Players soon won’t have to git quite as gud to enjoy Lies of P. When the improbably Pinocchio-themed Soulslike launched in 2023, many who attempted it found it even more difficult than FromSoftware’s own offerings. That difficulty has remained a barrier ever since, but when the game’s first paid DLC is released, more players could have the opportunity to join in.
Developer Neowiz tells VGC that Lies of P: Overture, a prequel add-on with no release date yet, will be adding difficulty options.
“We wanted to make sure a wider audience of players could play the game,” game director Jiwon Choi said.
These new difficulty options will be available in both Overture and the base game. They’re named Butterfly’s Guidance and Awakened Puppet, while the default setting will be called Legendary Stalker. While you’d have no way of knowing from their names, both additions are easier than the current difficulty, so players will have some leeway in just how much easier of an experience they want. For players who’d rather increase Lies of P’s already substantial challenge, a new boss rush mode with five escalating levels of difficulty is also being added, along with an even tougher boss gauntlet that doesn’t refill healing items between fights.
The update is a change of tune for Neowiz. Around the original game’s release, Choi actually told DualShockers that he didn’t believe Soulslike games should feature difficulty options. Choi attributes the shift to feedback from both players and the development team, which wanted a more approachable version of their work.
Online reactions to the announcement have been predictably mixed. While an irritating part of the genre’s audience decries any attempt to open up games to more people, a large portion of the player base is taking the update in stride.
Soulslike games and their difficulty have always been a source of intense vitriol, where gatekeeping often becomes a strange badge of honor. The very point of these games, the argument goes, is to overcome a challenge, and so any reduction to that challenge ruins the game. It’s a flawed argument; individuals will have more or less trouble within the same game for reasons ranging from disability to genre familiarity, none of which affects anyone else’s achievements.
I don’t disagree with the idea that there’s merit to overcoming a seemingly impossible challenge, and games are the perfect medium to explore that. Beating Dark Souls II genuinely helped me overcome a depressive episode, and sometimes it can just be fun to run up against an immovable object until you push it out of the way. But no one is taking that away by adding difficulty options. As Choi says, it’s about making the game enjoyable for more people.
My main concern with Lies of P’s new difficulty options is whether they’ll go far enough. Neowiz hasn’t said what the two new options will entail, and they didn’t immediately respond to Inverse’s request for comment, so it’s unclear what will change.
Earlier this year, I went back for another go at Elden Ring, having already spent over 100 hours on the game. I quickly found that I wasn’t up to scale that same mountain of difficulty a second time, so I turned to mods to take the edge off. But having so many mods at my disposal actually took things too far, removing so much of the challenge that I was no longer having fun. In an ideal world, players would be able to tune the difficulty to their liking, deciding how much to reduce enemy damage or increase their own health so they can enjoy a tough but not impossible version of the game.
However it pans out, letting more players like me, who no longer enjoy difficulty for its own sake, have a good time with Lies of P is undoubtedly a good thing. I can only hope more Soulslike developers get the message and open the gates to their games, too.
