In the last two posts, I’ve talked about Lies of P (Round8 Studio/Neowiz Games) and disability in gaming, respectively. The latter is because I’m playing the former, and it’s kicking my ass in the way Sekiro (FromSoft) did. I want to make it clear as I did the last time I wrote about the game. It’s a very good game. Like, really good. Well, I have complaints. Let’s go through those first because I get to the disability issue.
I have *spoilers* beatien the mini-boss and the second actual boss. I’m going to talk about that later, but let me say the second area really fucking annoyed me. One thing I dislike about Soulslikes is that they often take away the wrong lessons from From games.
Let me say this for the umpteenth time. The difficulty is not the point of the From games–or it shouldn’t be. For the most part, the difficulty is very much a secondary aspect of the games*, and it’s more about the discovery and the exploration.
This is not the same with Lies of P. There really is not much discovery. It’s gorgeous to look at, yes, but the environments are very restricted–and they’re oddly barren. In addition, I’m in the third area, and so far, all the enemies have been roughly the same. Now, to be fair, Bloodborne had the same villagers for the first area (and sub-areas). There were other enemise, too, though, including wolfmen, trolls, and wolf-wolves. In Lies of P, the puppets are different, but they look similar. And most of the garden-variety ones act pretty much the same. There are bigger puppets with different movesets, but they look the same as the other. And, of course, there are dogs. Apparently, there always have to be dogs in games like this.
I really don’t like the barren environments. I would prefer they didn’t look as nice, but had more of a lived-in feel to them. I get it. There has been a puppet uprising, and a war between humans and enemies. But, I really don’t like how lifeless the game feels. There’s you. There are the mobs of enemies. There are the NPCs. That’s it.
Speaking of mobs. Sigh. This is another thing that Iwish Soulslike would eschew because they don’t do it well–mobs need to be thoughtful. Not just a bunch of enemies thrown at you willy and, indeed, nilly. They have no stamina limit. They can just keep on attacking you. And, while you can hit them enough to stagger them, each individual hit does nothing to their poise.
This is an issue for me because I just cannot gauge when they are going to hit and whent hey are not. This is an issue for me for From games, too, especially Sekiro. I can’t do rhythm games. At all. I can’t feel the tell or sense it or see it. And, if I can, I can’t react in time. So combos that start the same are deadly to me because I cannot react in time. And I have no innate feeling for which way to move when I’m being attacked.
I quit the game back when I could not get the first boss by just trying to hit it. I realized the game was very Bloodborne/Sekiro-like, which meant I had to deflect. Which I cannot do. I did realize that you want to go early rather than late, but I just could not get the feel of it. Frustrated the hell out of me.
What I realized with the first boss after dying several times to him that this was more Sekiro than Bloodborne. You HAD to deflect to really make a dent in his health. Like, yes, Sekiro. There is no poise-breaking and beating a boss that way, but if you hit him enough times in quick succession, you can stagger him and get a crit–which is essentially the same thing.
I could handle this for the first phase of the boss fight, especially as you get some health back if you attack after guarding (that’s Bloodborne-y). But then the second phase kicked in and all hell broke loose. He starts flailing, and I could not get a handle on the timing at all. I did ntot get the deflect more often than I did. I’ve gone over this in the first post, but I wanted to reiterate my problems with the game. And, no, it’s not this game specifically, but all games of this kind.
You want to know how I beat the first boss? During the second phase, I circled to my right and smacked that ass. Just as if he were a big FromSoft boss. Here’s the weird thing–when I was up in his grill–he missed me more often than he hit me. By a wide margin. I’m serious. It was almost as if he wasn’t programmed to fight someone that close to him.
The second area sucked. I still think it’s a trash area. The way the enemies are placed is infuriating. The ‘put the enemy in the corner so you can’t see him until you’re practically past him’. ‘Let’s put this gunman in a place that you can’t easily reach him.’ I have said many times that’s there’s a fine line between being hard for hard’s sake and being legit hard. I feel like this game tips into the former. And that’s what I mean by devs taking the wrong lessons from FromSoft games.
The second area is mostly on the rooftops before hopping down. Plus, there’s an NPC who wants you to find her baby in the capital city because she’s going blind and she wants to see her baby one last time. She says that her family has taken the baby away to keep her (the NPC) safe–which means the baby is a puppet, probably.
There were two mini-bosses in this area. The first was a pared-down version of the first boss. Which was annoying. You could run by him, but he was guarding a chest that had something I would probably want. I should have run by him to grab the bonfire, but I didn’t. I also tried to kill him from a rooftop with throwables, but I didn’t have enough and then fell too far to get to him. I didn’t die, but I didn’t have any heals, either.
The second was a cop puppet. I raced by him to grab a shortcut back to the bonifre before I went back to fight him. I should have run back into the open area behind him, but I did not remember if there were enemies in there or not. So I just fought him in the alleys. I realized that I only wanted one of his attacks, so I did my best to bait it out. I was using an electric blammer by this point, so I would dodge towards him to bait out that one attack, and then hit him once or twice, then back up and try to repeat the cycle. Boring as fuck, yes, but that was how I eventually got him.
Then, it was on to the second boss. There were story beats along the way, and then it was time to fight Mad Donkey. Yes, that’s his name. He had a huge hacksaw, but only the blade, as his weapon. He was attacking a carriage and calling out Geppetto’s name, so I assumed geppetto was in the carriage.
I’m done for now. I will pick this up again tomorrow.
*Dark Souls II, excepted. I have defended that game as a good game, but it did try too hard to be HARD.