Lies of P dares to ask: What if Sekiro was more like Dark Souls? The answer, unsurprisingly, is “It would be worse.”

Enemy posture isn’t visible, and maxing it out only gives you a critical attack (Dark Souls 3 style) instead of an instant kill. Not only is it pretty nonsensical that the enemy can survive you ripping out their heart, I don’t like it from a gameplay standpoint either: It turns boss battles into awkward, repetitive strings of anticlimaxes rather than the whole battle building to a satisfying finish. Also, for some reason, they changed it so that even after you max out the stagger meter you have to hit with a charged heavy to proc an actual stagger, which is incredibly frustrating because enemies are relentless while your attacks are, in typical Dark Souls fashion, leadenly sluggish. Unlike in Sekiro you actually aren’t supposed to parry everything, as parrying some attacks will stagger you and knock you back, but the game gives no indication which attacks you’re supposed to dodge and which you’re supposed to parry. (There’s also no warning for grab attacks, unlike Sekiro.) It also uses a stamina system, which meshes extremely poorly with a game where you’re expected to regularly block attacks (and yes, even perfect parries still cost stamina). And hey, remember how everyone agrees the worst enemies in Sekiro were the inhuman monsters? Well, that’s most of the enemy roster here, complete with the worst Soulslike monsters, giant bosses who break the camera.

The camera, incidentally: Still the worst part of Soulslikes. I lost count of how many times enemies boxed me into a corner with no way out or how many times I dodge-rolled into a bottomless pit I couldn’t see was there (oh, and pits are instant death). The RPG elements are at least relatively restrained (and I appreciated there were no stat requirements for anything), but I still only used like… 3 of the game’s 30 or so weapons.

I swear, every single time a Soulslike tries to break from Dark Souls and do its own thing it’s better for it, and every time it tries to be more like Dark Souls it drags itself back down. (That applies to FromSoft’s own catalogue, incidentally.) I think Dark Souls just wasn’t a very good game, guys! Do your own thing instead of forming a cargo cult around it!

Storywise… ahaha.

“It received favorable reviews, with praise directed at its visuals, sound design, atmosphere and voice performances, though opinions on its narrative and gameplay were mixed.”

I swear this is a meme at this point.

The story is even more incoherent than Dark Souls‘, and that’s saying something. It’s supposedly an adaptation of Pinnochio but does so purely through vibes and symbolism rather than anything coherent. You can find tons of YouTube videos of people gushing over how XYZ character is so clearly name-checking some character from the book, but other than the Cat and Fox, it never goes any deeper than “Hey look, we made a reference!” The colorful cast of animal characters who so defined the original story are replaced with humans who wear animal masks for… some reason, and they’re rarely anything more than speedbump minibosses who could be cut without the game losing anything. Unlike the spirited and rebellious Pinnochio of the original, Pinnochio here is a silent protagonist who spends the whole game gormlessly following orders from people who tell you where to go. Pinnochio’s quest for humanity, the defining feature of the original story, is sidelined in favor of an absurd plot about puppets being robots who run on magic made of crystallized souls that’s produced by an unrelated magic disease AND ALSO there’s an unrelated group of mad scientists turning people into monsters by injecting them with magic goo because this will make them immortal somehow. (Is it just me, or is this plot ripping off Fullmetal Alchemist?)

I want to say that the whole thing runs on vibes, but not even the vibes make sense. Why did the engineers design all their servant puppets with monster claws and wrecking balls for hands? Why does the story keep insisting all the children love Stabby the Clown? Why are the puppets in the display cases just as filthy as the ones on the street, who in turn are exactly as dirty as the ones who have been sitting in a swamp full of slime for decades? Why are guys with pitchforks the deadliest enemies in the game? Why is the first monster boss you encounter the freakiest, thus making everything after that seem like a letdown in comparison? (And why does he reference Sephiroth of all things?) There’s so much this game could have done with subtle visual storytelling, but instead it chose to give us visual gibberish. The only thing I can say in the plot’s favor is that unlike in Dark Souls there is a plot, but it feels like a fever dream. There are flashes of what seems like something interesting — Pinnochio gaining humanity by lying is definitely an intentional subversion of the original story — but the story is just so deeply incoherent I can’t grasp what they were really going for. It’s all just vibes.

The DLC, incidentally, is even worse. The new enemies are animal monsters with impossible movements and nonsense hitboxes (how can I parry a crocodile’s bite…); the story introduces a ton of new characters who supposedly tie in with the main plot yet inexplicably aren’t mentioned by anyone in the base game; and aesthetically it’s porn. The new villain (who is a dominatrix) designed puppets with a custom sexy chassis. (Where she is finding the infrastructure to churn out these spotless, perfectly-molded titty robots is never explained.) They fight by kicking you and stance-breaking them makes them do a boob-and-butt pose. Yes, really. I have to wonder if every time they had a horny idea they said, “Wait, save it for the DLC,” because wow is the DLC horny.