I’ll be honest... I never thought I’d be a Souls player.

I’d picked up a couple of FromSoftware’s titles over the years, given them an hour or two, and bounced off hard. Too difficult, too cryptic, too unforgiving. I didn’t get it. I didn’t get why people got it. And so I moved on, assuming that particular corner of gaming just wasn’t for me.

Then Lies of P happened.

The initial draw was purely visual. I didn’t even clock it as a Souls game at first. I just saw the screenshots and thought that world looks incredible. The Art Deco architecture, the Belle Époque atmosphere, the gaslit streets and grotesque puppets. It had this dark, painterly beauty that felt genuinely distinctive. The Steampunk aesthetics woven through the Art Deco backdrop created something that felt both familiar and completely its own. That world pulled me in before I’d even touched the gameplay.

And then I started playing. And something different happened this time.

What I began to notice was how considered the onboarding felt. Lies of P has all the hallmarks that make Souls games beloved: the risk/reward tension of carrying your Ergo knowing one death could cost you everything, the demanding combat, the slow unravelling of a deeply strange world. But being a more modern entry in the genre, it had clearly learned some lessons about easing players in. Small things, but they mattered. Being able to cash in extra Ergo needed for a level within the level up menu, without having to exit to an inventory screen and go back again.
Checkpoints that were spaced thoughtfully, never so frequent that the tension dissolved, but never so sparse that progress felt punishing. These might sound minor, but for someone who’d previously bounced off the genre, they were the difference between staying engaged and quitting.

The weapon customisation system was another revelation. The ability to mix and match handles and blades, to genuinely tailor your build and playstyle, gave me a sense of ownership over how I played the game. I wasn’t just surviving. I was building my version of P, and that investment made me care more about every encounter.

But here’s the thing. All of that craft and all of those quality of life touches would have counted for nothing if the game had lost me before it could land. What Lies of P understood was pacing. It introduced its mechanics and its challenge in layers, letting each element settle before adding the next. By the time I reached the final boss, and it took me hours to defeat him, genuinely hours of repeated attempts, I didn’t want to quit. I couldn’t. I was so deep in the world, so invested in the combat, so conditioned by everything the game had taught me, that dying over and over again didn’t feel like failure. It felt like progress. Like I was getting closer to something I knew I could reach.

And then I got there. And I understood.

That’s the thing about Souls games that I’d never been able to access before: the payoff is incomparable, but only because the struggle earns it. Lies of P gave me just enough handholds to stay on the wall long enough to feel that. It didn’t make the climb easy. It just made it possible.

From there, the leap felt inevitable. We went to Bloodborne, one of the all-time greats, and I don’t think that would have happened without Lies of P as the bridge.

I’m not sure I’d call myself a Souls player still. But I’m getting there. And it started with a beautiful puppet and a gaslit city at the end of the world.

Let me know if anything else needs tweaking.