Got a bit further in the game this time than the first time I tried, and the 2.0 update has certainly improved the actual gameplay and RPG mechanics, but after about 10 hours I was once again ready to throw in the towel.

Fundamentally, I just think this is a boring game with a boring story in a boring setting. The name, 'Cyberpunk', it turns out is surprisingly apt: this is not a unique or interesting world, but generic genre fiction we've all seen and heard a million times over since Neuromancer was first published. Beyond the technical spectacle of the world, which wore off fairly quickly, the world and the characters simply did not engage me. The gameplay, similarly, is just not that interesting - early suggestions that this might be a more full-fledged immersive sim quickly fall away as you realise that most options are just different ways to approach combat encounters, while options in how to approach missions are gated behind skill levels. And, despite several years of patches, the underlying jankiness of the game is still all to present.

It's taken three years to get this game to this point and it's still just resoundingly 'okay'. I'm still asking myself the same question as the first time I tried Cyberpunk: how is this possibly the same people that made the Witcher 3?

Enjoyed this for a while but soured on it pretty hard past a certain point, quite simply because I just could not get over the perfect guard mechanic feeling about as inscrutable as it was punishing. Souls-like games tend to get a free pass for mechanical obtuseness that, in a game dressed differently, would be considered simply bad game design, and Lies of P, for me, is no different. This felt unfair in a way From Software games, even the ones I've not really clicked with, never did. Importantly as well the combat felt unsure of what it wanted to be (Dark Souls, Bloodborne, or Sekiro), making combat encounters often confusing: am I meant to be dodging, normal guarding and using health regain, or perfect guarding? There was no clear way to tell what the developers were expecting you to do, only tedious trial and error, and, frankly, I felt I had better things to do with my time.

And on the setting: it's a thin veneer over a knock-off Bloodborne, and a far less interesting world in itself. Stylistically pleasant, but utterly derivative and devoid of any new or interesting ideas (which summarises the game pretty well overall).