I started Lies of P late, which is a condition in these games. As soon as you enter magazines, communities and networks, you quickly find feedback from the first players. The one from the Round8 game became clear to me quickly: They called it one of the most difficult games in the Souls formula, which is not saying something, taking into account the fifteen years that we have been playing this type of games under our belt.
In particular, a few bosses were mentioned as really tough, to the point that many reviews have called him unfair and today the Korean studio has released a patch that reduces the health and chance of stuns of some bosses and enemies. So, with all this, I started to get curious not only about the game, but the reasons why many players were talking about it so much. Today with the game finished (and the bosses defeated without the help of NPCs) I think I have a clearer idea why.
The first thing to say is that the criticisms seem respectable to me. We are not talking about players who have never approached this formula. It has been confirmed that 87% of Lies of P players have played Souls-type games previously and therefore come with a degree of experience. Come on, it’s not the eternal debate about whether these games should have an easy difficulty mode or anything like that.
The point is that I don’t think the problem with Lies of P’s difficulty lies in the bosses themselves, as some players or even the team, who have altered them in patches, seem to indicate. Yes, it is true that there are some enemies who have an exaggerated life bar and one, the one at the end of the opera stage, not to be explicit, I played before the patch and it seemed to me to be the most representative of all this. But, all in all, I think the challenge of Lies of P is not so much in the patterns of the enemies as in their Defense mechanics: the parry and the dodge.
Perfectly…balanced?
The studio has created the most closed windows of opportunity I have seen in a long time. They are more so than games like Sekiro, Wo Long or any of the Platinum Games games. The famous dodge from Bloodborne, for example, contains few frames of invulnerability (the famous i-frames), while the parry has to be nailed at a very precise moment at the risk of not absorbing the damage. Can it be argued that the Souls’ parry was also tight? You can, but (except in rare cases like Gwyn) the game was not made to necessarily pass the bosses with this mechanic, while Bloodborne and Sekiro contain a much wider frame window.
Several more factors are added to all this. What enemies are constant attacking machines. When I switched to a faster build, and especially when I got the katana in the game, I did much better than with a heavy weapon, since most bosses keep attacking constantly. This forces you to play very safely or face them willing to parry everything they throw at you. As if that were not enough, the game loves feints. There are few bosses who don’t do them. The problem with feinting abuse is that it generates an arrhythmic defense, you cannot be guided by your instincts. The feints that FromSoftware began to use were very striking, especially in Elden Ring, but they should not be abused. Sekiro, for example, is a music sheet– The game sends cues in animations, sounds, and visuals so you know exactly when to block. Lies of P, willfully, sounds like an out-of-tune symphony. Be careful, I don’t want to say that this is always bad, but it is everything seems to be designed so that you make mistakes.
There are two ways to think about this. The personal opinion, of course, is the opinion of each player and respectable. To me, for example, it seems like an unnecessarily difficult game because the balance between risk and reward is somewhat imbalanced. You play a lot and win very little, since you don’t even have any information about how much you are breaking your stance when doing a parry, for example, since the stun bar is invisible.
But beyond personal opinion, there is an effect that this approach to design produces: on the fine line that separates GitGud of the pattern learning, Lies of P opts for the former. It’s a game that rewards the stubborn, not the observant. The observer can study enemy patterns and know how to counter them. He can make use of secondary attacks, take advantage of errors and windows of opportunity, adjust his strategy or change it radically… The Git Gud only relies on one thing: improve your response time to a mechanic. It reminds me, for example, of training in a fighting game until you learn a complicated combo perfectly. With some tough bosses, Lies of P wants you to learn to parry on cue or die. No middle ground.
There is an enemy that makes a nightmarish attack on you, with an exaggerated number of hits. He reminded me of the famous attack of Malenia, the one that it is better not to catch you close because it is practically unblockable and will take all your life. The difference is that here you will not be able to escape from this attack; You have to succeed with the parry or the dodge to the point of feeling like Daigo in the famous Street Fighter III combat. This attack sums up a lot of what Lies of P can be. Of course, it’s not an impossible game. But something strange also happens: Lies of P is probably one of the best soulslikes that have come out, but the best. And leaning towards that demand in the response instead of learning and the opportunity will cause many people to miss it and not discover all its benefits and the bright future that, as its epilogue ventures, it can have.
