Pinocchio Soulslike Lies of P is more than an absurd Bloodborne imitation

digitaltrends.com:

Lies of P is easily the most absurd pitch for a game I’ve ever heard. Imagine if you took Bloodborne, in all its gothic glory, but used its Soulslike structure to retell the story of Pinocchio in a steampunk setting … oh, and imagine if Pinocchio looked like Timothée Chalamet. I promise that I’m not making this up or suffering from a Gamescom-induced hallucination; it’s an entirely real game that I played with my own two hands.

It’s easy to write Lies of P off as either a joke or, even worse, a cheap knockoff. After all, it’s made by a small team that doesn’t have the same resources as a studio like FromSoftware. While I could feel those limitations during my hands-on demo with the game, Lies of P certainly isn’t a game to be taken lightly. It absolutely wiped the floor with me.

Right from the opening moments of the demo, it was clear that developer Neowiz isn’t trying to hide its Bloodborne inspiration. I was loaded into some dreary European streets and immediately activated what was ostensibly a bonfire checkpoint (a text splash that accompanied it looked identical to what you’d see in a FromSoftware game). The similarities only stacked up from there. A health-restoring flask? Check. A map filled with shortcuts that would make it faster to move forward each time I died? Check. Runes earned from enemies that could be used to upgrade my stats, but that I’d drop and have to recover if I was killed? Check.

I wouldn’t blame someone for thinking it’s a little shameless, but Lies of P does set itself apart in some key ways. For one, combat feels much faster and to the point compared to the slow, deliberate pace of FromSoftware’s games. I chose an agility-based class for my demo, which turned Pinocchio into a graceful fencer.