You know, I’ve played quite a few souls-likes in
my time. Every time I have thoroughly beaten a FromSoftware souls game, souls-likes would
bridge the gap until the next proper souls game releases. There’s just something
about starting with essentially nothing, and being pitted against unimaginable horrors
or corrupt gods, eventually coming out on top. It seems straightforward enough, but there’s a
delicate balance that has to be achieved in order to make a good souls-like. In today’s breakdowns
(yes, plural), I’m looking at Lords of the Fallen, and Lies of P; two recent souls-likes
that show up, and show out, respectively. As always, to understand the state
of the game we’ve got to peel back the curtain and have a look at
the people that brought it to us, starting with the developers of Lords
of the Fallen… this might get confusing. Way back in December 2014, the executive producer
of the first Lords of the Fallen (2014), Tomasz Gop, confirmed the development of a sequel to the
game, which was dubbed Lords of the Fallen 2, for the time being. In May 2015, polish game developer
CI Games announced that the game would be released in 2017, and confirmed that German game developer
Deck13 Interactive, the lead developer of the first game, would not be involved. In 2017, Gop
revealed that LOTF2 was still nothing more than a concept, and that CI Games has significantly
reduced the development team along with the scope of the game itself following the underwhelming
release of Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3. In 2018, CI Games declared that NY-based developer
Defiant Studios would lead LOTF2’s development, and that they would clean-slate the development
in order to start from scratch. However, CI Games must’ve been having second thoughts
because, just one year later, CI Games terminated its contract with Defiant, deeming their work on
the game thus far to be "inadequate". In 2020, CI Games then founded a subsidiary, Hexworks,
and set them to task working on the game. The game was officially revealed by CI Games during
Gamescom 2022, renamed as “THE Lords of the Fallen”. It was then rebranded as simply Lords
of the Fallen in March 2023 in order to properly reflect the game's status as a reboot. To give
you a sense of just how ambitious Hexworks was, executive producer Saul Gascon basically said
the studio’s objective was to be "the second reference [after FromSoftware]" for the Soulsborne
genre". A lofty goal to be sure. To minimize confusion, I’m going to call the game Lords of
the Fallen 2 for the remainder of this video. Now, I feel that a souls-like should be able to
borrow the general structure of a souls game, and build upon it in order to establish its own
identity. Deck13’s The Surge is a great example; it took the high-difficulty semi-open
world, complete with sparse checkpoints, area shortcuts and a plethora of weapons/armor
to choose from, and draped it in a corporatized, sci-fi aesthetic that also incorporates that
feeling of hopelessness and despair through the game’s many subplots, and the overall atmosphere,
that you’d expect from a proper soulsborne title. I remember the first Lords of the Fallen was one
of the PlayStation+ free games from September 2016. I was much less discerning about what games
I played back then, but I knew one thing for sure: Lords of the Fallen did not look to be
worth any amount of money. Naturally, when I got the game for free, I figured I had
nothing to lose, so I gave it a go. I recognized that the game was rough and unpolished,
but I still enjoyed it for what it was. In Lords of the Fallen 2, all of the Dark Souls
“staples” are present: choose a class to start the game as, which determines your starting
level, stats, weapons, armor, accessories, and items. Learn the basics of the game through
fighting a handful of enemies, and use those basics to beat one or two bosses before making
it to the main hub of the game. After that, gain a base understanding of the abysmal state of
the world, and what you’re going to do about it; exploring for new weapons, armor and items,
fighting small monsters, big monsters, and gigantic monsters, all of which pose roughly
the same amount of threat to your livelihood, and learning their attack patterns through many
straight-up unwarranted or aggravating deaths. Eventually, through sweat, tears, and all the
cursing you’ve done at your TV, the skills you develop both as the player and as your character
will be enough to get you to the grand finale, where you fight the most imposing boss thus
far. Lastly, you finally complete the game, and feel a positively refreshing sense
of accomplishment and a well-deserved sense of smug superiority wash over you;
then you enter NG+ and do it all again. As far as the aesthetic and atmosphere, Lords
of the Fallen 2 is very much “knights and magic with a modest dose of body horror, in a
once proud kingdom now reduced to rubble and overrun with unholy abominations”, and I’m
very much on board with that. Style-wise, it sits somewhere between Blasphemous and Agony. So,
what sets the game apart from other souls-likes? One mechanic that stands above all else in the
game is the Umbral Lantern. The Umbral Lantern is essentially a doorway; on one side is Axiom,
the physical plane where you spend most of your time by default; on the other side, is Umbral,
the death plane, and your understanding of the two worlds is crucial to making it anywhere
in the game. In Axiom, things operate as you’d expect a souls game to: explore, kill enemies,
and find items. When you cross into Umbral, whether you wanted to, or because you died while
in Axiom, you’ll encounter all the enemies that are still alive in Axiom, on top of the enemies
that only exist in Umbral, and the additional enemies that will spawn while you are in Umbral.
