Lies of P: Sugar Free (No spoilers)

[Friday]

Hello, and welcome to my review of Diet Bloodborne. I am Friday, age The James Webb Space Telescope has cast doubt on the fundamental age of the universe or we're missing something huge in terms of how galaxies are formed in early universal conditions, well either way we're missing something huge and every astronomer is having a massive crisis and nobody else gives a shit

So, is Lies of P "Diet Bloodborne"? Is it fair to say that? Is it even fair to compare the two games? You know me, I usually hate it when people describe games as "X meets Y" or "X, but Y" but this is an exception. Lies of P is begging to be compared to Bloodborne. It's like a bunch of Korean fans of Bloodborne asked Miyazaki "are you ever gonna make Bloodborne 2?" and he said "nah probably not" and then the Koreans went



Lies of P is a professionally made fangame made by fans of Bloodborne. It may as well be a really, really, really detailed romhack. I don't say this in a negative way, though. If you're gonna make a fucking romhack of a game, you can do a lot worse than Bloodborne.

So, then. They're inviting the comparison. They want people to compare their experience playing Lies of P to their experience playing Bloodborne, because they explicitly copied the mood, combat, and formula. This isn't comparing CT to Cross, because those are two very different games. If CT is a panther, then Cross is a mushroom, where Bloodborne is a bird on an island and Lies of P is a bird on that same island who lives slightly more inland with a slightly longer beak.

So!

Combat: Bloodborne has the best combat of any game I've ever played. If I was going to make my dream videogame, I'd probably copy Bloodborne's combat system, too. The minor changes that Lies of P makes to the combat are just that, minor. Having to block in order to use the rally system is a shift toward encouraging a defensive playstyle and a straight player nerf, but by giving the player perfect blocks this nerf makes sense. Still, I don't think "basically bloodborne, but more defensive" is an upgrade over Bloodborne classic. Bloodborne's signature is that it's all offense, all the time, and you're always living on the knife edge. I'm not saying Lies of P isn't on the edge, but it does move away from that a bit and that's not a win in my book.

Structure: Hoo boy, this is the big one. Bloodborne has some non-linearity to it. Oftentimes you will have multiple paths or even zones to explore. Some areas and even entire zones are entirely optional. Not so in Lies of P. The game is made like Castlevania. Level 1 goes into level 2 and then level 3. Stuck on a boss? You can't leave and try some other boss and come back later. You are stuck on that boss.

It might be weird to hear me say this, because I'm actually a big proponent of linear design. I think the original Castlevania is an excellent example of how putting the player through a world that you KNOW will happen in order, no matter what, will make an experience that is crafted and thrilling. You don't have to worry about players approaching from other angles or at too high a level. You know exactly the player's path. Another game that did this perfectly to the point it's still talked about today is Half-Life. Linear is good, actually.

But the problem is that after coming from Bloodborne and especially Elden Ring that Lies of P just feels stifling, but worse than that:

The World: The World and mood and themes of Lies of P fuckin' rule. But the linearity makes it feel more like a videogame and less like a world you are exploring. You sacrifice immersion for linearity. I talked about this a little when I was discussing why Symphony of the Night is my favorite Igavania: despite probably being the worst "game" it's the most "world" of all of them. There are zones in SotN that you can just ignore. The critical path is actually really short. Not so in the newer Igavanias, which take you on a tour, piece by piece, of the whole castle. Game vs World.

Lies of P takes you on a tour. That's fine, but you do lose some of that sense of immersion and exploration.

The Mechanics: I'm actually a big fan of the tweaks to the mechanics. Separating the handles from the blades of the weapons is a really neat concept and I think is this game's best feature. Having your Legion Arm be your "spells" is also a really cool idea. I stuck with Wire (aka Deathgrip) because every time I would use it to pull a fucking molotov throwing puppet off a nearby roof I'd yell "GET OVER HERE!!!" and then uppercut

Separating armor pieces from appearance is always, always, always a good idea no matter what game. Now you can equip armor for stats and then dapper up your fashion whatever you want. In the year of our lord 2022 Elden Ring came out and it did not have transmog and that is a Sin that will be paid for in hell by Miyazaki. I mean, that's not why he'll be going to hell. That's because of Blighttown. But while he's there they might as well make him pay off the Sin of making a game in 2022 without fucking separating stats from appearance in armor.

Anyway, all the mechanics are fucking awesome. Full marks. Lies of P knocked it out of the park there.

