how well-crafted the environments are and how dense they are with clutter. Lies of P feels very lifeless and the fact it's an overt homage to Bloodborne makes it obvious where it's lacking in comparison. To be fair, it's a demo, but realistically I don't think this is going to massively improve in a few months.

And yeah, the lack of weight & impact is apparent and it's a common problem with Souls-likes but it's made worse by the fact that the attacks feel cumbersome otherwise, at least with the greatsword. (BTW, it's a crime that the starting greatsword's first light attack is a thrust.)

Large enemies seem to hinge entirely on perfect blocking their attacks which tend to be of the "long windup, no tell before the hit" variety. Elden Ring had a lot of those kinds of attacks in its tougher bosses and it was BS there frankly, so seeing it in enemy types in the first levels of the game feels bad...

All-in-all it feels like it has no depth, it feels like the gameplay design is letting down the game first and the level design follows from that because there is nothing they can do to make it interesting. I don't understand it because anyone looking at Bloodborne should be able to easily see what mechanics make it interesting... not that they should copy it exactly but they should keep it in mind.
 
when I saw the loading screen " now lying" (instead of "loading ") I gasped "oh for fuck's sake" out loud

I didn't want to rag on them for this, because it's a demo and I hope they will consult about this language nuance before releasing the game, but it struck me the same way. The loading bar is also your nose growing longer. Maybe it's less weird in Korean the same way it's less weird in Japanese, where they repeat key concepts to an extent that feels like satire in English.

I played up to the boss and man, it's not good. This game gives me the constant sense that I'm missing some layer to the game because otherwise it seems to be about learning the exact timing to block attacks that don't have tells. It bums me out because undoubtedly a lot of effort went into this and it was betrayed by bad design... it's like bad Sekiro mixed with bad Bloodborne.

e: I will just take a break to say that the performance is great. Playing at 4K/120Hz with DLSS Quality is no problem. Playing at 1440p/240Hz with DLSS Quality, my framerate is rarely below 200. The other side of this coin is that the game has a strong "generic UE4 game" feeling.
 
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The combat doesn't look floaty to me here.
This guy makes these fights look OP for P, but he makes fights look easy in other Souls-like games too.
Meanwhile I'm getting wrecked by the second mini-boss down by the canal.


I wish this game had a map or am I missing something?
 

tusharngf

Member
I played the demo and was expecting something in the line of the surge or bloodborne but nothing like that. I feel like combat is still slow and animations needs more work.
 
Have to give respect when it's due. This is like the first Korean or China Hero game with a release date and demo on consoles. I seen so many with trailers and concept videos. But why does a game that look this is good Day 1 on Gamepass? That's what makes me iffy.
I’m assuming because the developers and Microsoft knew a game like Lies of P unfortunately wouldn’t be a good seller on XBOX, so they figure why not get some Gamepass money from Microsoft and Microsoft will have a cool looking game to flaunt on their subscription service. Wo Long to my knowledge was also day one on Gamepass as well and that game was from a well known developer. Probably a similar situation.
 

Agent_4Seven

Tears of Nintendo
What? Something wrong with your PC brother. Im getting 160+ FPS with DLSS at 1440p. 4K would prolly drop it a bunch but still over 100.
Nothing is wrong with my PC. I deliberately played @4K with locked 30 FPS and not used DLSS to test performance and whether or not I can play @4K 30 locked - well, I can. I'm perfectly fine with 4K 30 locked.
 

Thief1987

Member
heard this has a 40hz option on consoles, true ?
There is HFR option which you could activate only in quality mode, and when i saw it i thought that it's very... strange. But, yeah, it feels more responsive than 30 fps default quality mode, though i can't say if it 40 or just unlocked. However I didn't feel fluctuations in framerate so most likely it's 40. Why they didn't allow to enable HFR in performance mode is still a question.
 
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Elios83

Member
I've played the first half of the demo.
It's a AA Souls/Bloodborne ripoff. Gameplay is good, a bit easier/more accessible than the source material.
Unfortunately graphically it's really uneven, you can find tons of bland corridors and small rooms alternated with impressive stuff.
It's not a game I would buy full price, it makes sense to put in on subscriptions imo.
 
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Lux R7

Member
Loved it, the "rapier dex" style is what i like the most, you can hit and dodge very quickly and it's pretty fun
 
I beat the demo and loved it. I am going to purchase the game the day it comes out. The production values on this are insane. It's performance on Series S alone, makes Bloodborne on PS4 look like it needed more time in the oven. It is weird how apathetic I was about it before I really dived into the demo. This is the best demo I have ever played. Not even PS1 demo disks had this much content and fidelity to them.

It sounds like a lot of people are playing with 30%+ weight hence the delay to movement and greater stamina consumption. Also a lot seem to be getting filtered out before they unlock more weapons past Hotel Krat. It is weird that people cannot accept a game with differences in its gameplay design. Blocking and Puppet String Legion Arm are incredibly versatile in this game. The only real concern is weapon degradation in combat. It is a good thing the game throws a lot of cool weapons your way to switch between.

There is also a lot of fun to be had with mixing handles and blades to create unique weapon movesets. For me, combining greatsword blade with rapier handle is the fast but strong hit and run weapon I always wanted in these games. That rapier moveset is perfect for both bosses and NPC enemies alike. In the final version, I hope the saber handle will have an electric version to pair with electric baton head as that is the most fun mace I have used. Even though the default electric baton is better implementation of Bloodbourne's Tonitrus, it is not nearly as robust as this combination. It is good that the courtyard of the hotel has training dummies right next to the weapon customization shop as testing the combinations out is truly one of the greatest joys in this game.

I also really liked the level design on this. It was one of the things that were a leap above games like Thymesia. The enemies are not nearly as formidable or aggressive as in Thymesia, but they offered enough of a challenge with the way they are placed throughout the level and the bosses were certainly difficult and intimidating. I can't wait to see what else the developers can accomplish with the full release.

Is anyone else having a problem leveling up like you can't level up at all?
Past the first boss, you need to speak with Sophia (aka Blue Fairy) at Hotel Krat to level up.

They need to unmap the dodge and run so I can assign different buttons for them.
They have an option for clicking left stick to run. My only gripe with the alternative one button implementation is that it is dodge on button press and not on release. Not a big deal though.
 
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Finished the demo yesterday. Considering I wasn't even remotely interested in the game going in (my friend has been bugging me to give it a try), I enjoyed it overall.

EDIT: Damnit, didn't realize I was very last post of the page. Moving my thoughts to the next page for increased visbility to try and facilitate some discussion
 
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