Basically, the longer you stay in Umbral, the more frequently additional enemies will
spawn, and the more dangerous these additional enemies will be. If you stay far too long,
something called the Crimson Ritual will begin, where some overpowered enemy in red robes
will pursue you no matter how far you go, and attempt to forcefully remove you from
Umbral, as in kill you. When you die, you respawn at the nearest Ancient Vestige, this
game's equivalent of a bonfire, and your vigor, this game's equivalent of souls, is left with
the enemy that killed you. Fortunately, you can make good use of the Axiom/Umbral transition
during boss battles, since you’ll essentially get two “lives” in every boss fight. Unfortunately,
sustaining damage in Umbral applies Wither to your health, turning a portion of your health bar gray,
requiring you to deal damage to any enemy in order to gain that withered health back without using
an item. Also unfortunately, your Sanguinarix, which is your primary method of healing, only
heals half as well in Umbral as it would in Axiom. Two last tidbits about the Umbral realm and the
Umbral Lantern; one, some areas in Axiom can only be progressed through using obstacles or bridges
within the Umbral realm. If you see a gathering of white moths somewhere, shine your Umbral Lantern
on that spot to reveal something you should interact with or find a way to remove in the
Umbral realm. Be careful not to look into Umbral for too long, because umbral enemies can see you
while you’re looking around, and if they hit you while you are shining the Lantern, you’ll get
dragged into the Umbral realm against your will. You can manually enter Umbral whenever you want
via the Lantern, but to return to Axiom without dying, you’ll have to use the Rest function at any
Vestige, or find an Emergence Effigy, which are found in a limited number in each area. The other
thing, if it’s been a while since you’ve seen a Vestige, look for an Umbral flowerbed. When you’re
near one, you’ll see vines decorated with white flowers on the ground, and your Umbral Lantern
icon will flash. You can use an item called a Vestige Seedling, which can be found or bought
throughout your adventure, to plant a Vestige in that flowerbed, which can do everything a normal
Vestige can. You can only have one planted Vestige active at a time, and because you really don’t
know when the next real Vestige or area shortcut will happen, you’re almost guaranteed to waste
your Vestige Seedlings every time. Your Umbral Lantern and Sanguinarix can be upgraded to improve
their functionality and benefits, so as long as you’re exploring and picking up every item you
see, you’ll have both fully upgraded in no time. Lords of the Fallen 2’s combat, while being better
than the previous game, still has its issues. Controls are much more responsive than the first
game, which feels so, so good; but since they made the game noticeably more fast-paced than its
predecessor, it feels… floaty. Enemy weapon swings will sometimes hit you even though they shouldn’t
because their attack swings will either slide them 20 feet to connect with you, or the attack
itself will remain active even when the attack is over. I feel like that’s another a souls’ staple:
dying, and then saying something to the effect of “How the fuck did that hit me?” I feel like
this was how the devs planned to make players really pay attention to enemy attack patterns and
force the player to utilize the i-frames you get during dodges, or to use the parry system
(which I still haven’t really mastered). A mechanic I tried to like is the Weapon Combo
mechanic where, whether you’re dual-wielding two different weapons or going from a one-handed
grip to a two-handed grip on a weapon, you can change between the two, mid-combo, and use some
cool-looking combination moves. The caveat is, these moves take a lot of stamina, and
are damn near impossible to cancel out of, leaving you wide open to attack. Two-handing a
weapon typically hits harder and has an easier time staggering enemies than single-handing
or dual-wielding weapons. Not to mention, the more clean and precise nature of two-handing
a weapon makes it easier to work in your attacks between an enemy’s attacks, and be able to
stop at a second’s notice to dodge or parry, because dual-wielding attack combos can easily
get away from you, and get you killed. Just like in Dark Souls, your ability to actually use
a weapon or be effective with it depends on the stat requirements of that weapon in order
to wield it properly, and the stat-scaling of the weapon. Remember, you want to use weapons
that scale with stats you have an abundance of. There were quite a few parts of Lords
of the Fallen 2 that garnered criticism, such as the density of enemies in a lot of
