Having completed it, I could probably write a longer post on Lies of P as a whole but tl;dr - I like a lot of what the game does, have some strong feelings about where it missteps, but would love to see them iterate with a sequel. I think if you've enjoyed any of From's recent output and have a gamepass subscription, it is absolutely worth taking a look at it. It's an uncannily good imitation that I think is worth experiencing if just for the novelty.
What I want to talk about is how much I ended up loving the record player mechanic. As a brief summary, you play as the puppet Pinocchio in Krat, a fictional early 20th century city that's gone all Bloodborne. Puppets and people gone mad in the streets, that sort of thing. Despite the insanity of saying any of this out loud, this setup is bafflingly adept in its ability to frame the core personal conceit of the game; Pinocchio's pursuit of humanity.
Various actions you perform in the game will gradually make Pinocchio more human, one of these being the titular lying. Lies of P posits that counter to the original tale, lying is fundamentally one of the most human traits we have. Depending on how it's deployed, lying can be protection, salve, or weapon.
The other thing Lies of P contends make us human is our love of music. This is great. Throughout the game, you can collect various music records, often as the reward for side quests where you assist the various survivors of Krat. If you play these records at the record player in the game's central hub, you gain humanity points. But here's the thing, you have to listen to the song in its entirety to become more human. Simply turning in the record will not confer the benefits. I love this as a deliberate design choice.
It's easy to boil so many mechanics in games into their transactional bones. The bonfire lady levels me up, the blacksmith adds +1 to my sword, etc. When I turned in my first record and it did not immediately give me anything, I was taken aback. Wait I really have to just sit here and listen to this? And so I did. And goddamn, the records in Lies of P are really good.
For a game with such an otherwise unremarkable soundtrack, it's wild how good these optional tracks are. They all kind of have this vibe, running the gamut from romantic crooners to instrumental easy listens that feel vaguely era appropriate.
Eventually it becomes apparent that the only way to become truly human in Lies of P is a combination of tactful deception and listening to enough music to awaken the crystallized human soul that resides within your artificial body. Even if you choose to lie at nearly every possible juncture, you will not be human enough to trigger the true ending unless you've listened to at least some of the records.
It's important that the songs you get are good because that makes the reward twofold. There's the mechanical reward of becoming more human, but also the personal one of getting to listen to a new good song. And what's more human than that? It's such a clever way to communicate the narrative themes of the game to the player. Of course you should listen to the full song, that's what humans do. Only an unfeeling automaton would treat music as transactional.
For a game that's as blatantly imitative of From's output as it is, this is one of the things that'll probably stick with me as part of Lies of P's distinct identity. It's such a neat little trick that fits perfectly with the game's otherwise fairly simple narrative themes. These tracks aren't reused anywhere else in the game. They were composed exclusively to be collectible rewards for the player. It's choices like these that convince me that Lies of P is more than just a hollow simulacra.
The last shoutout I'll give is to the track, Memory of Beach. It's your reward for completing a quest for Antonia, an elderly woman who owned the hotel you use as your central hub. The long and short of it is she's in terminal medical condition and your actions can help ease the worst of her symptoms. There's no saving her, but you can make her final days less miserable. She's wistful for days long past and people long gone, in the ways you might expect from someone looking at life in the rearview mirror.
Memory of Beach beautifully captures this feeling. A soft hum accompanies the solo piano. It feels nostalgic, like someone listening to an old favorite and trying to remember how it goes. I don't even remember what the other reward was for completing the quest. I think it was for my P-Organ. But I'll remember listening to Memory of Beach, a gift from Antonia.
The reason these extra songs are so good is because they're all(?) covers of songs from the DJMax rhythm game series, which "Lies of P" developer Neowiz released 21 of between 2004 and 2020. For example "Memory of Beach" which Peyton praises above was originally from "DJMax Portable" for the PSP:
So of course they're good, Neowiz had 20 years of songs to pick from!
I absolutely love this entire thing, "let's do old timey Hooverphonic covers of all our old rhythm game dance tracks" is such a goofy easter egg to put this much effort into and the fact that the songs themselves are incredibly effective and emotive just makes it funnier.
