Recent reviews by Grimhallow

Probably going to go down as one of my favorite co-op experiences of all time. Launch was a little shaky, but the devs have done an excellent job of communicating and addressing issues, and I have no doubt that they'll continue to improve. 9/10, and 10/10 after bug fixes.

After 100%, agh what a great game. I didn't expect to love this one as much as I did. I am still on the "all characters Eclipse 8" grind and I love it. Less than 40 runs before I am done :0

Can't wait for the DLC.

After 100%
For me a 9/10 experience and one I would easily recommend to fans of the genre.

I really enjoyed Lies of P a lot more than I thought I would. If you like souls-likes, I think this game is worth your time and money. But I'll list my pros and cons if you're on the fence:

Pros:

The weapons and animations look and feel amazing. Getting a perfect parry into fable art into heavy attack stagger into heavy attack and then a quick light attack to finish the scripted "fatal blow" looks and feels amazing to pull off. I didn't know I needed combos like that, but now I do - they're really cool.

The weapons themselves are really cool. Bloodborne and Elden Ring are two of my favorite games of all time, but in both of those I struggled to find the weapon that really spoke to me. In Lies of P, the weapons were all fighting for my favorite and I regularly switched weapons just because there are so many cool weapons to choose from, not even to get into weapon crafting (which was awesome).

I really enjoyed the story and characters - I don't want to spoil anything, but I will say that I was very skeptical, and the fact that this game mirrored the Pinocchio story was initially a turn off for me. The game changed my mind for sure. I'll be thinking about this story for a while.

I enjoyed the enemy placement and encounter design. Traps and ambushes were fair and predictable, and almost always avoidable if you pay attention to environmental hints.

The bosses in this game are sick. I really enjoyed all of them. I kept thinking I would be disappointing by the quality of them, but Lies of P keeps a high bar from beginning to end here. I didn't think any of them were a shocking difficulty spike either, but your mileage may vary here.

I think they did an amazing job of tying gameplay elements into the narrative.

Music also slaps.

Runs amazingly on steam deck. I got 60-90 fps right out of the box with no tweaking (I do use tools like cryoutilities).


Cons:

I think the level design was a little too linear for me. The upside of this is that I didn't have any fomo, since all the little secrets are pretty easy to find. In Elden Ring, if you want to complete a story line on your first play-through chances are you'll need a guide, in this game I was able to complete 80% of all the quests and stories in my first blind play-through (and could have done more if not all if I had payed more attention) to helpful hints such as the character icons in the fast travel menu indicating that a character has new dialogue. Regardless - the level design had more of an FPS feel to it where you're basically charging through a level with a straight line to the boss, unlocking shortcuts back to the starting spawn as you go. For reference, my favorite world design of all time is DS1 - I am not looking for open world, but this was really really a line in one direction.

I don't like the "grab" telegraphs. A lot of them look like normal stabs and bait you to parry them, and it can be kind of annoying. I actually think that Sekiro solved this pretty well by providing you with a big "grab" icon when a boss was about to go for a grab, allowing you to react.

Enemy variety felt a bit lacking, but the quality of the enemies felt good. It may be more of an aesthetic variety that I was missing as opposed to a mechanical variety.

I don't like sprint being tied to the dodge button. Dodging with "B" is fine, but trying to sprint around the levels holding "B" and not being able to control your camera is annoying. For me this made exploration way more comfortable on steam deck where I could bind a back button to "B" and use that to sprint while keeping control of my camera. When playing on controller I had to curl my pointer finger around to rest it on the "b" button, which was not as comfortable. Ideally, I could have clicked in the left stick to toggle sprinting, but whatever.


Undecided:

I would say that several bosses have moves that you're supposed to die from on your first attempt or until you memorize the pattern. I really enjoyed figuring out each fight, and going from getting slammed to basically taking no damage the entire fight. That feeling when the tables start to turn on a hard boss is great. However, it doesn't always feel fair I guess? Compared to Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and even Sekiro, there were relatively few bosses I managed to take down on my first blind attempt because of the nature of their moves and attack patterns. I think there were a few main bosses I killed on my first try (Parade Master, Mad Donkey, Fallen Archbishop, Corrupted Parade Master, and all of the lone stalkers+white lady) and two that I killed on my second try (Manus and Nameless Puppet). To me that felt like a fair enough balance. But there were definitely times where I was like "oh yeah you're supposed to die on that until you've seen it".

I like that costumes are not tied to defensive stats, but I wish you got more costumes early. My three favorite costumes didn't come until the final two stages of the game (at roughly the 85% mark), so I didn't feel like I really got to enjoy them until NG+. I also wish that there were more costumes and less re-skins of existing costumes, but at least the costumes that are available all look pretty cool.

Not sure where I sit on boss runs (running all the way from a bonfire back to a boss room as opposed to reviving at the boss door). Not really a problem unique to this game, but when you're supposed to die until you've learned the boss the runs can get tedious.

Some of the P Organ upgrades felt like they should have been base abilities (looking at you double dodge). However, it was probably good to be forced into learning the perfect parry, as it is pretty core to combat in this game. Having the improved dodge from the start would have left many players trapped in the midgame crutching on the dodge when they need to have already learned how to parry. So fair enough I guess.

I loved this game. Highly recommend and looking forward to the DLC.

This is an excellent port with a lot of love. I am so excited to be able to play this game again! When I first started it up I had some pretty serious screen tearing- but thats because v-sync is built in automatically, so disable it on your graphics settings (for me it was in the Nvidia control panel).

Thanks for making this port so amazing! The nostalgia is real.

"To the Moon" is not a game, it's an experience, and I highly recommend that you try it.
Touching story, impressive soundtrack. This is a game I won't forget.

While I will be the first to admit that this was not a port done right, that doesn't take away from the fact that this is an awesome gaming experience. The machanics of the game all work right, and the gameplay is as fun as ever. Being on the PC, this really should look better, and nobody is hiding the fact that they rushed this one out the door. But don't let that keep you from one of the best games around! (and besides, it still looks as good as the console haha)
At least we can look forward to a proper port of Dark Souls 2!

(I just want to add- you can get a mod to improve the resolution. Definately give that a try. I am using DSfix 2.2 and love it)

DSfix 2.2 http://blog.metaclassofnil.com/?p=350

This game is awesome. Very unique and one of a kind: If you're yearnin for a different type of FPS this is definitely a game to check out!