the areas of the game, the amount of health the constantly-spawning Umbral enemies
have, graphical glitches, stuttering, and things like that. Since the game’s release,
Hexworks has been hard at work squashing bugs and tweaking things in order to ensure the game
is, you know, playable, and I can confirm it has gotten a bit better to play since launch. Enemy
density was one of my main gripes about the game; a true souls game may have one or two dozen
enemies between one bonfire and the next, but Lords of the Fallen has enemies left
right and center, up high and down low, which made my initial playthrough feel like
a tiring slog through each and every area I visited. After about 20 hours, I was praying
for the end. Instead of each section of the game getting me excited about what weapons and armor
I would find, or what the next area might bring, the number of enemies I would have to
fight through got to be so exhausting that, after a certain point, I just ran around them all
in order to make some kind of meaningful progress. Less of a bug, and more of a personal grievance
of mine, is the game’s navigation. You typically don’t get any kind of map in a soulsborne game.
Lords of the Fallen 2 decided to give you a “map” for each area, but it’s more akin to a “greatest
hits” collage of sketches of statues or points of interest in the area; so, not a map at all.
Then, there’s the Fast Travel that you can do between Vestiges. Each Vestige location will
have the name of the Vestige, an accompanying “Location Name” that goes with it, a picture of
where the Vestige sits, and a little paragraph that fleshes out the relationship of that Vestige
to that location. All of that is fine and dandy, but the few times I needed to go to an exact
location, I could never figure out what Vestige would get me the closest to where I needed
to be. This was especially frustrating when I had to locate an NPC that wandered off for
a questline, or when I had to find the sixth and final Beacon to cleanse in the main story,
because all you can do is get to higher ground, look out over the horizon to see what direction
the red skybeam is in, and then try to figure out which Vestige you’ve previously visited is
closest to the beacon you’re trying to get to. Lastly, the Lock-On function, which is
supposed to ensure your attacks target the specific enemy you want to attack, is very
finicky. It seems to prioritize enemies far away from you rather than the enemy directly in
front of you, and that’s just… not correct. Oh, there’s also this game’s version of dark
souls’ “covenants”, which essentially boil down to “Kill players in PvP or kill bosses
in Co-op to gain a special currency to add to the community bank and unlock special
gear”. I did my first playthrough entirely solo just to prove to myself that I could,
and in NG+ I decided to give Co-op a shot. I joined someone’s game and we just ran
around doing what you’d usually do solo; killing what needs to be killed, and trying not
to lose our own lives in the process. The host of the session has control over access to Umbral,
using Emergence Effigies, opening path shortcuts and picking up once-per-playthrough loot, but
everyone gets vigor and any items dropped by slain enemies. Usually in a souls game when you
die in co-op you get booted back to your own world with whatever vigor you gained. In this
game, you just respawn along with the host, and do the walk of shame back to wherever you guys
died. It’s nice to have someone to suffer with. If you beat Lords of the Fallen 2, which took
me roughly 40 hours to do, you get the option to either start the harder NG+1, with all your
items and character level, OR restart the base difficulty playthrough, with all your items and
character level. The thing that really makes NG+ harder, but also easier, is that the number
of Ancient Vestiges are noticeably reduced, forcing you to rely more and more on Vestige
Seedlings. Whatever difficulty that provides, that still means you’ll be less
likely to use them unnecessarily. In my own opinion, I think that pulling the game
from Deck13, the developers of the first Lords of the Fallen, was the worst thing that could’ve
happened to the reboot; if anyone would have truly understood where the first game lacked,
and how it could be improved, it would’ve been Deck13. The Umbral realm and the Lantern were
definitely unique additions to the tried-and-true souls formula, but that’s where I feel this
game’s individuality ends. Either way, with the fixes and changes still to come, and the free
additional content that’s on the way, Hexworks is doing their best to round out the experience
and keep players coming back. I wish them luck. On to our next subject. Lies of
P was announced on May 19, 2021, by South Korean developer and publisher NeoWiz.
