‘What if FromSoftware made Pinocchio?’

December 27, 2022 6:34 AM

The Lies of P [Announcement Trailer] [Gameplay Trailer] “Lies of P is a new “Souls-like” action RPG that blends the classic children’s story Pinocchio with the plague-filled horrors of Bloodborne. Developed by Round 8 Studios (Bless Unleashed) and published by Neowiz, the game is slated to come to Google Stadia, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X in 2023. Lies of P looks like a horrifying take on the toy-becomes-boy classic. The first part of the trailer shows a rat squirming out of what appears to be a dead man’s mouth. It’s a far cry from the cheery tale many people know from the animated Disney film.” [via: Polygon]
posted by Fizz (36 comments total)

This game looks dark, weird, & fun. I don't think we're going to get Bloodborne 2 for a long while, nor even a remastered version for the current generation of gaming. And that is sad.

👏 BUT👏 THIS 👏 LOOKS 👏 FUCKING 👏 AMAZING 👏
posted by Fizz at 6:37 AM on December 27, 2022

Does anyone remember that Dante's Inferno game?
posted by JHarris at 6:50 AM on December 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Does anyone remember that Dante's Inferno game?

Do Ulysses next. It's time for Buck Mulligan to fuck around and find out in Dublin.

More literary properties being adapted into souls-like horror aesthetics please!!
posted by Fizz at 6:56 AM on December 27, 2022 [5 favorites]

Google Stadia?

Did someone not get the memo?
posted by billjings at 6:59 AM on December 27, 2022 [5 favorites]

Google Stadia?

An older article from earlier in the year when the game was announced. Google Stadia did exist at the time of the article which was quoted up above.
posted by Fizz at 7:03 AM on December 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

To be fair, Fizz, it probably wouldn't be the first game with a detailed masturbation mechanic.

Still holding out for Tom Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow Six, though.
posted by phooky at 7:03 AM on December 27, 2022 [14 favorites]

To be fair, Fizz, it probably wouldn't be the first game with a detailed masturbation mechanic.

Without looking it up, I am going to just assume that the Yakuza games have some version of this. But if anyone else wants to go down that rabbit hole, DM me your results.
posted by Fizz at 7:06 AM on December 27, 2022

American McGee's Alice games were definitely not soulsborne but they were pretty cool. And definitely had a horror vibe I liked.

After viewing the trailer, I have to say this looks pretty crap. The animation/mocap and gameplay mechanics on show are barely PS2 quality. I feel like they bought a lot of high-detail 3D assets to try and extend the budget, which I get, but I am not sure the gameplay underneath is going to be worth the pixels they're pushing.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:35 AM on December 27, 2022

After viewing the trailer, I have to say this looks pretty crap.

Hard disagree. But, I'm super into this entire aesthetic and I think this is going to be a pretty interesting and fun souls-like. The Lie system they're also building into this game has potential, but we'll have to see how thats fleshed out and how much the decisions we make with our lies truly changes the story.
posted by Fizz at 7:44 AM on December 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

is there a reason for all this Pinocchio content within like an 18-month period?

- Disney live action remake
- Guillermo Del Toro stop motion version
- Some bizarre CGI version, inexplicably voiced by Pauly Shore
- This game
posted by hoyle at 7:46 AM on December 27, 2022 [5 favorites]

In re Pinocchio, I'm always reminded of H Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:53 AM on December 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm pretty sure the rush of adaptations are due to the influence of KC Green's recently completed adaptation of Pinnochio.

(Also: if you are near New York! There is an exhibition of props and models from the Del Toro Pinnochio on display at MoMA and it's fantastic.)
posted by phooky at 7:56 AM on December 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

I feel like there's a great game waiting to be made by somebody that focuses solely on whoever's job it is to light the candles, oil lamps, gaslight posts, etc. in the backgrounds of all these ruined steampunk-Victorian settings while dodging the constantly battling monsters, clockwork heroes, technoflesh battle-tanks, etc.
posted by Shepherd at 8:01 AM on December 27, 2022 [17 favorites]

is there a reason for all this Pinocchio content

Just roll with it. Maybe this is just an interesting timeline branching off. Maybe we're just in the renaissance for some kind of Pinnochio cult/religion that will define our subsequent cultures & societies.
posted by Fizz at 8:02 AM on December 27, 2022 [4 favorites]