There's actually a kind of bummer wrinkle to this. I'm just gonna writeup the timeline cuz Wikipedia's Pentavision page is incredibly hollow and Neowiz seems intent on providing no information about its studios, so:
Yes, all of these songs are from DJMAX. In a vacuum it's a really clever thing to re-arrange a lot of songs you've already composed for a rhythm game series in this style! Honestly it would be cool to see more studios do this with their games. Canon isn't sacred, you can have fun with the licenses and works you have rights to.
The sorta murky part of this is that most of these songs also seem to come from the Portable-to-Trilogy era of DJMAX.
A bit of history
DJMAX is pretty long-running and due to constant sales and promos on Steam you're probably most familiar with Respect/V but DJMAX has been around since 2004, originally as DJMAX Online for Windows and most famously as DJMAX Portable for PSP. The series took off there and under its developer, Pentavision, they made a buncha sequels including some (arguably) all-time classic rhythm game entries like DJMAX Portable: Black Square and the arcade game DJMAX Technika Tune, one of the first touchscreen-based rhythm games.
In 2006, Neowiz acquires a stake in Pentavision but continued to let the studio operate independently. This seemed to mostly be the case as the studio released entries at a steady clip but by 2008 they own a 100% stake in the company and use Neowiz's weight to secure collaboration with popular Korean pop artist Clazziquai for a beginner-focused entry in the Portable series. There's little I was ever able to find about operations under Neowiz but after the release of Trilogy, a PC-based version of DJMAX that included music from Online, Portable, and Portable 2, the studio went kinda quiet for nearly two whole years with exception of the American release of DJMAX, Fever which was just a repackage of Portable 1 & 2.
Around then, some folks start leaving. At this point in time, (2008) Pentavision employs about 70 people but its key figures and, more importantly, musicians are quitting and moving onto other works. Like BEMANI games, DJMAX's collective soundtrack is a mix of in-house creations and collaborations with outside producers. If it's anything actually like BEMANI, these guys all know each other and work together all the time so it's not super surprising if a bunch leave when the first couple do.
DJMAX Portable 3 came out in 2010 and it was just... not great. The game meta was worse, the presentation was off, and more importantly the music was really mid, which was so fucked to feel considering how much of a powerhouse the previous games were. Portable 3 marked the first proper directorial change in the series with BEXTER taking over, with Planetboom, the series' sound director, still maintaining that role.
By 2012, everything has sorta gone wrong. Technika 2 is plagued with bugs at the arcade, promised DLC is canned, services for Technika 1 and Trilogy are unceremoniously shut down and lock most of the games' content out from its players. Quietly, Pentavision is internally dissolved. Most of the former studio's leads are gone with a core of them forming Nurijoy, a company that would make arcade game Beatcraft CYCLON and the PS Vita game Superbeat XONIC. In a now-deleted tweet but at least contextually archived in this NeoGAF thread, Planetboom also eventually leaves Pentavision by 2013, making BEXTER the only remaining former-Pentavision producer left at the company.
In 2017, maybe later because I literally can't find an exact date for this, Pentavision is internally renamed Neowiz MUCA (for Music Café? For some reason?) and Respect is released.
So why am I being weird about this
Well, Memory of Beach, (one of my favs from Portable) is a song by M2U, who is one of the producers that stopped working with Neowiz post-Pentavision dissolution and made tracks for Beatcraft CYCLON and Superbeat XONIC. The same is true for NieN and his track/record, "Someday" (although he'd contribute to RESPECT/V later) "Feel", the first record you find in Lies of P, is a DJ Mocha track and DJ Mocha never worked on Pentavision titles past Portable 2/Trilogy.
Some of the older DJMAX Portable producers like ESTi, now known under his studio's name ESTimate, would contribute new works to Respect/V and lead me to think that maybe some bridges have been mended over time but I kind of don't understand why they reached in a pool so deep to grab the stuff at the very very bottom. Some of those songs are new Respect/V tunes so... why not just... get all of them from there? Why snatch the stuff that makes me, a basically day 1 fan of the Portable series, look at it and break out in hives over remembering the slow heat death of one of my favorite rhythm game developers?
Edited out a part of this about Round8's headcount size which was incorrect, I got them mixed up with another studio based on some false recollections on my part.
