Lies of P: Overture Review – Short, Sad, and Spectacular

Lies of P: Overture Review

New Soulslikes are released around every ten minutes, and I spend a lot of time playing and reviewing many of them. It’s a great problem to have for sure. But the downside is that many Soulslikes and their kin are kind of forgettable. But not all. Since its release in 2023, Lies of P has topped my list of non-FromSoft Soulslikes, although The First Berserker: Khazan is a close second. Neowiz’s dark fantasy take on the Pinocchio story stood out for many reasons, including its setting and brutal combat. Now we do not have a sequel, but a prequel. Lies of P: Overture integrates perfectly into the base game, while making some changes to the experience, mostly for the better.

Back from the Future

Sometimes DLC is accessible from the start of a game. In the case of Overture, players need to have progressed pretty deeply into Lies of P already. In other words, Neowiz expects players to come into Overture with both skills and narrative context. Players who haven’t touched the game in a couple of years might want to take some refresher time, because Overture wastes no time with preliminaries.

Overture sends P and Gemini back in time and fills in some narrative gaps from the base game. Overture begins in the Krat Zoo just before the Puppet Frenzy, when the Alchemists and Markiona were still experimenting the newly discovered ergo and reanimating Carcasses. Although it would be opaque to detail it here, the new story integrates pretty seamlessly, even elegantly, into the main narrative. Just as in Lies of P, the emotional tone of Overture has moments of sadness and pathos. It’s not all terror.

Like the main game, the story and environments in Overture allow the developer to imaginatively explore the intersection of humans, puppets and monsters. Sometimes the distinction is a slippery one. Overture has lots of animal-themed monsters, too, and these are delightfully fun to discover. Less fun are the many early scenes of animal mutilation, so sensitive gamers beware.

Horror Show

I was a huge fan of Lies of P’s setting, which brought together Belle Époque and steampunk elements, the Pinocchio story and creepy-as-hell animatronic monsters. The base game’s level design built on the Dark Souls template with secrets and eventual shortcuts winding back to a save point. The levels in Overture thematically and artistically could easily fit into the original game. Some players might complain that Neowiz has mined the “dark carnival” trope too often, but I really liked Overture’s Krat Zoo and natural history museum levels.

Overture’s level design is overall excellent, but it starts to rely a little too heavily on having players run frustratingly long gauntlets of low-level enemies and mini-bosses to reach the next checkpoint or shortcut. This is a Souls trademark mechanic, of course, but in Overture those sections started to feel a little repetitive. Happily, a lot of the enemy-filled side areas are essentially skippable. Of course, those sections also contain valuable loot.

Set the Stage for Conflict

Lies of P and Overture have intricate, artistic environments and an interesting narrative but they exist as a stage for combat. Overture’s combat is at least as challenging as the base game, and the DLC’s bosses are uniformly difficult but generally learnable and fair. Some enemies and monsters in Overture are carryovers from Lies of P but there are quite a few new ones, too.

Any DLC for an action game like Lies of P has to include new weapons and toys geared to specific builds. Just like in the base game, the weapons range from novelty items to powerful tools that will probably have to be nerfed. One of my favorite new weapons is the Royal Horn Bow, the first of its kind in Lies of P. With infinite, stamina-based ammo, it works exceptionally well for taking out low-level enemies at range, but it’s practically useless against bosses.

Lies of P and Overture’s level of challenge at normal difficulty can be quite high for non-Soulslike players. A free patch that comes to the base game adds two additional levels of lesser difficulty. There are many players who will scoff at the very idea of adjusting the difficulty, or that it ruins the game. In fact, the game at normal or NG+ settings remains as challenging as ever. Even at the “easiest” setting players will still need to learn enemy patterns and use equipment wisely. Add to these options the use of a summonable Spectre and Lies of P/Overture can now be experienced along a very wide spectrum of difficulty. That’s nothing but good news to the vast majority of action-RPG fans.

Life Now Has More Quality

The free patch also brings some much-appreciated quality of life fixes, like a clearer and more coherent P-Organ progression system. The leveling screen now includes a way to automatically add held ergo to reach the next level. There are lots of little things like that and all of them make the game better, more accessible or easier to understand.

Overture offers a significant amount of new content that visually, narratively, and mechanically slots easily into the base game. It doesn’t push the franchise forward, but that’s not its mission. Instead, its job is to provide fans with more of what they loved about Lies of P. In that regard, Overture is an unqualified success. New difficulty options mean that even more gamers will be able to experience Overture’s evocative world and engaging combat. Overture might not be a proper sequel, but it is a great reminder about what makes Lies of P such a fantastic Soulslike.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***