When you think about it, it’s not all that weird that there’s a grim, Bloodbourne-esque action RPG based on the story of Pinnochio.
If you’ve ever read the original The Adventures of Pinocchio (not the Disneyfied version) you know the fable is plenty dark already. When Pinnochio first meets Jiminy Cricket he immediately kills the talking bug with a hammer. Pinnochio’s friend, a little boy named Candlewick, gets turned into a donkey and is forced to work on a farm until he dies of exhaustion. It’s dark stuff!
So the life of Pinocchio makes fertile ground for Lies of P, Neowiz’s action ARPG set in 1800s steampunk London. IGN got firsties on the new gameplay trailer you can see above, though I gotta say in the two-minute running time there’s maybe about 20 seconds of actual, in-game gameplay. The rest is mostly bits from cutscenes, transitional scenes, animation, and a nice look at a few of the game’s characters and locations. Still, my nose would grow if I said it doesn’t look very cool.
P isn’t made of wood but looks more like a steampunk android superhero. We can see him ripping a safe door off its hinges with his mechanical arm, transforming his metal hand into a cannon, blasting enemies with electricity, and leaping through windows like an adolescent Jason Bourne. He even drags a sword across his metal arm and the sparks set the blade on fire. Pretty badass stuff, really. In the trailer he wields a shovel, a harpoon, several massive hammers, a sword twice his height, and what looks like a lumberjack’s crosscut saw.
When he’s not going toe-to-toe with towering steampunk monsters and angry automatons, little P comes face to face with his inventor-slash-poppa, Geppetto, who may actually be a sinister figure in this game’s story based on a somewhat maniacal laugh featured in the trailer.
One thing’s for sure: It’s definitely extremely Bloodbourne-ish, with the same weighty and deliberate combat we noticed in an earlier trailer. Since Bloodbourne itself still isn’t on PC, we’re not exactly complaining.