Lies of P Review

Nobody expected a South Korean studio's first attempt at this genre to be this well made, and the reason it works is that it took one idea of its own rather than copying five. Weapons split into blade and handle and recombine freely, so the moveset of one weapon can be married to the scaling and special attack of another, which produces build experimentation the games it imitates have never allowed. The perfect guard on the parry timing rewards standing your ground rather than rolling, and the durability system quietly forces you to keep engaging.

Krat is a gorgeous city, all gaslight and art nouveau ironwork, and the reworking of Collodi into a story about puppets that begin to lie is genuinely thoughtful. Its faults are the ones inherited from the template plus a few of its own: several bosses have delayed attack windups tuned to punish rather than to teach, the early game before you find a workable weapon is punishing enough to lose people, and the level structure is more linear than it pretends.