That's the Lamplighter's Guild and they are everywhere. Everyone knows you don't fuck with the Guild. Even long-abandoned caves in toxic swamps have carefully maintained torches because all of the locals will strike if anyone dares to shut down a site without really careful negotiations. That's why so many ancient kingdoms crumble, you know, it's the payments to the Guild for generations of tombs and crypts and spider-infested castles and lava river riddled underground caverns. Sometimes you see liches and revenants roaming the highways at night looking for literally anyone to rob, it's not because rubies and emeralds are a fashion choice, it's because the fucking guild keeps re-animating their corpses so they can keep up the payments. I haven't yet met an undead bandit who wouldn't rather be napping, you know? It's the Guild.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:07 AM on December 27, 2022 [23 favorites]

I am not at all in this product's target demo, but I am wondering about the generalized need to make "dark" versions of everything. Tim Burton taking a shit on Alice in Wonderland is a mild example, as I recall there was a "dark" Alice done as a desktop game years before.

Not a criticism, but more a question: What is the point of taking a property, particularly a children's story/book, and adding this grimdark nonsense? "Winnie the Pooh, but Eeyore is a serial killer!", etc., etc.
posted by the sobsister at 8:43 AM on December 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

It's a lot easier to put black mascara on someone else's fully realized fictional world than to develop your own. Also easier to explain. And some folks have these dark thoughts about light-hearted properties anyway and wouldn't mind seeing them explored. I do not personally have thoughts about the triangles on a totoro's chest actually being the exposed fangs of an extra-dimensional mouth portal to hell, but taking an idea like that and developing a game around how all that calm and soothing mythos is actually the direst evil and will eat your soul is going to guarantee you a certain number of sales.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:55 AM on December 27, 2022 [4 favorites]

is there a reason for all this Pinocchio content within like an 18-month period?

Can we add George "Jew-ish" Santos to the list?
posted by kaibutsu at 8:58 AM on December 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's a lot easier to put black mascara on someone else's fully realized fictional world than to develop your own.

I think that's right. I started reading Lost Girls and just had to put it away. What an utter paucity of imagination and absence of good feeling it must've taken for Moore to choose to "adapt" those stories in that way.
posted by the sobsister at 9:05 AM on December 27, 2022

It'll be on Gamepass day 1 too, so that's cool.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 9:19 AM on December 27, 2022

More literary properties being adapted into souls-like horror aesthetics please!!

I'd also accept the flipside if someone wants to do a tavern management simulation called Frank-n-Stein where you're a walking horror who is e.g. serving beers to explorers in the Arctic.
posted by cortex at 9:27 AM on December 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Nobody ever went bankrupt, providing teenagers of any age an opportunity to show themselves how grown up they are by subverting their childish memories. The fact that it is cheap to subvert existing worlds saves a lot of world building as noted above, too.

But don't discount the need to darken up then still tell the story of properties you would like to think you've grown out of.

Given that I'm at the point where I never, ever finish any game, much less a souls like, I look forward to watching some no commentary playthrough of this just for some of those delightfully over the top clockwork techno flesh horrors mentioned.
posted by abulafa at 9:35 AM on December 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

abulafa is right. Plus I tend to think of this kind of thing, which we've seen already with Oz and Wonderland, as a symptom of how pitifully and artificially small the IP public domain is now. Of course there are thousands of books, maybe millions, in the public domain in English alone, but of those, most of them appeal to scholars and historians, amateur or otherwise. The PD stories that can have a paying audience get colonized quickly, and the others ... well, who wants to go back and explore, say, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch? Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge nerd and I love Public Domain Review, but you see what I mean here.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:44 AM on December 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

What's ironic is that there is a huge amount of darkness in any of the Big Three (Pan, Alice, Oz) and in Grimms' and other's tales, both in terms of violence and in terms of mood, but the creative paucity on the part of content developers (I won't call them "creators") means that the extant darkness isn't quite dark enough or, perhaps, (visually) explicit enough.
posted by the sobsister at 9:59 AM on December 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

I am not at all in this product's target demo, but I am wondering about the generalized need to make "dark" versions of everything.

