Lies of P (2023)

Oof. I'm at a boss fight that very well might be the end of my playthrough. 3 vs 1, relatively long and annoying boss run. The game also feels like it ran out of content a few chapters ago and it's now stretching its length by reusing areas and enemies. It gets repetitive and also breaks all feeling of progression when I'm literally killing the same random puppets that I was killing at the beginning but due to enemy scaling they take as many hits as at the start.

I'll try again tomorrow and see.

Gonna give it to the game, the weapons are pretty balanced. I've been using the starting rapier all throughout my playthrough and just now changed it to this knife. Using the rapier handle it gets the same moveset that I'm used to but the blade lands critical hits like a maniac. They almost break the game, TBH. Not only they do more damage, but it also makes enemies flinch, even cancelling animation. With the fast rapier handle it's a monster.

But I've also been googling different weapons and it's interesting to see that there is no one weapon that is the best. Every commenter on reddit has their own favourite depending on their preferred playstyle and build.

I used to teach a university course on Data Visualisation. Once I got an exam that was pretty good overall but with some very basic errors and terrible code that felt incongruous with the rest of the document. Eventually I marked a different exam and realised that that student had essentially copied it wholesale and added a few (wrong) bits of their own --maybe not to make the cheating so egregious.

That's what playing Lies of P reminds me of. For the most part is a perfectly functional game and if I didn't know about souls games by cultural osmosis I would even be impressed at some of the ideas. But everything is lathered with a tick paste of jank and extraneous mechanics that betray it as a shadow of a better game.

Still, the moment-to-moment gameplay is enjoyable enough after getting into the rhythm. Literally. With the emphasis on parrying, boss encounters become almost rhythm games. The Fallen Archbishop is particularly good in that regard (at least it's first phase). I also appreciate the very short boss runs.

Ok, I'm not not enjoying the game overall, but I feel that there's a sense of clunkiness that drags it down. I feel that I realised that one of the things that most nags me about the combat is how heavy attacks and perfect parries don't have weight.

Most of the time enemies don't react to perfect parries and instead continue their attack sequence as normal. So you might parry the first attack and feel good about yourself just to be hit in the face with the rest of the attacks that you can't read very well due to the perfect parry effects.

Similarly, only the final blow of the heavy attack counts to stagger enemies. So an enemy can start and finish a blow while you are in the middle on your own attack animation, cancel your final blow and then you don't get to stagger them.

Also, what's the point of opening a chest and having to press A to get the item? Just give me the item!

I decided to give this a try. I remember not liking the demo and finding it very hard. I must've learnt how to use a controller better because I defeated the first boss in two tries and mostly breezing through the levels. Choosing the fast and build with lots of stamina might be helping.

Difficulty aside, I still don't know if I'm clicking with the game. The whole robot apocalypse rather generic but the game treats itself too seriously for a game that has something called a P-Organ. But I guess it's fine and I'll continue playing for a while.

Spooktober 2024 Game #11 Complete!

Okay, it was definitely stupid of me to schedule a ~30 hour game into the line-up when I'm planning a 15-game marathon for the month that already included a few 10-15 hour games in there, but I figured it'd be a good impetus to finally get to this, which I've been wanting to do for a while and I'm ultimately really glad I did. I had a great time with this!