Lies of P

Lies of P drops you into Krat, a Belle Epoque city gone catastrophically wrong. Puppets have turned on their human masters, streets are slick with blood, and you play as P, a puppet built in Pinocchio's image, trying to find Geppetto before everything collapses entirely. NEOWIX leans hard into the source material without winking at the audience about it, and the result is one of the more coherent worldbuilding efforts in the soulslike genre outside of FromSoftware's own catalogue. The architecture, the lore notes, the NPC dialogue - it all feeds back into the central question the game is actually asking: what does it mean to become human, and is lying the price of admission? Combat is where Lies of P earns its reputation. The guard and deflect system rewards aggression in a way that feels closer to Sekiro than Elden Ring, but with a crucial twist: perfect blocks chip through enemy stamina (called the Break gauge), turning every fight into a pressure test of when to hold your ground versus when to dodge. The weapon assembly system is genuinely clever. Blades and handles are mixed and matched independently, each with its own Fable Art (think weapon skills), letting you build something like a saw blade on a rapier hilt and have it actually feel different rather than just look weird. There are enough options here to support two or three distinct playstyle archetypes through a full run, though pure magic builds feel underdeveloped compared to the physical options. The Legion Arm prosthetics add a third dimension, with tools ranging from a flamethrower to a grappling wire, and the best ones fundamentally change how you approach specific bosses. The boss roster is the headline. Several fights here belong in the conversation about the genre's best - a mid-game encounter involving a concert hall that I will not spoil has no business being this good in a debut soulslike. The difficulty curve is steep but mostly honest. Enemy telegraphing is readable once you invest the time, and the game does not rely on chip damage or cheap one-shots as a crutch. The one recurring frustration is a handful of human enemy types in the second half whose attack strings feel tuned slightly past the point of satisfaction and into the territory of rote memorization. Narrative payoff is real, which I did not expect. The lie mechanic - you occasionally choose whether P tells the truth or lies in conversations - sounds like a gimmick and mostly is one for the first half of the game. But the ending branches and certain NPC arcs hinge on your accumulated choices in ways that feel earned rather than arbitrary. One side quest involving a hotel operator and a series of increasingly grim telephone calls is the kind of writing that makes you put the controller down and stare at the wall for a minute. On the negative side, the pacing in the final third drags, and two of the last three areas feel like asset reuse dressed up as new content. A confident 25-hour game would have been sharper than the 30-35 hours the main path actually runs. For RPG players specifically: the stat system is lighter than a traditional RPG and heavier than pure action. Motivity (strength), Technique (dexterity), and Advance (the magic-adjacent stat) gate weapon scaling, and respeccing is available but costs a resource that is finite per playthrough. If you are the kind of player who likes to theory-craft a build before committing, the assembly system gives you enough leeway to pivot mid-game without starting over. If you want the depth of a proper CRPG beneath the action exterior, you will not find it - but the character work and the world are rich enough to reward attention in a way most games in this genre do not bother with. Monika, Scout Team