Lies of P (2023)

Well, that's another run done.

I went through NG+ with the claw weapons. I'm still a bit salty that this special boss weapon is still not as good as a random dagger that you can buy for cheap from the starting vendor, but they are fun to use and look cool, so I had fun.

Now I've finished this game 3 times and the DLC once. That's quite a lot of play for a game that I feel has so many issues. Characters are bland, writing is terrible, story is nonsense, level design is fine but repetitive, and combat is overcomplicated. The game also starts dragging a bit after the halfway potint. But in the end I might just enjoy the core combat experience. Timing parries is so satisfying that I do it even when it's not really the best option, similar to why I like breaking boss' weapons.

Anyway, I'm gonna go and bump a start to my review.

Yesterday I closed Veilguard in boredom and my eyes landed on this game's icon on my desktop and I decided to open it up again and play NG+. This time, I decided to look for mods.

First: There is a mod to remove Gemini from the game and it improves the experience significantly.

Second, a sizeable proportion of mods are to replace Pinoccio with a booby character model. One version is not NSFW and I kind of love the cute version of the Winter's Hunting Outfit.

Im back at the base game. Beat Laxasia in two tries. Much easier when you know what you're doing and you've leveled up a bunch in the DLC.

I had forgotten about Manus' muddy motivations. Suddenly we learn that the dude can read minds and wants to create a world without lies, something that was never apparent at all in his actions. He also wants to become god, which seems like an orthogonal aim but more according to what he's doing.

I'm at the last boss of the DLC. So far bosses have been great, hard but fair and with good arcs. Second phases have always been enhanced versions of the first phase that increase the stakes but make sense. A marked improvement over something like King of the Puppets.

But for the last boss it seems Neowiz just couldn't help themselves and went again with this obnoxious design of a very easy first stage followed by an incredibly hard second stage with a completely different moveset that you need to learn again. Not only that, but the second phase starts with a Waterfowl Dance-style anime attack that hits like a freight train and it's hard to read.

The end result is me just having to go through first phase a million times just for a couple of seconds of second phase that I can barely learn due to this "fuck off I win" attack.

I just abhor this school of boss design.

Beat Vèronique last night. Neat boss. Loved her big fuckoff hammer with a jet engine. It took me a few tries until I realized that the best approach was to equip my big wrench and break her weapon. After that she went down in one try. I like that mechanic although it would be nice if it worked as well with all weapons.

The backstab window on her was particularly wonky, though. I would sometimes backstab her without seeing the icon and sometimes don't even if I hit her multiple times with the icon on her back.

The level design before her was also pretty rough. Again it has long and narrow hallways with enemies that you can't avoid so every runback after dying became a lengthy bore.

I got the claws, but they are pretty underwhelming. I noticed that despite having higher ATK that my previous weapon (a dagger tied to a street sign), the actual damage ouput is significantly lower. Testing with the test dummy, the fully upgraded claws did an average of ~270 per non-critical hit while the dagger did ~325 per non-critical hit.

The dagger with the street sign also has a skill to increase the critical rate and another to increase the attack power (which increases the damage output to ~377 per non-critical hit).

The dagger also staggers enemies out of their attacks much more consistently and the stabby attack doesn't collide with walls as often as the wide slashes of the claws.

Finally got into the DLC. My first impression is that instead of shutting up that annoying Gemini, they made him even more chatty and annoying. Terrible mood breaker.

The new weapons and grinders are interesting. I got a bow, which adds ranged combat to the game. I assume that the enemies in the DLC are balanced for that possibility but I wonder if that doesn't completely break the main game.

The first area is good, with lots of new enemies. I liked the mutated kangaroo and the carcass abomination that at first looks like an elephant but then it reveals a million different grafted animals.

The level design hasn't improved terribly, though. Still the same rhythm of exploration, shortcut, boss full of nonsensical invisible walls. But I guess it's functional enough.

Second area started rough. An extremely narrow and linear section filled with both highly mobile and ranged enemies. The problem being that when you inevitably die you can't just run past them or avoid them thanks to the knowledge of the level gained before. You need to engage with them every single time, which makes for an overly repetitive experience.

On a second playthrough I'm noticing how ramshackle the narrative actually is. Plot points and bad guys appear right before you fight them with barely any explanation or narrative flow. Basically there is never an overarching objective that our actions are weaved through. Go get Geppeto. Now go to some random church. Now go to the run-down district for... why did I have to go there again? I don't remember. Now go kill a Puppet King that we never mentioned before and will never be mentioned again. Oh, now without their king, all the puppets are disorganised and barely function... except that in the next area you fight very well-functioning puppets again.

It feels like a procedurally-generated plot. Or, to put it in another way, it feels like the writers were making it up as they went along.

I was thinking about this and

Overture is great- its more of the same with a number of the issues from the base game addressed, and a degree of polish and gameplay/asset diversity you wouldn't expect for a DLC in the genre. It reminds me more of shadows of the erdtree than the old hunters or ringed city (with tighter pacing but less content than SOTE).

Some of the smaller issues persist in the DLC, but the dogmatic adherence to fromsoft design seems to have lessened and as a result we got some really good areas, boss fights and narrative exposition (!!!) that feel more like an actual vision made manifest rather than a copy of other games.

It just feels good- well paced, challenging with a good story that elevates the world and base game narrative without distorting or superseding it. It'd be a disservice to Overture to suggest they copied the best parts of SOTE and dropped the bad, as it would elicit an obvious comparison to the base game shamelessly copying fromsofts catalog warts and all, but I think its true.

No pause button still, but almost every other criticism I leveled at the base game was addressed, if not satisfactorily remedied. Only a few runbacks for optional mini/bosses. No two healthbar bosses with completely unrelated movesets. Basically no 'fly away/backdash/reset to neutral' boss moves after their combos to stall out fights. The DLC weapons and amulets actually allow for different feeling builds. The super linear level design doesn't matter now that players don't need horizontal progression vectors to bypass difficulty based hardstops. They even added a amulet to give you a real dodge roll animation.

Not perfect but damn good - very optimistic to see what a potential Alice in Wonderland from the same creative team could end up looking like, especially with the capable writing and world building in Overture.

There is a neat little change in the update that shows your XP bar, how close you are to leveling up, and how many times you can level up. Makes leveling up less of a guessing game and more convenient to know

Empty XP Bar

Close to leveling up

Can level up twice