Fanservice is a tricky concept. Not the blatant stuff, of course: When a game creator sticks big, heaping mounds of T&A directly in front of a leering camera, inviting players to salivate over every exposed inch of digital flesh, it’s not very hard to figure out which part of its consumer base is being titillated. But the wider concept—of, essentially, giving people what they say they want, in the quantities that they say they want it—can be a much more difficult beast to wrangle. There’s a line between listening to feedback from the people receiving your art, after all, and bending over backwards to placate the consumers funding you. Finding it is never easy.
Lies Of P: Overture, the new expansion for the 2023 “sexy Pinocchio puppet does Bloodborne” sleeper hit, is, undeniably, fanservice. The massive new campaign delves deep into the original game’s backstory, answering a majority of questions raised by its surprisingly emotional story of a puppet (who, yes, looks almost actionably like Timothée Chalamet) killing its way through a strange European city as it undergoes several simultaneous apocalypses. Where the original Lies Of P—which would need another dozen or so sumptuously designed puppet costumes to wear all the inspirations it takes from From Software’s various Souls-style games on its sleeves—was often deliberately oblique and reserved, Overture is far more overt with how it deploys its characters and its feelings, readily exposing the story’s beating heart. (Or, possibly, its P-Organ, which is, of course, what the game’s version of Pinocchio has instead of a heart; no getting around the fact that loving Lies Of P means incorporating a lot of fairly ridiculous jargon into your brain.)
At the same time, developer Round8 has tweaked Lies‘ already-excellent and quick-moving combat in myriad little ways, almost all of them designed to improve quality of life for players. (The fact that you can now see how many currency-granting consumables you’re carrying while leveling up, and that cracking them open is now as easy as a couple of in-menu button presses, is a godsend.) Overture is a very clear effort to remove roadblocks that might have stopped people from giving the violent Pinocchio game a try—most notably with the introduction of difficulty levels, patched in with the expansion and available to all players, that can be chosen (and then re-chosen) whenever you’d like.
The Great Difficulty Discourse is one of those topics that will probably outlive humanity itself. In the year 20025, I imagine there’ll be sentient cockroaches engaging in flame wars on the OmegaNet over who should, or should not, “Git gud.” But the introduction of difficulty selection into Overture does occasionally blur the game’s artistic intent. (And I’ll note that the fact that I was playing the expansion on the already more difficult New Game+, because that was the state of the only save file that I had that was anywhere close to the expansion’s late-in-the-game starting point, definitely played a part in this.) For my first hour with Overture, I kept having to flick the difficulty settings up and down, trying to find a sweet spot that gave me struggles to overcome, without slamming me into walls that would crack my little puppet head open. And this did impact my experience. Difficulty can be many things in games—an accessibility issue, a badge of dubious honor, a marketing device—but it’s also fundamentally a storytelling tool. Encountering a boss who hits harder, or who deploys attacks that exploit your weaknesses more effectively, communicates something to the player about what that character is meant to represent; at the same time, the struggle itself is part of the emotional texture of the game. The adrenaline of a failure at the finish line, or the last-ditch move that actually saved the day, is part of what makes games of this style so ripe for emotional investment. Having to tune that curve myself—and I did, eventually, manage to find a happy medium—made Overture‘s early going a little less joyful than it could have been.
Which is a shame, because this is genuinely one of the best expansions I’ve ever seen for a game of its ilk. The original Lies Of P could be fairly dinged for a certain lack of variety, both in its level types and its enemies, with players spending most of their time running through a fairly drab assortment of 19th-century locales while smacking down the same basic varieties of robots and monsters. (The smacking was, and remains, good at least, with a new parcel of ridiculous new weapons escalating the parry-heavy carnage; look out for the giant pinwheel hammer that hits harder the faster you run.) Overture very consciously bucks this trend, incorporating zoos, carnivals, frozen shores, and more into its palette, all in an effort to provoke a giddy laugh of novelty from players. At the same time, Round8 has widened out the roster of what you’re actually fighting, presenting new challenges at pretty much every step of the hefty expansion. That goes double for the boss fights, already a highlight of the original game; the first boss battle in Overture, against a puppeteer who battles you 2 on 1 with one of her tethered creations, is one of the most engaging big fights I’ve ever done in a Souls-esque game, period, a fast-paced, surprisingly fair challenge of divided attention and multiple targets.
Lies Of P was already a better game than it had any business being, one of the rare From imitators that understood that story and vibes are just as important to the weight of Souls games as their combat. Overture shows all the ways that confidence can improve a title like this, allowing a developer to make bigger, weirder swings. It’s fanservice, yes: Addressing player complaints, bringing in or expanding on fan-favorite characters from the original, and telling its story in more concrete and openly emotional terms. But it also demonstrates why fanservice isn’t automatically a dirty word when it comes to gaming. When your base material was already so good, there are worse things you can do than give players more of what they want.
