This makes abilities like Immobilize, which freezes enemies, and Ring of Fire, which surrounds you with a protective flaming barrier, a fundamental part of the combat loop.

This is a vital change where in traditional soulslikes you can run out of mana and thus be cut off from your spellcasting, Black Myth allows you to continually cast so long as you can survive each spell’s (admittedly lengthy) cooldown. That new pace is bolstered by magic abilities that recharge via a cooldown. But by finding its own pace, Black Myth: Wukong has avoided that knock-off feeling. Few games, if any, have matched the finesse of a FromSoftware game, and so that can leave them seeming a little ‘bootleg’. This is something the soulslike genre has struggled with thus far. But its battles feel nothing like anything in the FromSoft library – there’s an entirely different rhythm to these encounters that positions Wukong as a unique experience. Like Bloodborne, Black Myth eschews the block mechanic, which in turn forces combat to be incredibly fast and evasive. Undoubtedly the most impressive of the three soulslikes at gamescom, Game Science’s interpretation of the genre’s tenets could be groundbreaking.

If Lies of P is about finding a new way of presenting the best of FromSoftware’s innovations, then Black Myth: Wukong is an experiment in stretching those innovations into new forms. I really do think Lies of P feels like a first-in-class soulslike – potentially the best among the crowd that sticks closely to FromSoft’s recipe. The theft is obvious, but I can’t deny the craftsmanship of the overall effect. Neowiz has effectively taken FromSoft ideas by the fistful and built them into something new. There’s equivalents to the health regain system from Bloodborne, the weapon arts of Dark Souls 3, and the mechanical arm from Sekiro, which here can fire explosive rockets, grapple enemies with a ‘puppet string’, and spray acid in thick, defensive lines across the floor. Mechanically, developer Neowiz has created a cocktail out of the purestrain Soulsbourne games. Soulslikes rarely, if ever, allow you this much involvement in their stories, and so I’m excited to see how Lies of P handles this and the consequences of a player’s choices. It’s said that each of these lies will be something of a moral dilemma, with it often being kinder to whisper ‘white lies’ than divulge the truth. Your puppet protagonist’s nose doesn’t grow, but the lies you tell to NPCs are promised to influence which of the game’s three different endings you are served.

Lies of P is, of course, based on the story of Pinocchio, and so lying is an integral part of the experience. That experimentation with tone extends to the narrative, which in an unusual move for a soulslike allows you to have a certain amount of decision-based agency. This grants Lies of P a unique tone it’s deeply sad and dark, yes, but everything I’ve seen suggests that a lightness plays among the shadows. I’ve been especially charmed by the King of Puppets, the centrepiece boss of the gamescom 2023 demo, who fights because you refuse to dance with him. They have that same sense of living on the knife edge between comedy and horror weird and funny designs that move in nightmarish fashion.

If anything, it’s closer to the steampunk of BioShock, especially with its creepy puppet enemies that share commonality with Infinite’s Handymen and Motorised Patriots. Yes, it’s set in a dark urban sprawl, but Lies of P’s turn-of-the-century setting gives the streets of Krat a much different, less Lovecraftian vibe. But while it certainly does scratch that itch, such an assertment is only partly true. Since it was first revealed, its city setting and impeccable Victorian fashion has seen people call Lies of P a Bloodborne clone. The more I play it, the more it’s clear that it’s not a Hidetaka Miyazaki game, but you’d be forgiven for thinking as much on a very quick glance. It has the same tightness in its controls, the right weight in the swings of its heaviest weapons, and the ideal sense of melancholy in its haunted streets.

Of all the soulslikes I’ve played, this is the one that feels closest to a FromSoftware original. Lies of P has no such significant reinvention, but instead thrives on its refined mechanics that subtly tinker with the core formula.

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