Lies of P (2023)

For the first half, this game is quite good. The second half, however, is probably one of the more worse souls games I've played. This funnily enough has a similar problem Sekiro had but in the opposite way. Sekiro gave you various tools you could use and they certainly worked in various situations, but its parry/block system was just so powerful once you got the rhythm that you never needed to use anything but parry once you got good at it. Lies of P exclusively wants you to use perfect guard for nearly every single encounter in the latter half of the game to the point it becomes incredibly frustrating. Enemies and bosses are designed to make sure you have a very bad time trying to perfect guard considering they all have layers upon layers of combos and staggered attacks. If you think Elden Ring had it bad, this is exponentially worse. You're constantly playing on the defensive and rarely go on the offensive except for when you finally stagger a boss. There's a boss that takes practically zero damage from normal attacks so you just have to perfect guard for five minutes in order to stagger it to do damage. Then there's bosses were staggering them just has them use a sort of retaliation attack that feels so unnecessary. Why, in the late game, am I being punished for successfully staggering a boss? Dodging is still often useless save for incredibly specific situations as bosses will constantly follow up with attacks meant to catch your dodges. I'm pretty sure every boss after a certain point just has full double phases. Not 50% health bar second phase, straight up two health bar phases. It's exhausting. why does the random swamp monster need two full phases? almost every double phase boss fight would have been perfectly fine with using a health threshold instead. I really don't know what they were thinking with the latter half and especially the last area of the game. Probably one of the worst areas I've gone through in a souls game. Frankly, I just ran through everything getting to the last three bosses of the game.

There's good ideas in this game, and I did enjoy various parts of it, but I don't think they should have triple downed on the perfect guard system. It gets exhausting when your only tool of retaliation becomes perfect guarding where the game is constantly trying to punish you for it and make it as frustrating as possible. Though I doubt it, I hope they make serious changes to the combat or at least give you more tools with meaningful uses as it certainly seems they'll be continuing this series with either DLC or a sequel.

EDIT: Did a bit of searching and there's both DLC and sequel confirmed already.

Only a couple hours in but I am enjoying this so far. The Victorian theme and crazed puppets is a welcome change from many medieval-ish fantasy settings of similar games. I bounced off Bloodbourne a while back but maybe that was because I played it years after iterations on the genre (including Elden Ring), or maybe I was just not ready for it.

I am very new to the genre but I found it very odd that a perfect block didn’t give me enough of an opening in many cases to interrupt even a minion’s combo attack. Meanwhile the dodge definitely feels more lumbering than it did in Elden Ring. I guess the moral of the story is to stop worrying about keeping my health bar pristine and focus more on continual attacks.

However, I just don’t get while the default control scheme for these games seems to be block and light attack on the bumpers, with heavy attack and utility on the triggers. I much prefer to have my most common actions on the triggers (block and light attack). Are the games telling me I should be using heavy most of the time?