Welcome back to “The Games I Played in ____” where I write about the games that I’ve played in the past month. This is the fourth installment in this series, so if you’d like to see what I played last month, you can find that here. I’m trying out a new format this month in a continued attempt to reign in how long this keeps winding up being, so let me know how you feel about this change. I think I’m getting close to the right format for doing this monthly, but let me know if you have strong thoughts on this change.

Halloween is right around the corner, which means it’s time for some good spooky gaming. Now usually, I’ll replay Resident Evil Remake around this time of year, but this year, I went to mix it up and played some newer horror and horror adjacent games. And, surprisingly, I kinda struggled to find a good Halloween game this year. There’s one that I constantly went back and forth on while playing, and while I ultimately did walk away from that one very satisfied, a lot of the other games I tried to jump into just didn’t click with me this year. Kind of a bit of a bummer year overall, to be honest. That said, the month ended with a few incredibly promising releases that I’ll get into more next month once I’ve had more time to dive into them, so I think good times are on the horizon.

So what worked and what didn’t? Let’s find out!

The Best of the Month

Lies of P (PlayStation 5)

Lies of P should not work as well as it does. I was not expecting the spooky Pinocchio/Bloodborne mash-up to be a game that would take up this much space in my head, and yet, here we are. Despite the somewhat laughable setup, Lies of P manages to create a really compelling and fascinating world filled with unsettling automatons, gorgeous environments, horrifying Eldritch abominations, and a surprisingly touching story. It’s also a bit of an over-designed mess with gameplay that would feel amazing at times, and then five minutes later have me tearing my hair out and debating about walking away from it forever. But by the end of it, it had finally clicked, and as I delivered the final blow to the last boss in the game, my hands were shaking, my heart was pumping, and I ultimately kept playing to go back and discover areas and items that I missed the first time through, while actually being a touch sad that it was over.

While Lies of P is messy and has lots of rough edges, the one thing that is 100% spot-on throughout the entire game is the worldbuilding. Lies of P takes place in the city of Krat. Stylized after an early 20th century European city, Krat is absolutely gorgeous. Throughout your time in Krat, you’ll explore marbled opera houses, gothic cathedrals, and art deco science fairs. You’ll travel down rain-soaked cobblestone alleyways with beautiful accordion music playing from the residences, climb up fire escapes to traverse the city’s rooftops, and meet all manner of fascinating characters loosely inspired by Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio. You’ll also constantly be ambushed by rogue automatons (which the game refers to as “puppets”, but that name undersells how effectively creepy they can be) that were driven mad in the aftermath of an event referred to in-game as “the Puppet Frenzy”. As you progress deeper into the game, you’ll learn that Krat holds even more secrets and even more horrors. Krat is also currently in the midst of an awful plague known as the Petrification Disease and, woo boy, does that name not do justice to how awful this disease and what happens to those infected are.

As this game wears its inspirations on its sleeves, those familiar with Bloodborne will immediately see the similarities. Both feature a sprawling city inspired by classic European architecture, and both feature a surprise cosmic horror twist (Bloodborne instead mashing it up with classic gothic horror tropes rather than Lies of P’s steampunk-inspired body horror tropes). Where Lies of P goes a step further than Bloodborne is that Lies of P isn’t content to just stop with the surprise cosmic horror twist (we’re getting into spoiler territory for the next two paragraphs, head’s up). When I first reached Saint Frangelico Cathedral and the game’s cosmic horrors first started to take shape, I wasn’t horribly surprised given how much this game is obviously inspired by Bloodborne. As incredible and horrifying as that level’s boss, Fallen Archbishop Andreus was, it wasn’t shocking to see cosmic horrors show up here. What did surprise me was when, a few levels later, this game revealed its actual twist. It’s also a loose retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

This extra third dimension does so much to elevate the story in Lies of P and make this batshit concept work. Where Lies of P could have very easily wound up just being a superficial, grimdark retelling of Pinocchio, it instead transforms into this fascinating work of body horror about grief, loss, and (I told you I’m spoiling everything, so last warning, I’m spoiling everything) two men losing their humanity in their quest to conquer death. On one hand, you have the alchemist necromancer Simon Manus (the game’s stand-in for Victor Frankenstein) whose experiments in raising the dead have brought about the Petrification Disease that is causing the citizen of Krat to devolve into horrifying abominations. And on the other, you have Geppetto who is successful in creating life within his automatons, but ultimately is willing to throw all of that away and doom everyone in the city of Krat in a vain attempt to revive his dead son Carlo as a “real boy” despite the fact that Carlo already lives on in puppet form as the player-character, P. Throughout the game, I was shocked by how cleverly Lies of P took bits and pieces from other classic children’s and horror literature and blended them together into something that works so well.