Director Ji-Won Choi states the game had been in development for about three years, and
the studio chose Pinocchio as the theme in order to appeal to a wider fanbase. Ji-Won Choi
notes that the original story of Pinnochio has a "dark" tone and "diverse backgrounds" that the
staff could naturally use. They chose to set the game in a Bell-Epoque-esque environment in order
to properly "encapsulate a city's transformation from opulence to ruin" and convey "a period of
unparalleled cultural and artistic prosperity, yet severe darkness and negativity".
Right off the bat, they nailed a solid aesthetic choice and the accompanying
atmosphere. Now, what did they do with it? Lies of P starts you off by having you select a
“combat style”, which they are, but also aren’t. I’ll explain more in a second. Basically, you
can start strong and slow with a two-hand sword, lighter and quicker with a Rapier, or
a saber which is more balanced between the two. I started with the saber, just in case I
needed to pivot stat-wise later on down the line. Once you select how you want to start, it’ll
only take you maybe an hour or two at most, to finish the starting sections; learning
all the basics, and fighting your first real boss, and then you end up at the main hub, Hotel Krat.
That being said, the game doesn’t really begin until you defeat Archbishop Andreus, who
is the fourth boss of the game. By then, you should know how you want to play the
game, where you want your stats to be, what weapons you want to use, and so on. I’ll
tell you hwhat, once I got immersed in the game, it truly felt like Lies of P is the closest
we’re going to get to Bloodborne on PC (it’s available on PlayStation and Xbox
too, but my point still stands). Anyway, there are two unique elements
in Lies of P which your character, Timothee Chalamet, can use to
overcome any and all threats: your Legion Arm, and your choice of weapon.
Stat-scaling is also a mechanic in this game, but the good news is you can wield any weapon
you find right away, since there’s no minimum stat requirements to do so. Weapons can be found or bought as one
assembled weapon. Lies of P sees weapons as having two parts: the handle, and the
“blade”. A little ways into the game, you will find a tool you can bring to
the blacksmith girl back at the Hotel, which will allow her to disassemble the weapon;
separate blade from handle. Do this to a bunch of weapons, and what do you have? Blades
and Handles you can mix and match at will. It doesn’t let you get as creative as you’d hope,
but it’s still fun if you want to try some wacky weapon and handle combinations, like a knife
blade on a greatsword handle. Your choice of Handle determines how you will hold the weapon,
how you will swing the weapon, and what stats the weapon will scale with. Your choice of Blade
determines how slow or quick the weapon swing or thrust will be, the damage type (since some
blades have inherent elements), and the blade is also the part you upgrade in order to strengthen
the attack power of the weapon, once you have the materials to do so. This brings us to Fable Arts.
Your weapon’s blade and handle each have an innate Fable Art that you can use, shown on the lower
right, and will show you how much of your Fable Gauge is required to use the Fable Art. Some Fable
Arts can buff you, some will do a special attack, some will shield you from damage or provide a
window of time you can use to parry an enemy’s attacks. Fable Arts cannot be moved from one blade
to another, or one handle to another, but it still provides another layer to the mixing-and-matching
of blades and handles that you can do. Next, we have the Legion Arm. As you
might already know, Timothee Chalamet is Geppetto’s finest puppet, appearing
almost human, apart from his left arm, which is very much still puppet-like.
