People told me this was "the good one", the non-FromSoftware game to finally execute well on the formula, and I was ready to believe them. I found the "gritty steampunk fairy tale" theme a little tired but I was ready to give it another chance. I really was open to this game being good.

This game is not good.

The bitter irony is that the thing that's maybe hardest about aping Dark Souls is having a collection of fun, compelling, and distinctive boss fights, and that's the only thing this game does right. There are a few boring bosses and one that I think is actively bad, but the majority of the roster are legitimately very fun. The combat's emphasis on perfect guarding and limited support for dodging (including some moves that simply ignore iframes) means they lean pretty heavily towards rhythm memorization, but that's my preferred style anyway. And it's certainly not the only thing going on—the best fights are also about positioning and learning when you can get in what sort of attacks.

But as fun as the boss fights can be, the game surely makes you suffer between (and sometimes during!) them. The first, most egregious sin is the writing. The game is from a Korean dev, so it's tempting to lay the blame at the feet of the localizer, but I'm confident that the underlying writing is terrible. That's not to say that the localization is good—more on that below—but it's very clear that even if the prose were marvelous the concepts being conveyed are insipid, boring, and deeply unsubtle. Nowhere is this clearer than in the figure of Gemini (pronounced like "Jiminy", get it), whose entire role in the narrative is to explicitly describe things that were already completely clear from subtext in gratingly unskippable voice lines. But truly, nearly every line of dialog or lore writing in the game ranges from ham-fisted to outright nonsensical, so that even the lore and character moments that are compelling (and there aren't zero of those!) fall completely flat without any kind of supporting structure.

The writing isn't helped by one of the worst localizations I've ever seen that doesn't straight up break rules of spelling and grammar. Descriptions of the same thing use inconsistent wording, and descriptions of different things overlap. Idioms are misused or overused like someone cribbed writing notes from an 80s sitcom. Major mechanics have descriptions that are flat-out inaccurate to how the game behaves. If you want to understand how the game works, you need a wiki not because the game's descriptions are oblique and left to the player to explore, but because they're untrustworthy.

If you're thinking, "well if it's fun to play I can deal with skipping through the text", think again. Outside of boss fights (and even in them to a degree), the design sensibilities of this game are frequently thoughtless and haphazard. While the core combat mostly works for fighting large, strong enemies, it falls apart entirely for weaker mobs, which die in one or two hits without any resistance throughout the entire game. For a combat system built around the idea that you can essentially parry any attack, parrying is irrelevant to 90% of the respawning enemies. Compare to Sekiro, where even very early mobs won't let you just walk up and hit them until they die without blocking you and forcing you to engage in a microcosm of the mechanics used by the bosses.

The game is just full of blunders like that. The "fable meter", which is used for special weapon-specific attacks, becomes completely irrelevant two or three bosses in once you get an amulet that gives you a huge across-the-board damage boost when it's maxed out and so motivates you never to use your fable attacks. This is one of not two but three different equipment meters you have to keep track of during combat, all three of which are mostly irrelevant. There are some interesting ideas here, but they're all fumbled or half-assed.

So don't play Lies of P. If you must, find a mod that just throws you at the bosses with nothing in between but maybe some build management. And please pray that when there finally is a worthy disciple of FromSoftware's teachings I won't be so burnt out on these failed pretenders that I don't even bother to give it a glance.