NORCO is a tricky one. It simultaneously has some of the best ambiance in point and click games to date - its southern gothic industrial-core setting managed to make me nostalgic for something I never lived through (I tentatively put it alongside Kentucky Route Zero in this regard) - and a mind bending story about faith, religion, capitalism and coming to terms with oneself that's part beautiful, part cathartic and part harrowing.

It also has some of the most questionable gameplay decisions I've seen in games of this genre, mainly the combat sections which are completely unnecessary and inconsequential, and some basic point and click "going back and forth" to pad out for more content. Sure, some of it helps you get even more immersed into the game, but the morsels of lore you gather along the way sometimes don't pay off the filler (I'm looking at you, city hall elevator puzzle).

The game is wonderful, but would've been better if it was just a straightforward point & click interactive novel.

Great humor, great ambiance, gorgeous pixel are visuals and a great story that will fry your brain during its last act, whose themes will surely stay in my thoughts for quite some time.

Since the success of Dark Souls many studios have tried to varying degrees of success to recreate what made it work, to the point that it's gotten a bit stale. Lies of P is one of the most transparent attempts at this, and probably the most "souls-like" the soulslike genre, if it's even broad enough to be considered a genre, has gotten. The core design obviously resembles the series to the letter, but also in terms of how they let its aesthetic influence changes to the fundamental formula in much the same way Bloodborne, the game in the series it clearly takes the most from, did back in 2015. It really feels like the developers though about what "Steampunk Bloodborne" would look like beyond the aesthetic, from the various arms with differing effects, to the mechanical grinder you use to repair weapons on the fly, to even being able to recharge your bizarre healing device.

That being said, my main issue, and I want to be clear that this isn't a huge one, is that I'm not sure these influences are entirely to the game's benefit. I think perhaps diverging even further from Souls could have made this game stronger, which is not me appealing some arbitrary standard of originality, but because I do feel some aspects of its design where its loyalty to its inspirations hold it back.

For example, the game is very much trying to tell a linear narrative. Unlike in Souls and Bloodborne, where the story has already happened in the past and what little plot there is remains pretty much inscrutable until you piece together the backstory on your own, Lies of P is something closer to a conventional narrative. At the very least, I wasn't exactly left confused as to who or what any particular character or boss's "deal" was supposed to be by the end. But this doesn't mean there aren't gaps in the narrative, things you have to fill in with item descriptions that are vague and hard to intuit. I'm still not entirely sure exactly why the perpetrator behind one of the game's inciting incidents, the "Puppet Frenzy", did what they did, for example. I'm sure I can find the answer, somewhere, but my purpose in bringing this up is that it made me ask a question - is the game actually more interesting for telling the story this way?

I think this aspect of the Souls series works better for its inherently inscrutable narrative. In those games, there's a degree of subjectivity to everything because all hope for an objective truth died out with the rest of the world. All you're left with is bad actors with their own agendas trying to steer you towards fulfilling their own ends, and only through vague scraps of the past can you determine who you're better off working with.

Conversely, I don't think there's much ambiguity to Lies of P's narrative. In fact, its morality is almost beaten over your head with its simplicity. One of the game's fundamental mechanics is that nearly every dialogue option is a choice between a truth or a lie. Your puppet's ability to lie separates them from other puppets, an indicator of some inner humanity despite being an artificial creation. So, the game treats every lie as the "right" choice, as something that brings you closer and closer to humanity. As far as I'm aware, lying never actually brings any negative consequences for your own character or anyone else. (As a tangent, this is another problem I have with the game, as there were a few times where I told a character the truth, expecting they would appreciate it more than a pathetic lie to spare their feelings, only to find out the game expected me to lie to create a better outcome for everyone)

