Lies of P Mixes Bloodborne, Bioshock Infinite, and Pinocchio

What would Carlo Collodi, who was born in 1826 and died in 1890, have made of this? Collodi was an author, whose most famous creation was The Adventures of Pinocchio. The tale of the young boy who was chiselled and planed from a chunk of wood has endured as much as it has splintered. Disney gave it the full animated treatment, in 1940, softly pencilled and painted. In 1996, we got The Adventures of Pinocchio, starring Martin Landau as the boy’s father, Geppetto, and an ugly clump of clayey prosthetics as the boy. Last year, there was Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, an altogether gnarlier version of the tale, with a stop-motion creak. And now we have Lies of P, a FromSoftware-style action-RPG, set in a damp gothic burgh, with all manner of rot between its cobbles. It is, in the fullest sense, in the mould of Bloodborne.

Collodi would surely be gratified to see the dedication: “In honor of the great writer Carlo Collodi.” But he would be shocked at the state of the lad – no longer wooden but, rather, an alloy of metal and flesh. He sports a robotic arm, a white ruffled shirt, and, in the combat stance I picked in the game’s new demo, a cutlass. With his mop of dark hair, he looks more like the cabin boy on a pirate ship. Unlike his predecessor, P seems more at home in his surroundings. The demo opens with him awakening in a train carriage in the city of Krat, which seems to take its cues from turn-of-the-century Paris, if you imagine it to be a turn for the worse. We see a sign that reads, “Krat Great Exhibition 18XX,” and, below it, “Witness the greatest show on earth! Experience the future of the world!”

We are meant to think of the Exposition Universelle of 1900, the world’s fair, which took place in Paris; and there is a rusty irony about Lies of P, in the clash between advancement and cataclysm. It brings to mind not just Yarnham, the setting of Bloodborne – whose streets surged with the flow of progress, before it began to clot – but also Columbia, from BioShock Infinite. Look at the automatons that P must fight: clanking toy soldiers who attack like clockwork. They recall the Handymen that faced down Booker DeWitt – awful welters of skin and brass, their hearts thumping away behind glass. The monsters of Krat are less human still; compared to them, P is practically a real boy, were it not for a selection of curious details.

On the main menu of the demo, we get a closeup of a mechanical heart, a real ticker, with cogs working away inside. This, presumably, belongs to P. Are we witnessing the moments before his creation, just before the final piece is plugged into place? If so, he really has got a heart of gold. There isn’t much by way of story. A spectral voice, belonging to someone named Sophia, bids us to “Find Mr. Geppetto. He’s here in the city,” and refers to someone – or something – called Gemini (pronounced in similar fashion to Jiminy, the cricket from the Disney movie). The bulk of that quest, in the hour of the demo, is taken up with combat.

No bad thing, considering there is a pleasing bite to it. All the fittings are in place – the lock-on, the dodge, the furious swipes – and blood gushes forth in a feathery spray. The parry requires sharp timing, though the result isn’t all that satisfying; compare the parry from Bloodborne, where your foe seems not just staggered but utterly undone, as if their spirit were sprained. Still, the challenge here is pitched with appropriate steepness, and you come away from encounters sufficiently rattled. (I like the idea that your healing items are “pulse cells,” little glass tubes that crackle with electricity; it speaks at once to P’s status as a mechanoid, topping up his anima with a jolt of fresh juice, but also to our need, in games like these, to stay wired and charged.)

Where Lies of P may succeed is where many other games that have looked to FromSoftware have failed: the hook and spell of its fiction. So many studios put their all into matching the mechanics of play, but few have an eye like Miyazaki’s for the equal precision of detail, decay, and believability. I have to say, at this early stage the world of Krat is a good place to poke around, at once far-off and graspable. It lacks the melancholy of something like Dark Souls, replaced with a dose of guignol horror, but you want to know more, to see more. When you played Bloodborne, the mythology always hung back; it was the personal effects – the notes, the keepsakes, the trinkets – that thickened the story and made it feel real. You grew nosey to get at the truth. 

The developer here, Round8 Studio, could well pull off something similar. Lies of P is out on the 19th of September, and I already want to experience the future of the world.