While navigating through a blood-ridden, twisted world dominated by uncontrollable puppets, one hero’s quest to fight a plague-controlled world while finding his father is the objective. In a dark interpretation of “Pinocchio” by Carlo Collodi, “Lies of P” includes him fighting puppets created by his father who has gone rogue.
Similar to the original story, “Pinocchio” is a wooden boy, created by Geppetto, who is assured life as a human. Players take on the role of controlling Pinocchio, who embarks on a quest to locate his father in Krat. His primary objective is to uncover the reason behind the puppet rebellion against humanity and to eradicate the source of destruction they have inflicted. Through his exploration, Pinocchio discovers the origin of Ergo, the currency used in the game, which was unearthed beneath the city. His mission is to put an end to the chaos and devastation wrought by the rogue puppets in Krat.
The concept of “Lies” comes into play when you begin to interact with humans and other side characters who are looking for help. As P (the character similar to Pinocchio) speaks to others, their response heavily determines how the game progresses and affects the ending of the game.
As the player finishes the tutorial, you begin the real battle of combatting the uncontrollable puppets. The player uses the basic mechanics learned in the tutorial to fight puppets, while the puppets increase in difficulty. It becomes apparent very quickly that the puppets and bosses are considerably difficult to beat. Patience and skill must be elevated when combating these puppets as the player will spend a lot of time on each map fighting each puppet. The visual appeasement of the puppets and bosses is very intricate and detailed making the puppets interesting.
I mostly play games where patience isn’t needed, so this game proved difficult for me because progressing to different levels and city areas took time. It took me about 40 deaths to finally beat the first boss with patience being the only strategy. The fact that the game lacked the option to adjust the difficulty level made it excessively challenging and annoying. Writing this review is the only thing that kept me going, death after death.
The game menu has many customization options but offers little to no help with combat. The navigation of the game menu becomes increasingly challenging when resources and leveling up gain significance. As the player gains more Ergo, they can use it to upgrade weapons and even armor. However, there are so many sections and subsections to navigate through just to make a simple upgrade.
When fighting bigger puppets, the difficulty in parrying and dodging becomes another common issue. Parrying, the action of blocking at the right time to stun your enemy and then inflict damage, seems outright impossible when first attempting. Even when dodging, Pinocchio inflicts damage on the enemy, and it takes him several seconds at times to recover. This essentially causes the enemy to swing back faster than Pinocchio can, although you are the one inflicting damage.
Another issue I faced was the extremely distanced checkpoints. Essentially, every map, or portion of Kratz, has one checkpoint. Spending 20 minutes on a map and dying toward the end to fight the basic puppets again was a bit infuriating.
All in all, the overall concept is amazing. The graphics are nice, and the characters have a unique backstory. However, the difficulty of the game makes progressing in the game very difficult and the game becomes boring after dying to the same character over, and over again.
