Ahab Souls

I am haunted; kept up at night by visions of an enormous whale-like creature that certainly will exist, but whether or not being devoured by it will satisfy me won’t be revealed for another two months…

    The first time I played the Lies of P Demo, I was duly impressed by the audio-visual design and charmed by its over-the-top premise, but the experience didn’t manage to fully entangle me in its strings; not yet.
You see, combat is well over 50% of what makes or breaks a souls-like title, (with the rest being monopolized by level and world design) and when it came to dismantling frenzied puppets, I bounced off; the meta-narrative driving this whole release seems to be “Elden Ring is lovely, but the world wants a sequel to Bloodborne very badly,” and so this vertical slice of a Pinnocchio-based spiritual successor convinced me to play it like one.

    Everything about the Victorian steampunk setting told me to find a rhythm of attacking and dodging that would make a hunter of hunters proud, but there were immediate issues with this approach that transcended my lack of a transforming weapon and a parrying sidearm.
Compared to Bloodborne, the quick steps and dodge rolls were shorter, with fewer invincibility frames. The enemy attacks tracked my position for longer, and were telegraphed with jerky, mechanical flourishes that did a great job of selling the killer automaton horror, while also throwing my evasion-centric strategy in the dumpster.

    Look, those rain-soaked streets were positively Yharnam-esque, so you’ll have to forgive me for requiring some outside input from my parasocial friends over at Remap Radio.
Seeing one Renata Price compare Lies of P’s combat to another FromSoft game caused my mental gears to snap into place; that prosthetic left arm had been staring me in the face the entire time!
This was as much Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice as anything else in the FromSoft catalogue.
Arming me with the intent to prioritize parrying over dodging made a huge difference, and if the weighty clang of a perfectly guarded attack was satisfying, the way this eventually caused enemy weapons to shatter was downright addictive.
That was probably when I became psychologically ensnared.

 

    Being a game designer can be difficult for a variety of reasons, but the one that tends to eat away at your schedule is that when ideas really get their hooks into your gray matter, it’s difficult to stop analyzing, extrapolating, and even mentally sketching out entire encounters.
Connecting with the combat in this tactile way didn’t just make me want to play more Lies of P, it had my poor brain re-jiggering enemy and consumable placements to better tutorialize the hurling of spare cogs to pull aggro, instead of, you know, sleeping…

“Does the curious ‘Gemini’ spelling of your lantern-bound AI ‘cricket’ guide’s name imply that he has a twin, or merely some dual nature?”

“How typically cheeky of them to turn the blue fairy into an obligatory level-up maiden, but what’s her connection to the glowing material that seems to be turning humans into plant monsters?”

“Wishing on a star in this narrative might imply that strange blue ‘ergo’ was harvested from a meteor; if puppets were made possible by a ‘cosmic’ power source, just how deep will the Bloodborne-esque vibes run?"

    Round-and-round my tired mind wondered about how all these references to Carlo Collodi’s original tale would shake out, when one of these musings above all others brought me up short-

“What are they going to do about Monstro? Will it be a form of travel, a mere submarine painted to look like a sea creature, or be still my level designer’s heart; will we be treated to an entire dungeon that takes place inside the guts of a massive, ergo-corrupted leviathan?!”

I am haunted by visions of an enormous whale-like creature that almost certainly exists, but will being devoured by it make me feel like an aging game developer forcing data-entry-battered hands to learn another difficult boss fight… or will it transform me into an awe-struck child on the threshold of Lord Jabu-Jabu’s belly?

    I can’t possibly know until September 19, 2023.

(The Lies of P Demo had been living in my head rent-free for weeks. In an effort to somehow get it the heck out of there for an additional two months, I was compelled to write this piece, which I dedicate to Renata Price for infecting me with some sort of gremlin-like energy that simmered down just long enough for me to procrastinate on the edit, which eventually led me to “publish” it on embargo day.)