As Lies of P progresses, it moves away from the veiled story beats of its Souls game inspirations and veers closer to a direct melodrama. In these moments you can see something beautiful happen, not just a game finding its footing but a developer establishing a house style. The DLC, Lies of P: Overture takes this approach and hones it further, establishing the main game’s pattern as a clear-eyed approach to telling a story that goes beyond its simple premise.
For those who did not play the original Lies of P, you should. A take on the Pinocchio story in the style of Bloodborne and Sekiro, Lies of P is one of the few titles to riff on what FromSoft established in a way that’s transformative and well-executed enough to be ranked as an equal. The main story takes place in the wake of societal collapse; the city of Krat is dominated by murderous puppets, mercenary humans known as stalkers, and people mutated into ambling creatures by a horrible petrification disease. As the game unfolds you begin to piece together how Krat fell, and who is to blame.
Overture is chronologically a prequel, but mechanically one that involves P going back in time. It does not show Krat before its collapse; that part is still veiled, and I imagine would be far more complex than the scope of a DLC would allow. Rather, it shows the final days, following the events in the web of relationships that led to the creation of P. You follow the Legendary Stalker, a character whose importance is only alluded to in the main game.
The original Lies of P takes time to find its footing. Overture does not have that problem: those lessons have been learned already, and so when you play it you hit the ground running. This is true not just in how the narrative lays itself out, but also mechanically. Overture adds several new weapons, items, and legion arms, and thankfully none of them feel extraneous. The conceit of Lies of P’s weapon system is handles and blades that can be mixed and matched, but while the main game featured many weapons that felt like filler, Overture adds far fewer and makes the ones that it does include far more interesting.
Most notable here is the Royal Horn Bow, which allows P to go medium range and totally changes combat. But there’s also a gunblade, a pair of Wolverine-style talons, and a lightning blade that all radically alter the flow of combat. The added legion arms, the trick weapons attached to P’s mechanical arm, are also welcome additions, and I spent the majority of Overture using the Cataclysm – a big shotgun that P can charge like Mega Man and, at higher levels, Active Reload like Gears of War. That’s right, they gave Pinocchio a shotgun.
If I went out of my way to find a major flaw in Overture, it is that it hews closely to the established patterns and tone of the main game. While it is clear that Krat has fallen and that the world is slightly less decrepit, it doesn’t take place far enough back chronologically to feel as distinct as it could. You are still fighting a lot of grotesque humans and animals, the latter of which are some of the most disgusting monsters I have ever fought in almost any game.
But practically speaking I’m not bothered. While Overture is more Lies of P, it’s more of the best part of Lies of P. A few of Overture’s locations rank among the most striking in the game, like the Zoo in the beginning, or a frozen shipwrecked area under a beautiful Aurora. There’s a side quest in it that hits harder than any in Nier: Automata. The bosses are tremendously challenging, and the final confrontation is both a fantastic reveal and a legendary fight. And when P finally does catch up with the Legendary Stalker, how the game chooses to fill in that backstory is a reveal that is heartbreaking and melodramatic in a way that could only come from these developers.
There’s only so much you can efficiently do with DLC, particularly when it is abundantly clear that you are making a sequel. But Overture succeeds at its task of assuring the player that the success of the original game was no fluke. If Lies of P was developers Round 8 Studio and Neowiz announcing that they had arrived, Overture is a confirmation that they are here to stay.
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