Lies of P recently released a surprisingly lengthy demo alongside its official release date reveal, and there is a lot to unpack from what is now playable before the game’s launch in September. Many quality-of-life features are great to see, including Lies of P’s equivalent of Dark Souls’ Homeward Bone and the early ability to warp to-and-from Stargazers. However, some features are seemingly made obsolete with infinite-use items like the Grinder, which makes an otherwise looming threat of weapon durability an afterthought if players can remember to use it often.
Many of these features are directly inspired by similar—if not identical—features in FromSoftware games. One of the features it draws from Bloodborne in particular allows the player to replenish damage sustained to their puppet protagonist’s health bar, though Lies of P’s implementation of this is largely different. Players do have an opportunity to strike back immediately at enemies to recuperate that health, but that will likely be what players are doing regardless of whether it is ideal or not because blocking and dodging are currently detrimental and difficult to manage well in combat.
Lies of P’s Chip Damage Punishes Its Blocks and Rewards Its Parries
Lies of P’s demo introduces players to three distinct starting builds that all come with a different starting weapon, though each of them consists of a sword blade and handle. It is unknown if all weapons in Lies of P will allow players to block and parry as these swords do, but time spent with either of these swords in the demo reveals that being able to block might not mean it is always better to do so when players are backed into a corner.
Blocking is ill-advised unless players are intending to parry because they will still suffer a great deal of chip damage if they ordinarily block any kind of attack. Chip damage refers to the health that is whittled or chipped away from the player’s life bar while guarding as opposed to how much damage they take when not guarding, and in Lies of P it seems like chip damage is devastating.
Lies of P’s parries are called Perfect Guards, and while being able to perform these Perfect Guards reliably is fantastic because it prevents the player from taking any chip damage, any mistimed parries become regular blocks that will still hit the player for a load of life lost, especially when trying to learn proper parry timing for larger enemies and bosses. This wouldn’t be a huge concern if not for how few other options players have in combat, particularly considering how stiff and unsatisfying the game’s dodge currently is.
Dodging only gives the player a tiny bit of distance and the recovery frames that follow them are easy for enemies to punish with many attacks already reaching the player regardless of how far they are. If neither blocking nor dodging is reliably viable in Lies of P, then that puts players in an unfortunate position of having to eke their way through tight parry window timing in order to learn when it is ideal to parry or dodge, but blocking alone never seems like an option that players should depend on. The demo gave insight into P-Organ upgrades where it looks like a double-dash can be unlocked, which hopefully means that the dodge won’t always feel short and slow.
Chip damage can also hopefully be toned down through subsequent upgrades, but it would be great to see improvements made to the dodge and chip damage for Lies of P’s launch this September if any feedback from the demo was intended to inspire some late tweaks to its gameplay before release. Otherwise, severe chip damage and initially restrictive dodges might simply be a learning curve that players have the demo to adapt to.
Lies of P launches on September 19, 2023, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
