Rating:<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n You know Pinocchio, right? Puppet kid. Wants to be a real boy. Has a supercharged, adamantine left arm. Carries a sword with the other arm.\u00a0<\/p>\n Uses them to pummel and slash his way through all the demented toy-monsters who populate his violent realm.<\/p>\n Ah, actually, you may not know the Pinocchio from Lies Of P. The makers of this game have taken Carlo Collodi\u2019s original fairy tale and twisted it into something far more brutal.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not Collodi to whom they owe their biggest debt. It\u2019s another game: Dark Souls.\u00a0<\/p>\n Here is the same hyper-challenging combat: slash, dodge, parry, die, try again. Here are the same revivifying bonfires and limited-use health flasks, though they go by different names. Here is the same atmosphere of dread and discovery.<\/p>\n If this has you saying that Lies Of P sounds derivative \u2014 doubly derivative! \u2014 you\u2019re not fibbing.\u00a0<\/p>\n I came into this one expecting the worst: a sort of angsty, teenage version of a superior game. But two things won me over.<\/p>\n The first is Lies Of P\u2019s setting. The baroque, Eastern European-feeling city of Krat may simply be a new skin layered over Dark Souls\u2019 ruins and battlements, but what exquisite skin! This world of gilding and shadows is a pleasure to occupy.<\/p>\n The other is the combat itself. Every thrust of Pinocchio\u2019s sword, or roll of his puppet-body, has a weight and moment to it that feels so satisfying in the hands.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the end, I was surprised: Lies Of P\u2019s dark ancestor is still superior, but only by a nose.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/1s\/2023\/09\/22\/01\/75710917-12547431-image-a-375_1695341219030.jpg\")
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