This article contains late game spoilers for Lies of P.
Bad games will always have a place in gaming culture, and are a necessary evil to make the good games shine all the brighter. Bad games can even go on to become good games given the time and chance. Good games which go on to become bad games however, those deserve their own circle in gaming hell.
It’s been a couple of years since I last visited this segment in the Alexx’s Fits of Fury saga, but I am now able to share a story of game rage that is still fresh in my mind nearly 18 months since it happened. Throughout this entire console generation thus far, this is the big one.
Picture the scene: It’s late 2023, the strongest ever year for game releases. I was piling hours into half a dozen titles jostling for my time and a place in my top five of the year ranking. One game looked like it was guaranteed one of the top spots, before a series of incredibly unfortunate and exceedingly rare events took place that saw it forever fall from grace. That game is the subject of our story today. One of the best, worst games I have ever experienced, which I haven’t touched since what I’ve dubbed the ‘Nameless Incident’: Lies of P.
Firstly, you must understand, not only do I generally play games on easy difficulty; I also make a conscious effort to avoid Soulsborne and Soulslike games. I appreciate them from afar. They look like fun and I want to play them, but if I can’t be good at them immediately then forget it. Not interested.
As years roll by, I find myself willing to venture outside of my ironclad comfort zone, and more and more I am pleasantly surprised by the experiences I find. My first real Souls game was Elden Ring, which I called my game of the year for 2022. A mistake, in hindsight, as I had to cheat / cheese (get another player to drop me millions of runes so I could artificially level up to 200+) but in the moment I didn’t care. I wrote multiple articles about my adventures in the Lands Between, and the fierce euphoria at beating each boss, even those I had no business besting first time, such as Starscourge Radahn, was unlike anything I had felt before.
Driven by my undeserved confidence, and having adored Lies of P’s aesthetic from its very first reveal, I flung caution to the wind and dived in on release day. Not only did I find enjoyment with the game, I was good at it. I excelled under the pressure it exerted, and I found my short game rage fuse was completely unfazed by the countless deaths I suffered in my dozens of hours spent.
Mechanically, Lies of P is an absolute triumph of a game with a tough but fair combat system. Impressively beautiful environments coupled with splendidly smooth frame rates make this a fully immersive game, to the point you will notice new little details in every playthrough. The story boss fights are expertly crafted, and the occasions where you are unsure why you died and how to avoid that reoccurring on your next attempt are few and far between.
The majority of Lies of P players I have spoken to will confess that there’s always one particular boss in the game who stonewalls them for what feels like an eternity. One of the things I love most about this is that it can be almost any boss in the game. I have two, because of course I do, and both of mine are ones that people will roll their eyes at me for struggling with, as generally nobody else seems to. King’s Flame Fuoco and Robber Weasel. You read that correctly, and to those who don’t understand what they read, Robber Weasel is widely considered the easiest boss in the game..
But wait! A lot of players will tell you that Fallen Archbishop Andreus was the boss who skill checked them in their first run at Lies of P. Not me. I crushed him in my first attempt; with next to no effort. I could ramble on about every Lies of P boss, but I’ll spare you that for now. Today is the day for the Nameless Incident.
To those who haven’t played Lies of P; upon defeating the final mandatory boss in the story, depending on certain criteria being fulfilled by choices the player makes throughout the game, you can choose to face an optional final final boss: the Nameless Puppet. This boss fucking sucks. I have reached him in all four of my playthroughs. I steamrollered him in my first and third runs, had to admit defeat and skip him in my second, but for my fourth game he stood in the way of meaningful progress to achieving the game’s Platinum trophy. This is a big deal.
The Nameless Puppet is a two stage fight. After clearing his first health bar he immediately gets back up with a new fight style, a new extraordinary level of strength, and an even steeper difficulty spike. I could clear his first health bar maybe two thirds of the time, but by the time I got to his second all my resources were spent. When you die against his second phase, you must repeat his first. You cannot use your summoned ally against him as you can in other boss fights. You cannot falter, hesitate or doubt yourself. Your performance must be perfect.
I struggled against him for weeks, resorting to every cheap trick I could find online after my usual combat patterns failed me. I started timing myself just surviving against him without even trying to inflict damage. Every time he relentlessly obliterated my health bar like it was my first time on the game and he was a ‘supposed to lose’ fight. Things took a turn for the worse outside of the game. I became obsessed. I was woken at night by adrenaline after fighting him in my dreams. I watched videos on YouTube over and over of people beating him while taking no damage. I mimicked other play styles that were drastically different to my own. All for naught.
The Nameless Incident attempt started just like every other. Badly. I dropped him to this second phase, and my twitching, bloodshot exhausted eyes glanced desperately to his health bar, and I saw that I had managed to reduce it to half remaining, then a quarter, then a tenth. This was the furthest I’d ever got in this playthrough. Gathering my composure, channeling stamina, I threw everything into the biggest attack I could muster against him at point blank range. How was I rewarded? With a one in a million glitch. My finishing blow attack phased right through him and dealt no damage. I hadn’t noticed unfortunately as I had prematurely begun celebrating, the DualSense fallen from my shaking sweaty hands. He killed me.
I stared at the game in disbelief for a while, newly respawned outside of his arena to start the whole thing again. “No”, I thought to myself, “Fuck this”. I ejected the disc from my PS5 and snapped it, three times; then I stamped the game case to tiny fragments. It took a lot of willpower to not smash the DualSense as well, but I resisted that temptation.
I removed Lies of P from my top five ranking and replaced it with Bus Simulator 21, partly because I did enjoy that game, but mostly out of spite. I hate Lies of P. I hate it so fucking much. But I also love it. It made me think I could play challenging games. It made me obsess over a game like I’d never believed possible. It nearly broke me, before I broke it.
Sometimes I would like to play it again, obviously I’d have to buy it first as it’s yet to be added to a PlayStation Plus lineup, but the memory of the Nameless Incident halts me. However, when it comes to the matter of my proximity to the Lies of P Platinum trophy, if I told you I’d abandoned all hope of ever unlocking it, then I’d be lying.
Written and edited by Alexx.