The best "non-From" Soulslike I have played so far, and better than some of From's!
Lies of P takes bits and bops from most From games (adapts Bloodborne's Rally mechanic, similar parry focus to Sekiro) and slaps them together into a really fun, high paced combat system that can go toe to toe with the greats and in which blocking, dodging and parrying are all vital during bossfights.

While also adding some great new mechanics into the mix - Weapons are split into 2 parts, one determining Damage and Speed, the other determining Moveset and Scaling, which can be matched at will to make for a rewarding system to experiment with and to adapt your weapon to the needs of individual fights.
LoP uses a Sekiro style posture system, but when an enemy's posture is broken, they have to be hit with one last charge attack before they stagger. Rarely has a single mechanic ever killed me more, as it seems designed to bait you into making stupid decisions, but it makes for fantastically tense moments and cinematic "hitting your charge attack .2 seconds before they hit you" clashes.

To me not the feel of the combat, nor hard boss fights, but the intricate level design has alaways been at the hard of From's games, and this is where most soulslikes end up faltering - Lies of P does not, and, in its best levels, manages to hit that quality bar and replicate the feeling of exploring and conquering a hostile, interconnected space full of secrets. Special shoutouts to chapters 3, 4, and 11 in that regard. Other levels are a bit weaker, mostly because they are either linear or visually repetitive, but as a whole it is a strong body of work.

Visually Lies of P goes strong into a European Gothic a la Frankenstein direction. Environments look fine without turning heads. Enemy designs are the real star of the visual show, especially the puppets (who'd have thought you fight puppets in a Pinocchio game) with their mechanical, unnatural attack and movement animations, unique and gorgous, all be it sometimes frustrating to fight (dear god the delayed attack animations).

Boss fights are through the bank really good, but hard in a way that you have to like - Parry windows are too narrow for reactive parrying, so a lot of time will be spend learning attack patterns full of long delays and offset timings. Also at a certain point just about every boss has 2 health bars, which leads to some spectacular fights, but can also be quite frustrating when phase one is trivial but you still have to sit through it every time.
Special Shoutout to the Brotherhood fight, Lies of P made a better Gank squad boss than From ever could.

Bunch of small annoyances: Dodge feels like shit until you upgrade it, Golden Fruit mechanic does not match the importance they supposedly have in the story (Characters lose their mind when I give them 1 Fruit, when I have literally 80+), Laxasia's Phase 2 transistion sky dive attack can go suck a duck, Camera completely shits the bed whenever enemies jump into the air for an attack.

All in all: Good video game

"What is United States? What is the purpose of the President?"
"I'm Japanese, how the hell should I know? Figure it out for yourself."

- A brief summation of my relationship with this game

I don't quite remember where I heard of Killer7 for the first time. I have vague recollections of reading about it in an issue of Nintendo Power. Knowing my tastes as a kid, I'm sure I must have thought it looked cool as hell... But there was zero chance of me being able to play it back then. Too violent, too scary. My parents never would have allowed it. In retrospect, it's probably for the best that I didn't get the chance - it probably would have turned me into an art student, which is pretty much a fate worse than death.

I'll give the briefest, most coherent explanation of the plot that I can: The Killer7 are an enigmatic, multinational group of assassins. They are led by one Harman Smith, and along with a number of "remnant psyches" (read: ghosts of past hits), they form a group commonly known as the Smith Syndicate. These assassins frequently do contract work for the US government, but something about this latest job is different. A terrorist group known as Heaven Smile - comprised of humans-turned-monsters whose only goal in life seems to be to laugh and violently explode - has appeared seemingly out of thin air and has started wreaking havoc throughout the world. The Smiths are tasked with bringing down this threat, which is headed by the mysterious Kun Lan, an individual with whom Harman seems to share a long history. As the threat escalates, it is quickly revealed that if any one thing is true of the world of Killer7, it's that you can't trust your own eyes.

I won't beat around the bush - just about everything surrounding this game is on point. The minimalistic cel-shaded artstyle focuses heavily on shadowing and contrasting colors, and is striking from start to finish. The voice acting is exceptionally well done. The character designs are cool, the soundtrack is superb, and while the story and writing are obviously going to hit differently for everybody, I personally enjoyed the absolutely nutty narrative that was spoon-fed to me throughout the experience. And if you need more, there's plenty of supplementary material you can dive into. Killer7 was my first full experience with Suda51, and given he put his head together with Shinji Mikami to make this kaleidoscope of crazy, I put off playing it for way too long. It's obvious that nobody makes games quite like Mr. Go-Ichi... For better or for worse.