The outrageous success of FromSoftware must have a lot to do with it. Elden Ring is amazing and deserves all of its accolades; it is also EXTREMELY grimdark.

I personally would squeal with delight if they gave me the opportunity to put a Santa hat on my Elden Ring character, but for whatever reason that's just not in this company's DNA. And they're obviously very influencial because they've made some incredible games and made a LOT of money.
posted by billjings at 10:13 AM on December 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

After viewing the trailer, I have to say this looks pretty crap. The animation/mocap and gameplay mechanics on show are barely PS2 quality.

fancy animations do not make a good game. and it looks great for an indie game.

personally as a huge Bloodborne fan I say: inject this straight into my veins.
posted by neckro23 at 10:51 AM on December 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

As to dark, you should read the original Pinocchio book. Spoiler alert sort of… Right in the beginning, the helpful cricket arrives, laying a big morality trip on the now living puppet. His response? He smashes the bug on the wall. The bug sort of floats around for the rest of the story more as a moralistic ghost commenting on Pinocchio‘s horrible behavior. The original novel was quite dark compared to the heavily disneyfied animated film.
posted by njohnson23 at 10:57 AM on December 27, 2022 [9 favorites]

An older article from earlier in the year when the game was announced. Google Stadia did exist at the time of the article which was quoted up above.

Not gonna lie, I assumed from the quote the entire project was satire. A "Every time the marketing material lies, Pinocchio's nose grows" bit seemed too... on the nose.
posted by pwnguin at 1:18 PM on December 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

I wish game studios would remember to have an art style. "Victorian London" isn't an art style, it's a setting. A Dark Pinocchio game could look like Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, or like Wallace and Gromit, or a Brothers Quay stop-motion movie, or a Kay Nielsen illustration, or troll dolls, or LITERALLY ANYTHING besides "more or less realistic people, but in top hats". Art-wise, this just looks like nothing; it's a generic treatment that could have any source material at all attached to it, alice in wonderland or the wolfman or sherlock holmes or 1800s Batman or anything you can think of, provided there's a way to rationalize the top hats.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 2:15 PM on December 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

The voiceover gave me a serious Meatcanyon vibe. And he's already done Pinocchio.
posted by doctornemo at 2:27 PM on December 27, 2022

There's a hidden shop in Dark Souls 3 on the roof of the sanctuary where you can get unique items. You get on the roof and find the crows nest and wait for crow caws and a voice to say me me pickle pee!

Years after all the rage quitting and controller throwing I was eating pickles over the sink and took a little sip of the juice from the jar. My girlfriend said me me pickle pee! GODDAMMIT now I can't eat pickles without thinking of pickle piss.
posted by adept256 at 2:37 PM on December 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

FWIW I’ve always felt Disney’s Jiminy Cricket to be one of the most enduring and horrifying villains in the mouse house Pantheon.

He’s an external conscience, a preachy Methodist little insect only Cronenberg in full body-horror could do justice to, but the horror is metaphysical: at the first sign of a hard decision in the film, what does a conscience do but abandon the protagonist to the machine! What a metaphor for twentieth century modern choices! Now that’s horror.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:05 PM on December 27, 2022 [4 favorites]

I'd say this was the Dark Souls of MetaFilter threads except every thread now is just misery, people being mean and nonsensical but definitely evil sounding laughter.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 5:36 PM on December 27, 2022

This doesn't seem grimdark to me, or at least it's less grimdark than the Pinocchio ride at Disneyland. That one scared the shit out of me as child, like I don't even know what can be said about seeing the Pleasure Island amusement park turning kids into donkeys when you are in the middle of an actual amusement park.
posted by betweenthebars at 5:40 PM on December 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'd say this was the Dark Souls of MetaFilter threads except every thread now is just misery, people being mean and nonsensical but definitely evil sounding laughter.

Not to discount your perspective, but I haven't seen a lot of that here? Or even in most threads. Just maybe the occasional one.
posted by JHarris at 7:47 PM on December 27, 2022

I am still waiting for someone to make a game or a film out of "My life in the Bush of Ghosts".
No need to try to make that grim, It all ready has the "Flash Eyed Mother" and armies of dead babies with clubs.
posted by boilermonster at 11:20 PM on December 27, 2022