So, with a story so simple to understand, why leave aspects of it unexplained and unanswered, so that someone with way too much time on their hands can dig through the lore to fill in the gaps? The answer is because Dark Souls and Bloodborne do it. Learning this additional information won't cause you to question the path you've been lead down, won't affect how you interact with the world, because as we've established, from the very beginning the game makes it clear what the "right" choice always is. Even the few times where there's a choice more complicated than truth or lie, there's almost always a "correct" answer you're primed for in advance. The few times I did dig through item descriptions, particularly for boss items, I never actually learned anything that affected my decisions going forwards, or made me question if I made the right choice when I looked back. We're left with a story where 90% of it can be easily understood, and 10% is arbitrarily cut out for the sake of having some actual new information for the item descriptions to present. I don't think it's more interesting that I don't know exactly why the Puppet Frenzy happened, even if I can connect it to that character's other actions to an extent, this just happened to be how the story was told for arbitrary reasons.

This general attempt at replicating the inscrutability of the Souls series carries over beyond just the narrative. The Souls series is known (and often criticized) for how difficult it is to actually understand what the various stats and menus actually mean. There is a staggering amount of information and none of it is explained to you. And since many choices are irreversible, this can often lean to you unintentionally creating consequences for yourself you had no way of anticipating and now have no way of undoing. A defense of this I've often heard is that it leans into the inherent incomprehensibility of the world. If the story isn't going to explain itself to you, why should the mechanics outside of a basic controls tutorial? I can get behind this for Dark Souls, but as we've established, Lies of P does not take place in that kind of world.

This world can be mostly understood even to a casual player, but if this were their first soulslike, they'd be utterly lost as to what they're actually doing on a gameplay level, not helped by some wonky translations in a few of the tutorials and menus. I barely understood how to engage with the systems of Dark Souls 3, the first of these games I ever played, so I can't imagine a different experience if I had somehow played this first. What makes this more frustrating is that last year's Elden Ring, a game actually made by the developers of the Souls series and one that is nearly as incomprehensible as its predecessors, actually goes further than this game does by having an option to explain almost every single statistic and option within every single menu of the game, which Lies of P fails to do, despite how much it shares with those menus. Perhaps this isn't a big deal, since this game's main audience is Souls veterans who won't struggle with these issues, but I couldn't help but think this game would have been better if there weren't some things I could only understand by remembering how they worked in Dark Souls.

On a game structure level, I think this game's relationship to Dark Souls is probably where it succeeds the best. The city of Krat, much like Bloodborne's Yharnam, just effortlessly lends itself to the compact, confusing, and interweaving level design of the Souls series, and it's done shockingly well here. But it is worth noting that this game is very linear, probably most comparable in structure to Dark Souls 3. You're pretty much always moving from one area to the next, one checkpoint to the next, with little need to have a wider understanding of the world beyond your immediate surroundings. This, on its own, despite many critics of Dark Souls 3's structure, is not bad. But I can't help but wonder if Lies of P really wanted to have this structure, or if they didn't have much of a choice.

Let me explain what I mean. As I mentioned earlier, Lies of P has a conventional, linear narrative. This means events actually unfold as you progress through the story, characters make active choices that have consequences on the narrative, and new information is actively revealed to the player and the other characters as these developments reach them. What this means is that there's very little wiggle room in terms of structure. They can't exactly have the player do most areas in a different order to what's intended, or else the continuity would fall apart. So the very idea of optional progression in the game world had to be ditched entirely. It's so linear that even the areas are all numbered in order on the fast travel menu.

This means that while there are side paths and secrets, yes, the only rewards you can expect are items. No new bosses, no secret ways of impacting the game's ending, nothing. I combed through every single area I played through thoroughly and the closest thing I found to substantial optional content were a few human minibosses that dropped cosmetic items. It's far more restrictive than even the "linear" Dark Souls 3, which had several major areas and bosses the player could miss entirely if they did not go looking for them. In Lies of P, you can find optional streets to go down, and various shortcuts that cause the level to loop back in on itself, but you will never come across a single moment where you actually feel like you explored something.