The gameplay is functional, and that's about all I can really say to it. Killer7 came out shortly after Resident Evil 4, prompting comparisons at the time. Superficially, they are quite similar: Run around, pick up plot coupons, solve puzzles and stop to shoot bad guys every now and again. Killer7 is a rather linear game by comparison, however - quite literally so. There is no free movement or camera control in Killer7. You press A to move your chosen character forward and press B to make them turn around. The path often forks and is dotted with various smaller locations and points of interests, but in getting there, you will go either forwards or backwards and no other way. It's effectively a rail shooter that lets you decide where the shooting should take place. Your foes, the Heaven Smiles, are invisible. They approach you relentlessly and will explode if they reach you, taking a chunk of your health with them. You solve this by aiming towards them with R, and then scanning them with L, revealing them. At this point, it's a matter of either plugging them full of holes or, more ideally, shooting their weak point which generally kills them instantly. There's no true ammo management; you can reload as many times as you need to get the job done. You will encounter many varieties of Smiles throughout the game, a great deal of which can only be killed by attacking them in a specific manner. Killing foes by striking their weak points will earn you thin blood, which you can use to power special attacks and heal, and thick blood, which will allow you to upgrade the Smiths' stats. Conversely, simply shooting your foes to pieces will reward you with a comparatively pitiful amount of blood. There is a limit to how much blood you can earn in each stage, preventing you from grinding too much. As you go along your merry way, you'll encounter various NPCs who will help clue you in on what's going on and what to do to proceed. Dying will result in no consequences save for being sent back to the last "save room" you visited and making you lose access to the Smith that was killed. You can remedy this setback by sending a particular character to their place of death, resurrecting them - but if this character dies in the attempt, it's a true game over and you'll have to reload to your last save.

Of course, there is the titular Killer 7, who form the cast of playable characters. There's Dan Smith, the ill-tempered gunslinger whose thirst for blood can only be matched by the size of the gun he carries - KAEDE Smith, a mysterious barefooted woman with a scoped automatic who can use her blood to break mystical barriers - Kevin Smith, an unerringly silent man who is lethal with a knife and can turn invisible at will - Coyote Smith, an uncouth gentleman carrying a modified Enfield who can effortlessly pick locks and leap high into the air - Con Smith, a young boy who has overcome his blindness to become a dual-pistol-packing blur of speed - and MASK de Smith, a heroic luchador who totes a pair of grenade launchers and has explosive physical strength to match. You can switch between these six characters freely (although they will occasionally need to be unlocked first depending on the mission) and utilizing their unique abilities will be required to clear stages. There's also Garcian Smith, who acts as a handler of sorts: A self-styled cleaner, he can retrieve the bodies of Smiths that were killed in action and revive them. If he goes down, it's game over. Harman himself can also be played, but only in very specific scenarios.

So let's start with said characters. The idea of being able to freely switch between six characters with unique abilities is awesome on paper. In practice, though, it's very underwhelming and not especially fun to engage with. The biggest issue is that while you can switch to any Smith at just about any time, you need to go into the menu and choose to switch - at which point time will freeze while your current character explodes into particles to make room for the new one. It's a cool effect, but changing from one to the next is anything but seamless. The ability to switch on the fly would have been appreciated (something that is possible using hotkeys in the PC port, which somewhat improves the flow of the game). Even if it weren't a bit of a chore, though, the game doesn't do a great job of incentivizing you to diversify your palette. All of your enemies are killed by shooting them. Some Smiths are simply better at shooting things than others. In particular, Dan Smith has all around good stopping power, accuracy, and health. Whatever flaws he might have are quickly ironed out by investing a bit of thick blood into him, and a certain plot-relevant upgrade doubles his ammo capacity. He's even capable of killing a handful of foes that the other Smiths can't. At that point, there really is no reason to use any other Smith unless it's required for a puzzle or unless you're up against one of the few Smiles that only MASK can defeat. He is likewise nearly broken, almost as a gameplay mechanic. He's built like a tank and his grenades can kill a good number of enemies effortlessly, and he gets multiple mandatory upgrades that just make him even better. The game gives you a tradeoff in that you can't kill enemies that need to be hit in their weak point, and you don't get any thick blood by using him... Which is really a non-issue considering how easy it is to get thick blood otherwise. Finally, there's Kevin, who throws knives with pinpoint accuracy and doesn't need to reload. Since hitting an enemy's weak point kills them instantly, if you have good aim he's basically invincible when up against any generic enemies with a weak spot. The PC port really hammers this home, with the ability to use a mouse totally breaking whatever difficulty curve this game has. Otherwise, KAEDE has a scope which can sometimes be useful for taking out a pesky Smile from afar, Con can spam bullets ad nauseum and Coyote is for all purposes simply a worse Dan. Their special abilities are by and large simply used for puzzle solving or for trivializing combat in other ways. It's very easy to get complacent by just settling on one Smith for general purpose combat and only changing to the others when it's absolutely necessary, especially since it minimizes the number of times you'll have to visit a menu. On the one hand, being able to break the game with minimal investment does mean you can adjust the difficulty to your tastes, making things as easy or challenging as you want them to be. On the other hand, some of the Smiths being so lackluster really undermines whatever cool factor they might lend to the overall gameplay experience.

