Pinocchio’s descent into the madness of Krat is often gorgeously rendered and filled with evocative imagery, even when genre abstracts obfuscate some of the finer details. There is a fairly explicit narrative to follow in Lies of P, marking a change of pace from the game’s obvious inspiration points. While roaming the world, Pinocchio will be faced with situations that require him to either tell the truth or lie, either choice causing inscrutable reactions within his machinery and putting a Chekhov’s Lie on the table. Pinocchio’s quest is largely defined by his father, Geppetto, whose performative guilt over the fiasco unfolding outside the walls of the Hotel Krat is matched only by his insistence on your sticking to the good boy rulebook while butchering his other, less good children. From a central hub location, you’ll venture forth into the world with a loose sense of direction provided by an existentially haunted array of characters who have gathered in this final safe place. The flow of the game will be immediately familiar to anyone with even a passing experience in the genre. It’s undoubtedly bleak but rarely indulgently so, Lies of P playfully dancing with edgy concepts and abundant, strange warmth. Pinocchio will come across all manner of violent tableaus but his one-sided relationship with Gemini, a wise cracking cricket who occupies a glowing lantern on your hip, can be trusted to break through the dread at just the right time. It is a grotesque and utterly fascinating powder-keg of a setting, doubly so when layered with the iconography and themes of Collodi’s contrastingly bright world. Although vastly outmatched by their creations, humanity’s clash with the now feverishly violent puppets is compacted by the spread of the Petrification Disease, an unknowable thing that painfully contorts flesh into stone. Awakened by Sophia, Lies of P’s maiden character with a unique connection to the Ergo, Pinocchio is set on a destructive and revelatory path through Krat’s dying final days. Then there’s you, the good boy, the best boy, Pinocchio. Others still don animal masks and prowl the streets in an ideological hunt for the inhuman as only they can understand. Others build monuments to the technological revolution, manned entirely by artificially created life, humanoid or otherwise. Some sit in a council of alchemists, prodding at the metaphysical edges of Ergo and its potential. The match lit by the underclass of autonomous puppets created by Geppetto and prolificated by a system of equally ambitious, and deeply flawed, men. Heavily inspired by the real-world Belle Epoque period that infused the Third French Republic with a similar prosperity and optimism, Krat is ornate, ordained, and burning. In the hundred odd years since its release, it has been translated more times than we can count and read just as many, a hearts and minds campaign that leads us to a South Korean team’s wild gamble on the now public domain tale of a boy and his lies.Ī sprawling, suffocating exercise in colonial expansion and endless growth, Krat sits atop a land rich in Ergo, a vibrant blue oil of sorts that fast-tracks the city’s central nervous system. A universally understood metaphor for the human experience and filled with iconic imagery and quintessential Italian tomfoolery, those early adventures of the wooden boy were immediately prolific. Amid the nose goofs and Disney-specific reference points it’s easy to forget exactly how impactful Collodi’s 1881 master text actually was. The premise of Lies of P has been memed and warmly dunked on since its initial reveal back in 2021 – a grimdark reworking of Italian author Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio. In the grander scheme of Round8 Studio’s new Soulslike, the thematic and narrative weight of those choices, those lies, will feel different depending on your palette for the self-serious sillies, but for me, it was the exact moment, the exact combination of flowery words and tone, to tell me that Lies of P had emerged as heir apparent to FromSoftware’s brutal, beautiful empire. Our impossibly pretty twink protagonist, the titular P-inocchio, had just skewered his umpteenth manic puppet on the road toward the looming Hotel Krat when a supernatural connection to a mysterious woman led to a brief rumination on the nature of a lie. There was a quiet moment a few hours into Lies of P when I knew the game had managed to pull it off.
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