Lies of P

Developed by Round8 Studio and published by Neowiz, Lies of P released on 18 September 2023 for Windows, macOS, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, with the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 versions following on 19 September. This review covers the base game campaign; Overture, the prequel expansion that Complete Edition now bundles with it, is noted at the end but not graded.

A weapon you build twice

Most weapons in Krat arrive whole, and most of them can be taken apart. A standard weapon is really two objects: a blade that sets the damage and the reach, and a handle that sets the moveset, the weight and the attribute scaling. Each half carries its own Fable Art, the weapon skill you spend Fable Slots to fire, so choosing a blade and a handle is choosing two abilities as well as a swing. Every rearrangement happens at a Stargazer or with Eugenie back at the hotel, and it unlocks once Geppetto hands you the Enigma Assembly Tool after the Mad Donkey goes down early in Elysion Boulevard.

Boss and special weapons break the rule on purpose. They cannot be split, they arrive with their own skill, and they trade the bench for a stat line you cannot assemble any other way. Handles can be altered with cranks to push their scaling toward the attributes you actually invested in, and a Balanced Crank undoes that alteration when the numbers stop suiting you. Most of the character building in Lies of P happens on the equipment screen rather than in the stat menu, which is why the bench matters more here than in any of its neighbours.

Blocking is a loan

Hold guard and you take reduced damage while stamina drains, and the damage you soaked becomes Guard Regain. That recoverable health is not yours until you take it back: land hits before the window closes and it returns to you, so running, rolling and drinking instead means you paid for the block in full. It is one small rule with a very large effect, because the safest moment to attack is right after you have absorbed something heavy.

Perfect Guards are the sharper version. A guard timed to the instant of impact costs stamina and no health at all, and enough of them will break an enemy's weapon, leaving it swinging a stub with a much shorter reach. The timing is tight and the game does not widen it. Some attacks, the red-lit Fury Attacks, ignore the usual answers completely: a held guard will not stop them and dodge frames will not carry you through them. You meet them perfectly or you are somewhere else when they land.

Perfect Guards also push an enemy toward Groggy. When the health bar flashes white, a charged heavy opens the window and a Fatal Attack closes it. Underneath all of that sits weapon durability. Every swing and every block wears the blade down, a dull weapon does less damage, and a blade pushed all the way to zero breaks outright — past that point the Grinder can no longer save it, so it is a top-up you spend before you get there. Needing it halfway through a boss fight is the price of turtling.

Every tool wants its own meter

Fable Slots sit behind your two weapon skills and refill as you land hits, with consumables and P-Organ passives covering the rest. Legion Arms are the prosthetic on P's other shoulder, and each one draws on its own separate supply, refilled by a Legion Magazine or by resting at a Stargazer. There are more than five of them to find and none of them is the correct one. The arm that discharges electricity and the arm that sprays acid are answers to different bosses.

Quartz feeds the P-Organ, a node graph of passives that widens as you go: extra Pulse Cells, more Fable Slots, faster recovery when you are knocked down. It opens up properly once Geppetto gives you a seat in his workshop after the Scrapped Watchman, and none of it is permanent. A late-game character can reset their level, the P-Organ and the Legion Arms at the Gold Coin Tree, so a build that hits a wall is a build you change rather than a run you restart.

The healing flasks deserve their own paragraph. You begin with three Pulse Cells, and only once you have spent them all does attacking enemies refill the gauge that hands one back. Being aggressive is how you keep healing, which is the guard rule stated a second way.

The lie is part of the build

Puppets in this world cannot lie. P discovers that he can, and the game keeps a quiet record of it. A hidden humanity stat tracks the choices the game reads as human: most often a lie that spares someone's feelings, but sometimes the honest answer, along with the Records you play back at the Hotel and a handful of small kindnesses along the way. That number gates the endings rather than choosing one for you — fall too low and the final scene will not even offer you the refusal, which locks you into the bleak ending, while the best of the three asks for more humanity still before one specific late conversation. Few games in this genre keep a character sheet for your manners, and it gives the choices more weight than a dialogue prompt usually carries.

Where Krat creaks

The loudest complaint at launch was that Krat reads as a tribute act, and it is not a baseless one: the debt is visible in every Stargazer, every Groggy window and every healing flask. What saves it is the work done on top of the borrowing, and how much of it the game expects you to use. Fury Attacks in particular are a rule you are never allowed to forget, and if a frame-timed press is your least favourite thing in games, the campaign will feel like an argument you keep losing.

The world is the other friction. Krat funnels as much as it opens up, and critics were divided on the levels and on the story besides. The pieces are gorgeous and the route through them is narrow, and that narrowness lands hardest late, when the fights want a Perfect Guard and a dull blade punishes you for the block you just made. It holds together, but it is a game that narrows your options at the exact moment you want them widest.

The pulse

Critics were warmer than the genre's reputation suggests. The platform scores landed in the low-to-mid 80s, and players went further: more than 82,000 Steam reviews, with 75,877 of them positive, which is a Very Positive rating from Valve's own summary. It sold through one million copies inside its first month and more than four million by March 2026.

Neowiz has kept working on it, too. The update that shipped alongside Overture in June 2025 added three difficulty settings, a colourblind mode, and two boss rematch modes, one of which strings three or more fights together with limited health and items. A sequel is in development, with Dorothy of the Oz novels expected to lead it. Two and a half years on, the game that looked like a curiosity at launch has quietly become the standard the rest of the field gets measured against.

Should you play it

Yes, if you ever wanted to see what a studio with something to prove does with the Bloodborne template. The assembly bench is the reason: two halves, two skills, and a weapon you can rebuild between attempts without touching a single stat. Put that next to a combat loop that pays you for holding your ground and you have my favourite take on the formula from outside FromSoftware.

Skip it if a tight window is the thing you like least in games. Lies of P answers red Fury Attacks with precision and almost nothing else, and it will grind your weapon down while you learn. Anyone who bounced off Sekiro because of the parry will find the same conversation waiting here.

On the edition question, the base game is the whole story and it stands on its own. Overture is a prequel sold separately, and on a first playthrough it waits until the end of Chapter 9, once the hotel Stargazer is repaired — a repeat run can start it from Chapter 5 instead — so it is a late-game trip into a Krat that has not fallen yet, with its own weapons, two more Legion Arms, and a guide named Lea, the Legendary Stalker. Complete Edition bundles both, and that is the version that reached the Nintendo Switch 2 in 2026; the base game also arrived on the Epic Games Store for Windows the same year. Start with the base game and decide about the prequel once the credits roll.