It’s usually the dogs. Every Souls player knows how infuriating they can be as enemies, leaping from behind corners, gnashing their jaws, surprising players before swiftly removing a decent chunk of their health. If you’ve played Bloodborne, you’ll know what I mean.
That comparison is how I started a preview of Lies of P before it came out. In that particular demo, the puppet dogs seemed positively docile. This can’t be a Soulslike, I thought, can it? In the short section played, it seemed too derivative of FromSoftware’s work and missed the mark.
I was wrong, though. Once I played the full game – and after some pre-launch tweaking – I absolutely loved Lies of P. To me, it’s the best non-FromSoft Soulslike. And now, with the release of the Overture DLC, we have a chance to reappraise the full game in its entirety. After all, even director Choi Ji-won likened this to a “director’s cut” of the game.
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Let’s start with a simple question: what fresh ideas does Lie of P bring to the genre? It certainly bears the familiar hallmarks: the punishing difficulty and calculated combat, the bonfire-esque checkpoints, currency loss on death. This perhaps caused many to dismiss the game as a simple imitator. That, I think, would be a mistake.