The Translation: Uhg. this is the worst part of Lies of P, full stop. You can REALLY tell that the localization team struggled with this. I don't know if Korean is just harder to translate well or what, but some of the dialog is really awkward and strange, even for a Souls-like. And when your dialog is more awkward than actual literal Dark Souls dialog, you know you have a problem.

That being said, the fact that I'm talking about the translation being the worst problem this game has should clue you in how fucking good this game is.

Difficulty: On the whole, easier than Bloodborne. And that's probably a good thing. More frequent saves and shortcuts to saves to restore your health and estus, easier enemy design, more powerful weapon options and spell options. Still a hard game, of course. Lightning Dommy Mommy is a real ball buster.

The Boss Design: Yes, yes, yes. Appearance-wise they all rule really fucking hard. Mechanics wise they also rule. I broke a dude's sword by chain perfect blocking him and it carried over to a later boss fight with him. Lol get wrecked idiot

The bosses do flurries of attacks like nobody's business but you've got the tools to handle it. You can double-dodge, a first in souls-likes I've played, which means that if you dodge too early you can just interrupt your dodge to re-dodge like a double jump to correct for the mistake. Absolutely feels great. You've also got blocking and perfect guarding and this gives you a lot of options. To make up for this, bosses attack like it's going out of style, and that creates this really good feel, like "holy shit this boss is insane but I'm a badass with the tools to handle it" and that's EXACTLY what you want in a game. You feel extremely powerful and badass but at the same time so does everything else, so you still feel great when you conquer your enemies.

The Story: The Story was really good! It's told in a much more straightforward way than any of the Miyazaki souls games and that's actually kinda how I prefer it. I know everyone loves reading every item description and piecing together a story from them, still missing 70% but then watching the vaatividya about the story to understand, but sometimes I just want to be told a good story. I also liked the lie/truth system a lot. It subverts what you would expect in that the Lies are usually the kinder and more heroic option. But not always, which is great as it really makes you consider each choice. I'm actually curious what some of the other options would have led to! Also warning: story is very sad. Unfortunately some of the story is negatively impacted by the rough translation to English. Again, is Korean just harder to translate? I'm not sure.

Overall:

If Bloodborne is a 10 (and it is) then Lies of P is a 9. Minus .5 for encouraging more defensive combat, minus a full point for being so linear that it broke my immersion and took away from the world, and plus .5 for some really great mechanical ideas.

"Diet Bloodborne" is not an insult, but a compliment. Lies of P can proudly stand on its own with some original ideas and a great mood, tone, story and world.

But yeah, you invited comparison, and the OG is still better. Don't feel bad, though. You lost to the best.

[Friday]

wait nevermind I forgot you can pet the cat and even pick him up 11/10

[hngkong]

The James Webb Space Telescope has cast doubt on the fundamental age of the universe or we're missing something huge in terms of how galaxies are formed in early universal conditions, well either way we're missing something huge and every astronomer is having a massive crisis and nobody else gives a shit

Wait, seriously? Why am I hearing about this from a video game review?

[Friday]

Because it's boring to every single person who isn't an astronomer, and that includes the mainstream media. You can only get information about it from science youtuber channels.

To put it succinctly, the James Webb can see further than anything ever before by orders of magnitude, and we're seeing galaxies that are redshifted to the point that they're just around 500 millions years older than the Big Bang, and they're larger than the Milky Way. Which should be impossible given the conditions of the universe when it was that young. At first it was just one galaxy, but now it's up to like 10 examples, and they're expecting it to keep climbing.

Remember that the James Webb is very new. This is all information that is basically hot off the press.

What this means is, of course, is either the Universe is older than we think it is (which is insane and would fuck over a lot of established measuring tools) or our ideas of the nature and composition of the early universe are wrong (which is insane and would fuck over a lot of established measuring tools).

Now, this is being called a "crisis" for astronomers because it actually very much is. But the average person does not give a single fuck if the universe turns out to be actually 3 billion years older or whatever. Their reaction would probably be "why can't you just say the universe is actually 3 billion years older then" because they do not understand that we know how old the universe is by looking at background radiation and if our measurement of that is wrong than we have fundamentally made a huge error and so much shit is also wrong.

[Upthorn]

To put it succinctly, the James Webb can see further than anything ever before by orders of magnitude, and we're seeing galaxies that are redshifted to the point that they're just around 500 millions years older than the Big Bang, and they're larger than the Milky Way. Which should be impossible given the conditions of the universe when it was that young. At first it was just one galaxy, but now it's up to like 10 examples, and they're expecting it to keep climbing.

So the thing about this, is that our estimates of the size of distant galaxies is based on taking the combined brightness and then assuming that all galaxies have roughly the same distribution of star types (large, medium, small, etc) and it turns out that there's an economy of scale where a star that's twice as massive as the sun will outshine two stars that are equally massive as the sun.