If only Lies of P was that successful with its gameplay. Lies of P similarly takes bits of pieces of other games, mostly From Software’s Bloodborne and Sekiro: Shadow’s Die Twice, and mashes them all together in an attempt to create something new. This is much less successful than the storytelling. Games like Bloodborne and Sekiro, while difficult, are ultimately quite simple as they are entirely built around a single design tenet. In Bloodborne, your offense is your defense. The opposite is true of Sekiro. Both games took a while to click with me, but after a few hours in each, they did. From there, I was tested on how well I understood that system as the challenge and difficulty increased, but that system was always the answer I needed in order to complete the game’s hardest challenges.

Lies of P instead is kind of a maximalist mess. Not only does it mash-up these two conflicting design ideologies, it also layers on a skill-tree, craftable weapons with different skills and abilities, mechanical arms with different abilities and elemental affinities, a weapon grinder that can imbue your weapon with different elemental affinities or abilities, consumable items, the list just never ends. Lies of P just never stopped throwing new systems or new mechanics at me throughout my 40 hours with it. As such, it never really clicked with me. I never got the “aha” moment that I did with Bloodborne or Sekiro. Individual boss fights would eventually click after trial and error, but then the next one I would get to would require a completely different approach or use of a totally different part of the game’s mechanics than previous bosses. While I could see some people liking the depth, I just found it frustrating when nearly every boss became a huge roadblock that required hours of tedious study and experimentation to get through. The boss design doesn’t really help matters much, because while they are all incredibly well designed from a visual standpoint, mechanically a lot of these bosses are just absolute drags to fight. I will admit that by the time I got to the Green Monster of the Swamp (I know what you’re thinking and no, this is not Shrek), I was very close to just walking away from this game entirely.

But I didn’t. In those moments when I was ready to give up, all of the amazing high points that had come before came to mind. The contrast between the gorgeous marble of the Estella Opera House and the horrifying harlequin spider puppets that lurk within. Finally descending to the bottom of the Saint Frangelico Cathedral and discovering the Eldritch abomination that Archbishop Andreus had become. The somber duel with the White Lady set to a French pop song. Lies of P has moments of greatness. It also has moments of complete and utter bullshit. But if you stick with it, you’ll ultimately be rewarded with the best Soulsbourne (ugh) games I’ve played outside of those made by From Software themselves.

Recommended (though I also won’t at all fault you if you quit once hitting the Green Monster of the Swamp)

The Rest of the Month!

Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse (PlayStation 5)

I really wanted to like Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse. I really, truly did. The original three Fatal Frame games are some of my favorite survival horror games of all time, and I’ve been hoping that this game (which originally released in Japan only on the Wii) would eventually make it’s way to us here in the States. While this one does a lot right, namely the somber and unsettling mood, control issues kept breaking my immersion. Given the general praise for the Wii original, I think the issues I ran into are largely coming from this re-release doing a poor job of converting the Wii’s motion controls to a more standard control scheme. Basic navigation in this game is painful and control over the game’s flashlight (which is needed to find/interact with items) is a frustrating, tedious annoyance that constantly pulled me out of the mood this game was otherwise expertly building. This is a real bummer as I can see how playing this on original hardware would only add to the immersion, but that’s not possible unless you can speak/read Japanese or have access to a modded Wii to play a fan translation.

Not recommended (unless you have the ability to play this on original hardware in some capacity)

Inside the Backrooms (PC)

I have to be totally honest and admit that I did not expect much from this game. As I mentioned in my Halloween edition of Pretty Cool Things, while I find the concept of the original The Backrooms to be incredibly interesting, I’ve not really enjoyed what the internet has done to The Backrooms. And this game definitely follows a lot of those things that I don’t like. Each floor of The Backrooms and the monsters within are clearly explained out in full in text logs you come across, removing all mystery from this game. But the core gameplay loop of exploring maze-like spaces while solving puzzles with your friends is really solid and well done. Assuming your friends don’t get motion sick, that is. There’s a poorly implemented sanity mechanic that boils down to the screen getting heavily distorted that made a few of us quite ill, but there is a promised patch to turn that off on the way soon, thankfully. There’s a lot of jank in this game because it’s still very Early Access, but this one is honestly just a total blast to play with friends, even if the horror is virtually non-existent.

Recommended (get some friends together, hop on voice chat and spend a few hours getting lost)

Iron Lung (PC)

Iron Lung is often discussed as being one of the greatest works in the indie horror space. It’s bundled on Steam in the Masters of (Indie) Horror bundle alongside games I’ve written about like FAITH: The Unholy Trinity, Lost In Vivo and The Convenience Store (as well as Nightmare of Decay which I need to write about) which are all incredible examples of what indie horror can do at its best. I went into this with really high expectations, and sadly Iron Lung makes a single baffling choice at the end that totally soured my experience with the game. The sound design (please play this with headphones if you decide to play it), the atmosphere, even just the concept of the game itself, are all absolutely top tier. Iron Lung is truly masterful at building tension and ratcheting that tension up throughout its brief 45-minute runtime. The issue is that what it ultimately does with all that tension is so laughably bad and poorly executed that I found the entire experience to be a massive disappointment. I know I’m an outlier on this one, but I really expected so much more from the developer behind Dusk, which is one of my favorite indie titles in recent years.

