The Scrapped Watchman is winding up. I do not roll. I plant my feet and I tap guard, over and over, riding his combo string like a drum solo. Clang. Clang. Clang. Each perfect guard chips his poise and lights his body up white. Then I hear the tell, that half-beat pause before the big swing, and I hold the guard a hair longer than feels safe. The screen flashes. Stagger. I dash in, land the fatal blow, and watch him fold. That is the moment Lies of P sells you. Not the story. The hands.

Let me be blunt about the feel, because that is what matters first. The perfect guard window here is mean. It is tighter than Sekiro and it demands you not only tap at the right frame but ride the input a few milliseconds longer, something the game barely explains. That sounds like a complaint and it is not. Once the timing clicks, the flow state is unreal. You stop backing off and start leaning in. Every enemy becomes a rhythm to read instead of a threat to flee. The weight is exact. Attacks land with a heavy mechanical crunch, and the feedback loop of guard, stagger, riposte is one of the most satisfying I have felt outside FromSoftware itself.

The fight systems are where Neowiz swings hardest and mostly connects. The weapon assembly is the headline. You snap any blade onto any handle, so a heavy greatsword edge can ride a fast dagger grip and inherit its scaling and moveset. It is genuine build expression, not a menu gimmick, and it feeds directly into how aggressive you can afford to be. Fable Arts give each weapon a special move that rewards charged poise damage. The Legion Arm on your left rounds it out, letting you flamethrow, grapple, or shield mid-combo. Enemy readability is strong. The puppets and Carcass horrors telegraph with clear wind-ups, so when you eat a hit it is your read that failed, not the animation lying to you. The skill ceiling is high because perfect guarding is optional but transformative. You can tank and dodge your way through, but the players who commit to the parry rhythm operate on a different level entirely.

The arenas hold up. Krat is a gorgeous rotting Belle Epoque nightmare, and the level design threads tight streets, cathedral heights, and swamp sprawl with the shortcut loops the genre lives on. Boss design is the real star. These are varied, inventive, and genuinely hard, from massive mechanical monstrosities to two-phase behemoths with huge health pools that will take you apart in seconds if your spacing is off. When the encounter pacing is on, it is elite. The tension ramps, the arena gives you room to breathe between combos, and the payoff of a clean kill is enormous. It does sag in stretches. A couple of mid-game areas overstay their welcome, and a few bosses lean on relentless aggression and hyperarmor in ways that feel cheap rather than fair.

The grind is where I name the flaws out loud. The early game is badly tuned. Before you unlock enough weapons, upgrade materials, and the perfect guard confidence, the opening hours are a grind wall that has frustrated even soulslike veterans, and the launch balance was rough enough that Neowiz patched boss difficulty after the fact. That early friction will bounce players who would have loved the back half. The derivativeness debate is real too. This wears its Bloodborne coat and its Sekiro parry loudly, and if you want reinvention you will not find it here. What you find is execution. Lies of P does not innovate the formula so much as polish it to a mirror shine, and the weapon assembly and P-Organ progression are its own enough to keep it from being a clone.

Here is the call. Lies of P is the rare soulslike that earns the comparison instead of hiding behind it. The feel is superb, the parry is one of the best in the genre, and the bosses deliver. It stumbles on early-game tuning and it borrows more than it invents, which is exactly why the real consensus lands it strong but shy of the top tier, an 81 on PC and near the top ten percent on OpenCritic. If you want a demanding, aggressive, parry-forward action game and you are willing to grind through a rough opening, this is essential. If you bounce off tight timing windows or you need the genre reinvented, look elsewhere. For everyone else, plant your feet and hold the guard.