Lies of P: Complete Edition review for Nintendo Switch 2

Created by developer Round8 Studios in September 2023, Lies of P is a souls-like game very loosely based on The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. This version includes the DLC Overture to make nice all-in-one package. At the time of this writing, the Switch 2 price point makes it the best value on both the base game and the DLC together. If you haven’t picked up Lies of P yet, is this a good version to stick your nose in?

Lies of P takes place in the once-grand city of Krat, a gloomy metropolis now crumbling under the weight of catastrophe. Like most Souls-style games, it does not hand you the full story up front, instead letting you piece together the world through scattered clues, eerie environments, and brief story moments. After completing the tutorial area, a short video gives you a glimpse of what has happened, but the details remain intentionally hazy.

All you really know is that most humans are dead, apparently at the hands of out-of-control automated Puppets. These Puppets are basically 19th century robots, originally invented to make human lives easier before everything went horribly wrong. Pretty sure that’s the start of every sci-fi dystopian movie.

Those familiar with Soul-likes will be instantly at home. Hit points and stamina drives much of the combat, each swing of your weapon reduces your stamina, and each block reduces both health and stamina. What is a little different here is that when you counter strike after a blocked attack, you gain the health back that you lost while blocking. This creates a tension of needing to strike while you can still regenerate but not be so careless that you are hit again.

Weapons are more customizable than normal here. Each regular weapon consists of two parts, the handle and the blade. The blade affects the damage and damage types of the weapons while the handle is what gives you the move set for the weapon. You want to wield a dagger like a sword? Put a dagger blade on a sword handle. You want to create a polearm, put a pole handle on a sword. There are a bunch of different combinations that can be used.

On your off hand, you can equip legion arms. These are special arms that do different types of attacks. One of the first ones you get is the puppet string. It is a ranged weapon that, when hits its target, does a little damage and pulls the enemy towards you. It doesn’t do a lot of damage, but it has a lot of utility because of it. There are several different legion arms in the game, each one does something unique.

The difficulty of the game is on par with most Souls games. Punishing if you just mash buttons, but manageable when fighting regular enemies. I died a few times on my way to the next save point, but it wasn’t enough to make me rage quit. Bosses are where the difficulty spikes really hit. The first actual boss of the game I died around 20 times before I finally beat him.

Death in this game is just like most other Souls games. While fighting and defeating enemies, you collect Ergo. You use this Ergo to level up your character and buy new equipment. Upon death, you drop all of your current Ergo where you died. In a normal Souls like game, getting back to where your died will get all of your currency back, not this one. Every hit you take reduces the amount of Ergo you recover. The good news is that if you die at a boss, they place the Ergo recovery point right outside of the boss room.

While the weapon customization is fun, I never found a weird combination of handle and blade to use that I liked over the original handle and blade combos.

Overall, the game runs great in docked mode, I never saw the framerate dip, even when fighting large bosses, or having multiple enemies on the screen at the same time. There is a day one patch scheduled to enable 60fps gameplay in handheld mode, so if your preferred way to play is on the go, no worries on the framerate.

Graphically, I love the aesthetic, the environment looks and feels like a gloomy European city. Character movements are smooth and combat is fun. Where the game struggles is when you are in a confined area, like a warehouse or factory, and you pan the camera. The game doesn’t draw in all the polygons fast enough, so as the camera turns, you can see quick flickers of white while the game draws the background. I’m hoping this gets resolved in the day one patch mentioned above.

Stan has a great review here. I would recommend checking it out, it is a fantastic review and spot on. Lies of P is a great Souls like game. If you didn’t get a chance to pick it up when it first came out, give it a chance here. If you do own it and want a way to bring it on the go, again you can’t really go wrong.  I must not tell lies; Lies of P is worth your time and money!

Note: NEOWIZ provided us with a Lies of P: Complete Edition code for review purposes.

Click Here to pre-order Lies of P: Complete Edition on Amazon