If you have to copy something, it might as well be a masterpiece. That seems to be the central idea behind it Lies or P, a new ‘Soulsborne’ action game from South Korea’s Round8 Studio. Named after Dark Souls and Bloodborne, two games from the internationally beloved studio FromSoftware. And right the latterconsidered by many to be the second best game From ever made, is imitated very blindly here.
He must have his own twist in the story: this is a dark retelling of The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, which takes place during the Belle Époque (late nineteenth century) in the fictional city of Krat. You wake up as doll P, a robot that surprisingly resembles the American actor Timothée Chalamet, and encounters artificial intelligence Gemini (pronounced Jiminy, the name of the cricket in the English Disney film adaptation of Pinocchio).
To lie
P’s task, with the help of Gemini and the blue fairy Sophia, is to save his creator Geppetto from the rogue robot dolls that have the entire city in their grip. P’s – and Lies or P‘s – trump: while the other puppets are bound by strict rules about lying, he can tell lies.
The latter is mainly reflected in the various storylines in which the doll can choose to lie at a single moment. How and whether you lie determines how human the doll gradually becomes. But there are long passages in which lying is not discussed at all, and Lies or P mainly looks like a cheaper version of Bloodborne, complete with chimney sweep monsters and dark Victorian streets and crumbling cathedrals. As P you walk through the streets of Krat, fighting smaller enemies, looking for objects and ‘Stargazers’ that you can use as rest and travel points.
If you die, you wake up at the last Stargazer and you have to collect all the ‘Ergo’ points you won at the place where you died. If you die again before you find them, they disappear forever. So far so good: Round8 manages to recreate these basic elements of the genre very well, and although the environments look familiar, there are plenty of interesting secrets and surprises to be found. As long as you can explore and talk to the people of Krat, there is little to complain about.
Also read about Soulsbornes: ‘The hardest game ever’ – why would you do that to yourself?
But it is precisely in one of the most important parts of Soulsborne, the boss battles, that things go wrong. Where Bloodborne serves us unreal, beautifully grotesque monsters to clean, dark orchestral music Lies or P too often uninspired blocks and bobble boxes that sometimes attack erratically to standard music. FromSoftware perfected the feeling that the fault lies with your reflexes when things go wrong; Round8 is stuck on the feeling that perhaps you should have put just a few more grenades in your pockets.
While Lies or P is a beautifully creative use of its weapon system: you can unscrew the blade of each weapon from the rest and exchange these parts, so that a large sword, for example, can turn into a spear with a remarkably wide blade. The search for the right combination, mastering that spear-sword, should have felt crucial. But it never gets to that point. Lies or P never equals the masterpiece it copies – a missed opportunity.