Not recommended (but please go check out Dusk if that is in any way interesting to you)

Sons of the Forest (PC)

Playing through the original The Forest with my wife and friends was one of my favorite moments in co-op gaming and really helped us get through the final few months of pre-covid vaccine life. We’d get together a few times each week to slowly build out our base, fight off hordes of cannibals and monsters, and descend deep into the caverns underneath the titular forest to slowly unravel the mystery of just what the hell was going on in this creepy island. We were all eagerly awaiting the release of the sequel, Sons of the Forest earlier this year. After getting everyone back together, we were very disappointed to learn that the game was released FAR before it was finished and bounced off after a few sessions to give this more time to bake in Early Access before trying it again.

Well, it’s been a few more months and after jumping back in, we’re finding that there is definitely much more to do now than there was on release. That said, it’s still missing a lot of the magic that made the first game such a delight. While the story seems more fleshed out and the caves now actually have things in them, the island itself still feels dead. There’s no real reason to build a base because food and supplies are so scarce everywhere outside of the caves themselves. The clunky and awful new crafting system is still clunky and awful. It’s in better shape, but it’s still lacking a lot of what made the original The Forest so special. This is a tough one to fully evaluate because it still feels so incomplete, but the developers did make the decision to put it on sale and charge money for it in this state, so evaluate it I shall.

Not recommended (unless you’re absolutely fiending for more of The Forest and are willing to play something that’s clearly not yet finished)

World of Horror (PC)

World of Horror is what happens when a solitary developer takes the second edition of the Arkham Horror board game, translates it into a 1-bit point-and-click RPG like you’d see on an old Apple II, and then throws in a healthy dose of Junji Ito inspired horror. If you’re the kind of person that would appeal to, I’m sure you’re already pulling up Steam. If not, Ragnar over at RagnarRox just released an excellent stand-alone video on the game (which I first learned about when he featured the Early Access version in his first Games from the Underground video a few years back) which sells it far better than I ever could. While there’s definitely some jank around the edges, World of Horror is a pretty fascinating little game and is one of my favorite indie horror games I’ve come across in the past few years. If it at all sounds remotely interesting to you, I heartedly recommend checking it out.

Recommended (for anyone who loves the old-school Arkham Horror boardgame, Junji Ito, or has ever wanted to play a horror game with art entirely made in MS Paint)

Returning Favorites!

Street Fighter 6 (PlayStation 5)

Is anyone surprised at this point? Because you shouldn’t be. Two important things happened this month for me when it comes to Street Fighter 6. The first is that I fell in love with playing the newest DLC character, AKI. AKI is not a character that I would typically find myself playing as she is both incredibly technical and complicated to play (her gameplay revolves heavily around applying a poison state to your opponent and managing that state), but she also has some pretty glaring holes in her toolkit unlike my usual main, Ken. That said, she’s fun as hell to play and her combos are incredibly satisfying to hit. The other big thing is that my leverless controller finally came in, which has literally changed how I play the game. Playing on a leverless controller is so much more ergonomic and causes me so much less hand pain over long sessions, that I can finally really dig into this game more. I will likely write a whole post about my journey when it comes to learning a leverless controller, but it’s safe to say that while it’s been quite an adjustment, I’m extremely happy that I finally picked one up. Street Fighter 6 also still rules.

Sneak Peeks!

Spider-Man 2 (PlayStation 5)

I am an enormous Spider-Man dork from my childhood. From the 90’s animated series, the Sam Raimi movies and their respective games, and playing a weird amount of Marvel Superheroes and Marvel vs Capcom in local arcades, I’ve always loved Spider-Man. And this particular version of Spider-Man is quickly becoming my definitive version of the character. Insomniac has done such a smart job of blending little elements of every different iteration of Spider-Man over the years, making sure that no matter what version of Peter Parker you consider to be your Peter Parker, you’ll find elements of that Peter here. I’m still fairly early on with this one, but I’ve been really enjoying switching between Peter and Miles and getting to see the two working together. I have not been enjoying the surprising amount of bugs (including a hard crash) that I’ve run into, however. More thoughts to come next month, but so far this is looking like a solid, yet surprisingly buggy next entry in this series.

Super Mario Bros Wonder (Nintendo Switch)

Despite only having played through the first world as of the time I write this, I think I can fairly safely say that this is my favorite 2D Mario game since Yoshi’s Island on the SNES. While that sounds like a bold statement, it really isn’t as I never really loved the New Super Mario Bros serie sall that much. They were perfectly fine games, but were never anything that really left any lasting impression on me or made me ever want to revisit them in anyway. Through just the first world, Super Mario Bros Wonder has finally found that extra bit of magic that the 2D Mario series had in the NES and SNES days. I’ve been playing through this co-op with my wife so far, and I’m so excited to get further in and see what else this has in store for us. This has been an absolutely packed year for awesome releases, and I think this one may wind up very high on my year-end list from what I’ve seen so far.