TL;DR: the actual takeaway is that heavy stars were more likely to form in the early universe (which makes sense as matter was all a bit more squished together, making it easier for a gravitational mass to just pull more and more shit into it.)

Oh right, this topic had a topic.

Hello, and welcome to my review of Diet Bloodborne.

So I feel like tying regain to blocking was actually meant to help encourage parrying, since if you whiff a parry at least you can regain the health, right? As long as you were early and not late, (in which case DIE). Which is a good goal in a bloodborne style combat game because if you aren't engaging with the parry mechanic you're missing like 75% of the enemy design.

That said, I went into the game intending to engage with the parry mechanic, and never managed to retrain myself from mashing a whiffed parry to holding a whiffed parry, so I think it's a good goal poor execution kind of thing.

Also, I agree with you on the linearity except that I would dock it more than one point. One of the things I like most in this kind of game is exploring the world, and Lies of P just kinda falls on its face in that area. Especially since, as you mentioned, it's one thing you can do to release frustration when stuck on a boss. I got to King of Puppets, got stuck, put the game down for a month. Beat King of Puppets to soothe my ego, and then put the game down permanently because there was no world to explore.

[Mongrel]

Astronomers (and physicists) have been living with the unsolved mystery of Dark Matter for a couple decades now - what's one more inscrutable mystery?

[Niku]

(some spoilers)

i really like the linearity in lies of p simply because it's something the from games don't do and sometimes i do just wanna be railroaded through a story, like just run a train on me with whatever you got. but it is one of the things that makes it lesser than bloodborne, no question. i do like that it lets them also reframe the world itself as you go though, so that when you end up revisiting earlier area the apocalypse has now hit them, and that's fuckin cool.

agreed on the translation though: it makes it surprisingly hard to recognize some of the straightforward fun stuff the story reveals toward the end just because you're scratching your head over how the game is telling it to you (like how it's heavily implied antonia is the legendary stalker who inspired carlo and lampwick but also maybe she wasn't and it's super unclear??).

also the game loses ten million points by turning the dogfish/monstro into a mere off-screen submarine ride to the final area instead of BEING the final area inside a massive eldritch jabu jabu which would've been so much cooler than the lame, dull castle ruins that make up the actual final area. the aesthetics of the alchemist's isle are the biggest thumbs down i have against the game by far.

the game makes up many of those points by doing such a fucking cool job with "grimdark pinocchio" in the first place though by absolutely committing to it when it was and should have been just a total joke of an idea and it's why i'm so goddamn excited with where they're apparently going with things next.

anyway the most important question: did you get or did you see the ending where you give up your heart because goddamn

[Friday]

i lied like a motherfucker almost 100% of the time throughout the game and grew hair down to my ass, then wasn't a horrible monster to the blue fairy, so yeah i got it

and yeah coming back to earlier zones that were now overrun was really cool

honestly though Polendina just casually informing you that he was going to delete his sentience because he had no more reason to live after Antonia died, and then for the rest of the game he will only give his robotic greeting was the most soul crushing moment

edit: ohhh i just realized that you meant your actual literal heart, and not whatever happens in the ending I got with the blue fairy

no i have not seen it

[Niku]

it's a very good "bad end, try again with a friend"

also absolutely agreed with your spoiler. that kind of shit hits me real hard.

[aett]

Poppin' in just to say that Lies of P might just have been my 2023 GotY. I didn't know about it at all before launch, and only started seeing occasional praise a few months after that. I was subbed to Game Pass for a month to play through LaD Gaiden, but ended up spending most of that time with Lies of P.

When a game that I wasn't anticipating ends up being great, I tend to think it's even better than it is, because there was nothing for it to live up to.

Also, the ending scratched an itch that hasn't been scratched since the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics finished.

[Büge]

Also, the ending scratched an itch that hasn't been scratched since the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics finished.

The first time, or

[Friday]

When a game that I wasn't anticipating ends up being great, I tend to think it's even better than it is, because there was nothing for it to live up to.

Yeah I feel this. This happened to me most recently with Stray, which pretends to be a game about a cat knocking shit over to solve puzzles but is really a game about emotions knocking your heart over.

[aett]

Also, the ending scratched an itch that hasn't been scratched since the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics finished.

The first time, or

Every time. But especially the final time.

Yeah I feel this. This happened to me most recently with Stray, which pretends to be a game about a cat knocking shit over to solve puzzles but is really a game about emotions knocking your heart over.

I still need to play that.