You begin with a very rudimentary Legion Arm that can do a simple punch (I never
used it) and, after the starting section, you are made aware of more types of Legion
Arms you will come to possess once you find the necessary item to unlock them. There’s only
a handful to choose from, but pretty much all of them have a role that they fill. The Fire one is
good for fleshy enemies like creatures or humans, the Puppet String is good for yanking enemies to
you or yourself to them, the Acid or Electric arms are good for killing inorganic enemies like
puppets, and so on. My favorite is the Aegis, because it looks dope, and a shield that explodes
once an enemy touches it is pretty handy. Actually, I lied, there are four unique elements
to the game. Number three is the P-Organ system. The P-Organ is basically a skill tree of
significant upgrades, each with two or more slots that must be filled with Quartz in order to
activate the upgrade; upgrades can do things like change how your dodge works, make parries easier
to pull off, add additional usable item slots, add additional pulse cells (which are your primary
method of healing), or even add another Legion Arm slot. Slotting Quartz also applies a lesser,
but still very useful, passive upgrade to greatly assist you in combat, like increasing the
amount that pulse cells heal, making consumable buffs last longer, or providing buffs when your
weapon durability hits certain thresholds. Yes, weapons have durability, and you are given
a grindstone to fix your weapons on the fly, but not only is it never a big deal, but there
are P-Organ upgrades and Amulets that make it even less of an issue, so don’t worry about
it. Whether you’re just tossing in a Quartz, or activating a whole upgrade, it’s still going
to make a big difference in combat, so try to make smart choices depending on your play style.
Should your play style change down the line, you eventually get the chance to reset your P-Organ
and re-allocate your Quartz however you like. The last unique element of Lies of P, and perhaps
the most important: your Lies. Puppets are not allowed to lie, which is the Fourth Law of the
Grand Covenant, essentially a rulebook which gets imprinted within all Automated Puppets
once they are constructed. Timothee is, as everyone keeps saying, a very special boy,
because he is able to Lie. Dialogue with different characters will sometimes make you choose between
a direct and cold choice, basically the truth; or, an attempt to spare a person’s feelings by
obscuring the truth, basically a lie. The more Timothee lies, the more his body will change,
and the more human he will appear to others; the most prominent change being his hair. Not
to mention, I was annoyed that this cat that lives in the Hotel would NEVER let me pet him,
only to realize it doesn’t let puppets pet him. Oh, I mentioned Amulets earlier; Timothee can
equip Amulets and install Defense Parts to provide more benefits in combat. Amulets
can provide bonuses like increases to certain stats or things like gradual health
regeneration, and Defense Parts can provide, you guessed it, Defense, against certain types
of damage. Amulets, Defense Parts, Weapons and Legion Arms all have weights which need to be
accounted for so you don’t become over-encumbered. Combat in Lies of P is slow and methodical.
Every attack hurts, and you will be punished if you panic-roll away from enemies. You can
Guard with any weapon, which has you take a bit of actual damage and something creatively called
Guard Regain, which is health that you lost due to guarding, that can be regained by attacking
the enemy. If you guard at the perfect time, you initiate a Perfect Guard, which negates all damage
you would have taken, instead just reducing your Stamina. Perfect Guards, parries via Fable Arts,
and attacks of any kind wear down enemies and, once their health bar flashes a white border,
hit them with a heavy attack to Stagger them, which then opens them up to a Fatal Attack,
dealing massive damage. Each weapon blade has its own Stagger attack, with heavier blades
having more and lighter blades having less. Dodges have I-frames, so you can side step around
earth-shattering attacks once you know them. When enemies glow red prior to attack, I-frames will
not work, so you will need to Perfect Guard, Parry, or straight-up run out of range of the
attack. As for how the combat mechanics flow together, once you know the ins and outs of your
weapon, and have a basic understanding of enemy attacks, you’ll be okay. Oh, before I forget:
in this game, as well as Lords of the Fallen 2, walls or unbreakable obstacles will interrupt
your weapon swings, and it will get you killed. Surprisingly, it only happened once or twice
in Lords of the Fallen since most attacks whiff through walls anyway but, in Lies of P,
if you do a wide swing in a narrow corridor, your attack will bounce off the wall, but
the enemy’s attacks will not, so be careful. There is currently no co-op in Lies of P; I’m
saying “currently” because I remember when Ghost of Tsushima, a single-player game, sprung
a whole-ass co-op expansion out of thin air that time. If you need help on a Boss, you can use Star
Fragments, which you can find all over the place, to summon a Specter to fight alongside you. It’s
essentially a bot version of you that’s more of a distraction for the boss than anything else.
