Lies of P

Lies of P is a 2023 action RPG developed by Round8 Studio and published by Neowiz, released September 19, 2023 for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox — day one on Game Pass. It holds Metacritic scores in the low-to-mid 80s, has sold past 3 million copies, and occupies the throne it was openly built to claim: in community polls and critic retrospectives alike, this Korean-made reimagining of Pinocchio is the default answer to “best Soulslike not made by FromSoftware” — with a vocal minority arguing the qualifier is no longer necessary.

Its 2025 prequel expansion, Overture, only hardened the case: a Metacritic 85 and an OpenCritic 86 with a 100% critic recommendation rate — and a sequel is already officially in development.

Technical Specifications

Pinocchio, but Bloodborne

Krat is a Belle Époque jewel drowned overnight in the Puppet Frenzy — its mechanical servant class turned murderous en masse while a petrification plague eats the survivors. The player is P, Geppetto’s puppet, woken in the massacre’s aftermath and sent through the city’s opera houses, factories, and cathedrals toward the truth of what his maker did. The literary conceit runs deep: Sophia, the Blue Fairy analogue; a scheming fox-and-cat duo; the cricket companion Gemini — every Carlo Collodi beat reappears warped, and the story lands with an unusual clarity for the genre, told through cutscenes and voiced characters rather than item-description archaeology.

The Lie System and the Legion Arm

P’s defining mechanic is the game’s title: at recurring dialogue crossroads, P can tell the truth or lie — and lying, the thing puppets cannot do, is how he becomes human, feeding an ending-determining humanity system woven into music collectibles and side stories. Combat runs on Sekiro-adjacent deflection timing and Bloodborne-paced aggression, with two signature layers: a weapon assembly system letting any blade be recombined with any handle for hybrid movesets, and the Legion Arm — swappable prosthetics housing grappling hooks, flamethrowers, and mines. Reviews consistently ranked the boss roster among the subgenre’s best, a reputation Sekiro and Bloodborne veterans largely co-signed.

Overture

Released June 2025 — shadow-dropped at Summer Game Fest after a February State of Play reveal — Overture is a prequel to the Puppet Frenzy itself, following a legendary Stalker through snowbound Krat in its final ordinary days. Critics called it among the best expansions the genre has produced (its 100% OpenCritic recommendation rate is genuinely rare), praising new bosses ranked with the base game’s finest and the addition of difficulty options to the whole package — a quietly significant accessibility shift for a flagship Soulslike. Neowiz credited the DLC with triggering a “second wave” of sales for the base game, with 90% of lifetime revenue coming from Western markets — a striking figure for a Korean studio’s first Soulslike.

Reception

Launch reviews landed in the low-to-mid 80s — praise for the art direction, boss design, narrative clarity, and sheer polish of a debut attempt, with criticisms focused on early-game derivativeness (“Bloodborne’s wardrobe” jokes were mandatory) and some overtuned mid-game difficulty that post-launch patches rebalanced. Three years of retrospectives have been kinder than the launch scores: with Overture folded in, “best Soulslike ever made, FromSoftware included” is now a defensible mainstream take rather than a hot one — and the greenlit sequel makes Round8 the first non-FromSoftware studio whose next Soulslike is a genre event in itself.

Where to Play It Today

Lies of P is on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox, cycles through Game Pass, and discounts regularly — with the Overture bundle the definitive way in. For players charting the wider genre, it’s the natural next step after FromSoftware’s own catalog, ahead of peers like Khazan and Enotria that followed in its wake.