And then there's everything else. If the core conceit of walking in a straight line from place to place didn't already throw you, a lot of the game's more tedious aspects still might. Puzzle solving in this game is a joke. Most of them have painfully obvious solutions, and just as many others don't even really qualify as "puzzles" so much as simple cases of "use the right Smith here" or "use the right ring here". The game even provides a hint system if one or two still prove a tad too obtuse. Failing all else, there's only so many different ways to interact with things; simply checking out everything you can will be enough to brute force your way in most cases. By the end, the designers seem to have mostly given up - the bulk of your time will be spent merely running around and picking up plot tokens with no real challenge other than trying not to get lost. While the story is a big draw, a lot of the dialogue outside of cutscenes is delivered to you fairly slowly, one line at a time. And of course, there's the way your enemies are delivered to you, frequently popping up in your path and forcing you to search for them. They're all generally designed to be annoying to hit, but otherwise aren't especially threatening. Aim for their weak spots to take them down quickly or unload into them when that fails, heal up if you get hit, and try not to let the repeated critical hit quote (just the one) of your character grate your nerves. Your biggest issues are going to be coming up against enemies that are around corners, approaching you as you exit rooms, or constantly respawning. That last point is definitely part of what makes the exploration a task. You can look forward to killing the same enemies over and over again as you poke through rooms trying to find that one item you're missing. If enemies you killed stayed dead, it might place a greater emphasis on the "aim well, be rewarded" aspect of its gameplay, but as it stands you're likely to get more than enough thick blood to increase your character's stats simply by virtue of all the wandering around you'll do. And yes, there isn't much reason to invest too much in your characters, anyways - again, hitting weak spots results in an instant kill, and some Smiths are more worthy of upgrades than others, so you can pretty comfortably put points in your favorites and leave the rest to languish without hurting your viability in the long run. Boss fights are generally not enjoyable, being either way tankier than they have any right to be or relying on a single gimmick (or both). There just aren't a whole lot of places where I could authentically say I was having fun playing this game.

As a whole, Killer7's core gameplay loop really feels more like a concession to the concept of action game design than an actual attempt at making a fun action game. It has a few cool ideas, but none of them amount to much in the long run. You move and you shoot, and click on a few things in the meantime, and it's fine - if your neurons activate when you fire a gun, you'll probably have a great time - but there is nothing about it that makes me want to play it twice. It could have just as easily been a graphic adventure game like Policenauts with the occasional shooting section and it probably would have been more palatable. Instead, it's a shooter because a game involving gun-toting assassins not letting you shoot would have been considered borderline criminal in 2005, and about no other reason. It's the vehicle that delivers Suda51's crazy tale to you, and not much more.

But I'm not sorry that I played it. Every cutscene, every little plot revelation, every time Andrei Ulmeyda opened his mouth - when all of the components of this game came together to make a whole, I felt compelled to go a little bit further anyways. It's weird and frustrating, but it's slick and it's also funny as hell. There's some good commentary in there if you can manage to arrange all the threads neatly in front of you, and overall I think there's a really good chance it could stick with you, too.

It's a hard sell. Even back then folks were calling it an "art game" - one of the first games I can think of where the point really seemed to be to emphasize the style and story over everything else. These days we call lots of things "art games", especially in the indie sector. It's a redundant moniker, of course, as video games are art. It's something Suda51 himself seems to be acutely aware of, and he seems to feel that video games are an ideal medium for self-expression, which I'm inclined to agree with. I didn't much enjoy Killer7 as a game, but I think it's a real artistic achievement and I still wish there were more games like it. If you're the kind of person that's more interested in what a game has to say than how it plays, I think you'll be pleased with Killer7. Otherwise, feel free to take a chance on it. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Do you like Bethesda games?

If the answer is no, RUN.

If the answer is yes, enjoy Gotyfield