Lies of P: Overture Review (Ric)
Lies of P: Overture is an excellent wrap-up to base-game that pushes your honed skills to the absolute limit. One small mark against it is that its opening stage (The Zoo) is, in my opinion, very overtuned compared to the rest of the experience. I found that enemy health was exceptionally high and damage-received was clocked a few notches too extreme. I was concerned that the rest of the DLC would play out like this, but after the Zoo’s mini-boss, the numbers become noticeably less severe and the experience feels more fun as a result.
Speaking of bosses, the quality of the boss-fights will test your ability to react more than base-game. Mastering P’s parry-system is a necessity for the final boss, especially. It’s going to likely excite the hardcore parry-fans while simultaneously annoying those who want more caution-driven approaches and I can sympathize. I’ve seen discourse over the difficulty increase of Overture, and while it’s easy for people to throw out the always-classy skill-issue retorts, it’s hard to deny that the player-frustration isn’t valid, because it absolutely is a jump some might not be ready for. Fortunate for those players, there is the difficulty options added.
I don’t want to go far into the difficulty-option controversy, but I do have to wonder whether the difficulty sliders were added because of the shift in difficulty of Overture. If that’s the case, I think I would have just preferred to see Overture’s difficulty reduced to match the same expectations of base-game. I ran a fresh NG+0 save on Legendary Stalker to marathon base-game before jumping into Overture, which only made the jarring jump in difficulty that much more noticeable. I pushed myself out of perseverance to stay on Legendary Stalker mode in Overture, but I wasn’t surprised to read comments about folks dropping down the difficulty once they got to Overture, especially with the Zoo. I think that’s an overall shame, because now I feel like if they start to nerf Overture, the consensus will just become “Why didn’t bad players just shift to easy mode!?” when the real statement should be “Why wasn’t Overture balanced so that it didn’t require a difficulty slider in the first place?” It is what it is, a little stain on an otherwise solid foundation.
Update: As of the 6/20 update, a patch has reduced the difficulty as was predicted, and unfortunately I was right to see that players are now frustrated that this was done when they added a difficulty slider. I don't have an issue with the difficulty slider existing for players who need it, and I'm glad that they seemed to cut down the issues we saw in the DLC's early game.
Overall, I liked the story a lot in Overture, possibly more-so than base game. It felt more like a personal dive into Carlo as a character more than the original, and the moment I saw the poster of Romeo in the opening section, I knew we were in for something that was going to end with high emotions (Spoiler: It did). A lot of the mysteries set up in base-game felt paid-off, here, and the final boss’s surprise reveal was such an awesome moment if you experienced all the content in base-game. Soundtrack, as always, kicked the ergo out of my ears, and I now need to get my hands on it to add to my collection. The new weapons are fun, and I’ll likely run NG+ a time or two just to enjoy them.
NEOWIZ absolutely know what they’re doing with this expanding genre, and while there were some stumbles in Overture, I absolutely hope that they will continue to make quality games. Looking forward to the future of this developer’s growing catalogue.