Lies of P is... magnificent. It was my first Soulslike experience, and was an absolute blast to play from start to finish. A few design quirks with its morality system led to a few headaches when attempting to earn all achievements, but that's the only negative thing I can say about this game.

If you've played a game in the Soulslike genre, you'll be very familiar with this game. If you haven't, allow me to break it down very simply.

Everybody wants to kill you, you have very little health and take a lot of damage, and your options are to dodge, guard or hope your attack lands first with enough force to get you out of harm's way for the moment. If you do get hurt, you can heal, but you only have a finite number of heal charges between checkpoints. You'll need to use these sparingly and hope you avoid taking too many hits.

The game itself plays in third-person, and the progression is very linear, tasking you with progressing from one map to the next in a very straightforward fashion. Each map will have a minimum of one mini boss and one major boss, with a sprinkling of lower-tier enemies throughout.

As you slay enemies, you earn Ergo, which can be used to purchase new items like equipment, consumables and others, or to level up your stats. You can level up your HP, Stamina, Weight Capacity (heavier gear will weigh you down and slow your moments without this), Heavy Attacks, Light Attacks and Elemental Damage. You can choose to build your character based on your playstyle. If you wish to experiment, there is a respeccing system in the game as well.

Lastly, the P-Organ is a passive skill tree that you upgrade with Quartz, a currency you acquire from quests and mini bosses/bosses as you play. You can increase your damage, resistances, improve the effectiveness of abilities, etc.

The game primarily plays out of the hub area, Hotel Krat, where you'll fit your character before pushing on.

The story of Lies of P is best left discovered as you play, but the basic principle is that you play as Pinocchio and are awoken to help save the world from the madness known as Puppet Frenzy, which is driving all of the puppets in the world mad. The narrative is far more nuanced, but is worth experiencing with no spoilers.

The game runs like a dream. On my RTX 3090, I'm able to play at a locked 120 FPS with everyone running on Ultra at a native 2560x1440. While my machine is very high-end in nature, the game scales phenomenally across all hardware implementations, seeing Ultra settings running smoothly on even older generation GPUs. Zero shader compilation or traversal stutter, not one single crash in 80 hours, and the game is a visual spectacle.

Lies of P is my GOTY for 2023. It's an incredible experience from start to finish, and I never felt bored or uninterested as I went through it... four times. The New Game+ system motivates you to go through again to push your passive bonuses a little further and to experiment with new builds, and the linear nature of the game complements quick runs. Where your first may take you 30+ hours, subsequent runs can be done in 6-8 and feel completely new due to the vast array of builds available.

What an amazing game.