As with any co-op in a souls-like boss battle, it makes it harder to tell who the boss is aiming
their attack swings at, so I typically run solo. The nice part is that, if you die in a boss fight,
your Ergo, which is this game’s version of souls, will be dropped outside the boss room door, and
that is a very welcome change from the norm. An unwelcome change is that for every time you
get hit prior to picking up your dropped Ergo, you lose a portion of your dropped Ergo;
meaning, you can either run straight to your dropped Ergo to get it all back, or take
your time and kill whatever stands between you and your dropped Ergo, having that much more of
it when you finally recover what you dropped. Since I mentioned the poor navigation and
sense of direction in Lords of the Fallen 2, I feel compelled to discuss how much better it is
in Lies of P. The bonfires in Lies of P are called Stargazers, which you can use to rest and recover,
switch Legion Arms, and a bunch of other things; namely: Fast Travel to other Stargazers. The
Stargazers are neatly categorized by region, given a name, and a picture for reference.
Not once did I not know where I was going, whether I was walking or Fast-Traveling. On top of
that, if you need to talk to a specific NPC that is not at the Hotel, or a Quest Item needs you to
go to a certain location, an icon showing the NPC or the Quest Item will be placed next to the name
of the Stargazer your person or place is closest to. It’s so simple, yet so, so significant.
Dark Souls could even benefit from that. I took my sweet time in Lies of P,
finding all the equipment I could, completing all the quests I could, and
enjoying every bit of it. with my first playthrough completed after 38 hours. There is
a NG+ mode, that you can start directly after, where everything carries over except for key
items and the Supply Boxes you can give to the merchants at the Hotel to unlock more items to
buy. You also gain access to an additional group of P-Organ upgrades to unlock, or you can reset
your P-Organ entirely for an added challenge. Remember that Spongebob episode where
King Neptune made a platter of like 100 Krabby Patties that were all bland, but
Spongebob took all that time and care to make that one single perfect Krabby
Patty? Lies of P is that Krabby Patty. I can’t call Lords of the Fallen 2 a bad game,
but I can’t recommend it either. Whether it’s by design or by accident, Lords of the Fallen
is bigger, with 171 weapons, 32 shields, 88 armor sets, 64 magic spells, and a huge world
to run around in, but it can’t replace the heart and soul of a well-thought-out game, much less a
well-thought-out souls-like. It’s quantity over quality, and Lords of the Fallen 2 does not,
to me, have enough quality. On the other hand, Lies of P is smaller in scale, and paced
a little more slowly; there’s a smaller number of areas to run around in, a modest
number of weapons and equipment to find, a small collection of outfits to choose from, and
less enemies to worry about, but the fewer options give rise to a much more refined experience
since each weapon, legion arm, trash enemy, or big boss, was crafted with a clear purpose in
mind, and everything comes together masterfully. Both games have their distinct positives and
negatives; but, at this point in time, Lords of the Fallen has more negatives than positives, and
I feel like that is the most objective conclusion I can draw after having played both that and Lies
of P from start to finish. Like I said earlier, I really think Lords of the Fallen 2 was
doomed once development was taken from Deck13, with the vision of the end product being clouded
more and more each time the project got tossed to a different studio. If being better than Lords
of the Fallen 1 was the bare minimum goal, I would say they nailed it, however any
accolades beyond that are up for debate. but, that’s just my two cents. Lords of
the Fallen and Lies of P are both available now on the PlayStations, the Xboxes,
and PC. They were both just on sale, so I’m sure they’ll be marked down again soon.
Lies of P is worth every penny, but if I were you, I would wait for Lords of the Fallen to go
on sale again. If you enjoyed the video, make sure to leave a Like, and Subscribe if you
want to see more. This has been your slayer of Lords and master Puppeteer, CygnusJason,
and I will catch you all on the Game Side.
