I'm still having a lot of fun with Lies of P. I'm currently 14 hours in and the difficulty is finally starting to ramp up. The bosses I've been meeting has been giving me more and more grief with each one. Still, I haven't needed more than give attempts to take down any of them. That was until I met Romeo, the King of Puppets.
The holy trinity
When it comes to soulslikes there's three things that are important to me. Combat, exploration and bosses. If all of these hit the spot then I'm going to enjoy it. Combat needs to feel fluid and not clunky. There needs to be a sense of exploration and not just a linear path. Bosses need to feel unique and challenging.
So far the game has been somewhat lacking in terms of exploration and bosses. Exploration is very simple and it's harder to miss things than to find them as long as you just take 10 seconds to look around each area. There are however some secrets from the earlier areas that are hinted towards in notes and documents in the later areas. That is something I like.
The bosses has also been a bit of a disappointment. At least in the first part of the game. I don't have an overview on how many bosses I've fought so far but I churned through quite a few before I found my first proper challenge. Luckily the one after that, and the one after that again turned out to be even bigger challenges. That's what I want from boss fights in this game. I want then to become increasingly more difficult as time goes by.
The Fallen Archbishop that can be seen up above was the first challenge for me. I needed a good 4-5 attempts to take him down. Mostly because I wasn't anticipating his second phase. I should have known from the small health pool he had. I played carelessly and ran out of heals by the time I got to the second phase. That phase had some real camera issues when tracking the boss. Half the time I couldn't even see the boss swinging around which was quite frustrating.
The second big challenge was the Black Rabbit Brotherhood boss fight. This guy hits hard and has some long attack combos that can be hard to parry. He also has helpers joining him throughout the fight who needs to be taken down. They have challenging attack moves on their own. This one took me 8-10 attempts to defeat and it was only when I learned the parry pattern and managed to break his weapon that I easily took him down. That is a cool feature in this game. If you perfect block the enemy enough times their weapon eventually breaks and they become weaker.
Enter Romeo, the King of Puppets
Then came Romeo. The source of my first proper rage moment in Lies of P. You start out fighting this giant monkey like machine. He has a relatively small health pool and most of his attacks are quite basic and easy to perfectly block. It took me 10 seconds to understand this was a two phase fight. I destroyed the monkey on my first attempt and I was right. It's a two phase fight where the second phase is entirely different from the first.
Out of the monkey comes this white haired, scythe wielding puppet. He looks menacing for sure but I wasn't really phased. All the other puppet fights in the game has been really easy so far. He then proceeded to completely wipe the floor with me in the span of 20 seconds. I wasn't mad. I was happy that I'd finally found a real challenge.
It took me a good hour or more to defeat this guy. It turns out that the first phase is quite volatile. It can be easy one attempt and then completely different the next. I never managed to properly master this phase but I always managed to get through it, arriving in the second phase with everything from 2-6 heals remaining.
I can't really say that I ever mastered anything in the second phase before my second to last attempt when something just clicked. I struggled to block his attacks and I struggled to dodge them. The boss is just so fast and unpredictable. When you get him to a certain percentage he puts flames on his scythe as well and does a full 10 second combo that is basically an instant kill. I eventually managed to counter this by timing my stagger for when he activated his scythe. That cancelled the entire attack. He still killed me afterwards though.
On my second to last attempt however something clicked that just trivialized the whole boss. Turns out if you dodge to the left you perfectly evade all his attacks and can easily get in an attack between almost all of them. This also works for the flame scythe dance. It's funny because I was in such a rage before discovering this and I was a button click away from summoning a specter to help me defeat him. I'm glad I didn't because on my very next attempt I managed to take him down.
I really hope the bosses keep increasing in difficulty from now on, without going into bullshit territory. That is another trap that these games often fall into.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.