This begs the question, much like how I criticized the game's narrative, of if the game really should have borrowed this element of Dark Souls, even if one could argue it did this "right." Because, as I said, on a fundamental design level, the way these levels interconnect with each other in isolation is done fantastically, my criticism is not in the execution of their design, but whether or not this was the right game to do it in. Would that much have really changed if these levels were not dense mazes but instead more typical linear paths? Because there actually are some areas that function like this, such as the Moonlight Town/Cathedral section of the game, and I didn't really feel like I was getting a different experience. All the areas are structured the same when you get down to it, they just vary in how many times a shortcut will connect back to a previous checkpoint.

I feel like the maze-like design of Souls is beneficial when it forces you to consider the game world on a larger scale, and despite the similarities on a micro level, on the macro level, I don't think Lies of P quite succeeds in recreating that experience, because it simply isn't the same type of game. And maybe that's fine, this isn't really a flaw in and of itself. After all, being a different game from Dark Souls does not make it worse than Dark Souls. In this case, i just makes me wonder what it would look like if we had a version of this game that did go the extra mile and had its world interconnect and weave off into the unknown in the same way the games that inspired it did.

There is one other aspect where this game's desire to be like Souls hinders it, and it comes in even the more conventional aspects of the narrative. This game promotes itself as an adaptation of Pinocchio, and this is true... expect the times when it isn't. This isn't me complaining about the dark and gritty takes on various Pinocchio characters or whatever, I mean there are literally just large stretches of this game that, as far as I could tell, have nothing to do with the material it's based on. And I don't criticize this to make it seem as though the original collection of Pinocchio novels are some sacred text that must be respected in an adaptation, but it's weird how this game goes back and forth between the "grimdark Pinocchio" story it was promoted as, and some weird, other thing it's also trying to be.

Most people who play this probably already know what I'm referring to, but I'll try to leave it vague since I haven't exactly "spoiled" the game I'm referring to, but there is a significant group of antagonists who, as far as I can tell, cannot be connected to anything from Pinocchio. They do, technically, have a connection to Sophia, the "blue fairy" of this story, but her connection to them has very little to do with what their actual deal is. What this means is that a lot of bosses, enemies, and even narrative elements just feel somewhat out of place. These aspects of the story are all connected and interwoven on a literal plot level, but thematically, other than one of the game's main antagonists (a character who, as far as I can tell, is not even vaguely based on anyone from any version of the Pinocchio story) constantly repeating that he wants to "create a world without lies", there's a distinct lack of cohesion. And if the game's absolutely BONKERS post-credits scene is any indication, as much as I love the unashamed absurdity of what it implies, there's only going to be less cohesion in this developer's future projects.

So why are these things here? Well, they give the narrative the opportunity to do a bit more typical Souls storytelling. Fallen religious leaders, bizarre experiments, men who want to become gods, that kind of thing. It's clearly the developers trying their hand at telling these kinds of stories. And they're not bad, but I don't think they're as strong as what the game starts as. When this is a game about you fighting a bunch of robotic puppets to save Geppetto, everything fits together nicely. When you introduce these other elements, the waters get muddied. For what it's worth, this does give the game some more diversity in terms of enemies and visuals, so this choice isn't entirely without its benefit, as fighting mechanical puppets might have gotten boring if they were the only thing you fought over this surprisingly long game. I just wish they found a way to connect everything together in a way that felt more natural. The result, unfortunately is less than ideal.

The point of all of these complaints is not to say Lies of P is a bad soulslike, in fact I think it's deserving of all the praise it gets. But it does serve as an example of how you can't just make Dark Souls again to make a good soulslike. It's not the differences that cause this game to be flawed, it's that those differences are weighed down by the shackles of being faithful to the formula of other games. With more changes, more freedom to set itself apart, we could have gotten a version of Lies of P that was a better version of itself, even if it would have been a worse Bloodborne 2.