Lies of P - Overture (DLC)

Lies of P is the kind of game that makes you question why more soulslikes don't bother with a coherent story. NEOWIZ took the Pinocchio myth, stripped out the whimsy, dressed it in gaslit cobblestones and rusted puppet limbs, and somehow produced one of the more memorable action-RPGs in recent memory. The Overture DLC is a prequel chapter, meaning it slots in before the main narrative and expands on the world of Krat, the Belle Epoque city that has gone very, very wrong. If you have already sunk hours into the base game and want more context for the lore threads you were piecing together, this is exactly the kind of content you were hoping for. The core combat loop carries over intact, which is either a relief or a warning depending on how you felt about it. Lies of P builds its fighting system around a guard-and-riposte mechanic that rewards reading enemy timing rather than brute-force dodging. Perfect blocks chip through even heavy assaults, and the legion arm abilities give each build a meaningful secondary toolkit. The weapon assembly system, one of the base game's strongest ideas, lets you swap blades and handles to mix scaling types and move sets. Overture continues to support that variety, introducing new puppet-type enemies whose attack patterns demand you actually adjust your setup rather than steamrolling with the same configuration you used for the previous boss. Good. Filler-free content that respects the build you spent forty hours crafting is exactly what a paid expansion should deliver. On the narrative side, this is where things get interesting for anyone who cares about whether a soulslike's lore holds together under scrutiny. The prequel framing gives the writers room to show Krat before it collapsed, and the environmental storytelling does a lot of heavy lifting. Notes, phonograph recordings, and NPC fragments fill in backstory that the main game gestured toward but left deliberately obscure. It is not a wall of exposition. It trusts you to connect threads yourself, which the writing generally earns. If you played the base game and felt the world was compelling but wanted another layer, Overture delivers that without hand-holding you through it. What does not fully land is the pacing in the middle section. There is a stretch where the enemy density spikes in a way that feels less like deliberate design pressure and more like the level needed more runtime. It is not a grind in the traditional XP-padding sense, but it slows the sense of discovery that makes the opening areas feel so sharp. Boss encounters are the real payoff, and the expansion has at least one fight that belongs in the conversation alongside the base game's best. The art direction throughout remains exceptional. Krat in decline looks genuinely oppressive in a way that few games achieve without leaning on cheap darkness-slider tricks. Overture is not the place to start if you have never touched Lies of P. It assumes familiarity with the systems and the setting, and landing cold into a prequel chapter with no baseline investment in the characters will leave you fairly cold in return. But for players who finished the main campaign and wanted the lore to breathe a little more, or who are curious whether the combat holds up in new content, this delivers what it promises without obvious padding or recycled assets dressed up as new. Monika, Scout Team