Replaying this game on Very Hard, currently on about chapter 3, feel like getting some thoughts out. My memory on most of the game is fairly foggy, but a fight I ran into recently reminded me of a big issue I had with the game first time around.

This game mechanically is odd because on the highest difficulty there's a damage scaling mechanic that kind of invalidates the point of increasing stats. For some unique bosses, their HP and Damage scales to the strength of your weapon which typically ends up resulting in the fight taking as long with a level 1 sword or a level 99 wand, for instance. This sort of comes to a head in a relatively early fight in Chapter 2 where your options are relatively limited and the boss can do 80 percent of your health in one turn. All of this is accompanied by a mechanic where every boss (from what I can tell) ramps up their damage very quickly as the battle goes on and you have a fight that forces you on the defensive, but also demands that you deal damage quickly enough that he doesn't get strong enough to one-shot you, and accompanying all of this, getting stronger yourself doesn't afford you any leeway in making this fight easier.

This fight is still doable even without exploiting the mechanic, lowering the difficulty, or grinding stat boosters by just managing your turns extremely carefully, but it's such a ludicrous difficulty jump in comparison to the rest of the game it kind of baffles me. It's not really just this boss though, it's the damage scaling mechanic as a whole, it's essentially the turn-based RPG equivalent of rubber-banding in a racing game. Rubber-banding can and will make things difficult regardless of player skill level, but at the cost of invalidating the significance of player skill or strength in the first place. It begs the question "why even bother leveling up if it means nothing for the fights that matter?"

It's not even designed well as a rubber-banding mechanic either. I mentioned exploiting this mechanic earlier -- the scaling is based on the strength of your weapon, and I will add that equipping and unequipping items mid-battle is a free action. If you wanted to make this already easy game's only artificially difficult fights piss-easy it is incredibly trivial to do so. If this was an attempt to make sure players who grinded heavily still face challenges, it definitely failed.

So the game sucks right? No, I like the game a lot. It's pretty fun, has a nice aesthetic and there's just enough main and side content for it to be worth the price in my opinion. I'm literally replaying it because I saw it in my library and was like I kinda wanna play that again, especially since there's new epilogue content I haven't seen. It's just that this game is plagued by a very poorly designed, bad mechanic that needed to be punted during whatever phase of development balancing is considered.

Good game, like a mix of Sekiro and regular Souls, and the game I haven't played yet because Sony is holding it hostage instead of porting it to PC. Fantastic presentation, satisfying combat once everything clicks.

Withholding a half star because as far as enemy attack design goes, everybody holds and charges their attacks like they're doing their best Margit-holding-the-cane impression. And by everyone, I do mean everyone.

The game sort of expects you to play it like Sekiro a lot, but Sekiro has plenty of attacks that are intuitively reactable on first sight, but Lies of P is a game where you kind of have to die to an attack a bunch of times until you register the timing in your head. It's difficult to feasibly react to a boss holding their hand behind them for a punch and then bringing it forward in 10 frames (8 frame parry window) but also there's other attacks in the moveset that look similar so they mix you up anyways. The movesets feel more designed to "getcha" than they are to create a satisfying fight that flows well, not that the gameplay isn't satisfying, but it could be a lot better!

Weapon destruction mechanic is cool, guard regain is cool, boss rematch is a sorely needed QOL that FS has forgotten about after Sekiro for some reason, the boss weapons are very cool and the mix-and-match handle/blade mechanic is really fun to mess around with. A lot to love in this game.