I can't understand why I've seen some people in the past saying that "Lies of P is the best souls like not made by Miyazaki"... It's better than some of Miyazaki's work, as well, in my honest opinion.

Very punishing and challenging game but very charming and engaging, too. Interesting, charming characters, a good story that is quite frankly better told than in any Miyazaki game, interesting game world and lore.

I sincerely had a better time playing this than Dark Souls 3. DS3 had many incredible bosses, some of the best of the series, but the game world and playing areas felt underwhelming to me, as well as the general level design. Lies of P feels like a real, interconnected world with many satisfying shortcuts that are very reminiscent of the design of the early game of Dark Souls 1. The bosses in Lies of P are also phenomenal for the most part, even most of the mini bosses are very, very good.

Another aspect of Dark Souls 3 that was very underwhelming to me was the exploration, as I found many of the enemies had way too many flurry attacks and, using a light weapon throughout my entire first playthrough, I could never stagger them due to the low hyper armor damage of my weapon which sucked too. In Lies of P exploration and general enemy engagements are rarely as much of a pain in the ass as in Dark Souls 3, in my opinion.

The systems in this game are also very interesting and allow for a lot of different play styles. I won't go into detail here but suffice to say there are a lot of different tools that you can take advantage of, or completely ignore, allowing for multiple play styles and player creativity to manifest itself.

Having not yet played Elden Ring, if I had to rank this game among From Software's, I would rank things like this:
S: Sekiro > Bloodborne > Lies of P
A: Dark Souls 1 > Dark Souls 3
B: Dark Souls 2 > Demon's Souls
(Note that even the lowest game in the ranking is still super good, I love the original Demon's Souls atmosphere to death, that by itself makes the game excellent tbh. And I had a much better time playing Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 2 than Dark Souls 3, but I recognize that in objective terms DS3 is a better game than both.)

The side quests in this game are both a point of notable success and one of my biggest complaints. The side quests themselves are very interesting and well done, and the game does a fantastic job of telling you when there is important dialogue or quests and in which area.

But not always. Some quests you have to find for yourself and I did get kind of confused sometimes, or had to look something up because I missed something obvious (the last door of the Riddler guy, for instance). So while it is a great point of improvement over the extremely obtuse quests in the souls games, I think it could still be improved. There are a lot of quests in this game and it can be easy to overlook an item missed or a place forgotten/ignored.

In closing, suffices to say that I am very impressed by what this game delivered and to know that this was done by what is basically a double A studio is seriously incredible. This game rivals the best in its genre and over delivered on my expectations, was a pure joy to play.

I was not expecting that a game from 1999 would have some of the very best writing I have experienced in a video game.

I felt like the game took its time with getting me hooked, but once it did, it never let go. I'm just glad I stuck to it and finally got around to beating this gem of a game.

As a dnd noob I didn't care much for the combat, but I managed to get by regardless.

But the story, the characters, the world building, the introspection... Just fantastic. My congratulations to the dev team.

David Cage's best game mechanically, which is not a big achievement, but still.

A story that is supposedly about Androids that is actually about racism, since all it does is make parallels with black history and the Holocaust, and doesn't actually explore at all themes about AI, what it means to be sentient, how can we know or argue whether or not the Androids should be considered individuals, etc.

Oh and the writing sucks, obviously. It's David Cage after all. The silver lining is that this game has the best thing to come out of his work so far: The Connor + Hank duo. That's pretty good.

Really poorly written and extremely boring but as far as David Cage goes it's his most unoffensive work which is... okay... I guess?

You won't get an aneurysm from it like when you play Omikron. You won't see absurd plot twists covered by simon says controls like in Indigo Prophecy. You won't see dumb magic shit like in the previous two and Beyond: Two Souls. And you won't see a terrible attempt at social commentary like in Detroit: Become Human.

What you will definitely see is terrible writing though, just like in every one of the games cited above. And some of the best meme moments in gaming history.

Keep in mind: This is a review coming from a long time fan of DMC3 that has only gotten around to trying this game out in current day.

Definitely dated, but decent. Some of the bosses have weird attacks that take a bit of trial and error to understand wtf is going on. The combat mechanics are simplistic and don't reward style or creativity as much as later games. Devil Trigger is really strong and some DT abilities are lifesavers against certain bosses and enemies. The grenade launcher + stinger combo is OP to spam on nearly anything in the game, too.

You take a lot of damage in even just 1 or 2 hits, so the game can be really tough and frustrating when you factor in its jankiness. Oh, and the camera is terrible. Like, really terrible. And so is any part that requires platforming, including some bosses.

All in all it can be frustrating at times because some bosses and enemies are kind of bad, and it's not even close to the later titles in the series but it was a good game on its time, and is still a decent game today.

Story wise it's ok, subpar for today's standards but for the time it was made it is about what you'd expect