Lies of P 18+

S Tier game; if this was a FromSoft game, it would be praised as one of the best of the series. This truly demonstrates how powerful the new Macbook hardware really is: looks incredible and runs smoothly.

Some thoughts on gaming on Mac:
Up to this point, I didn't really expect we'd get good titles other than Capcom's because I thought they were the only ones Apple convinced to port their games over. But the fact that I didn't even hear about Lies of P getting a MacOS release and it was just here in the App Store waiting for me, fills me with hope that maybe this is a turning point for more great modern titles coming to Mac in the future.

Don’t recommend. Lies of P combat feels laggy and inconsistent. The combat lock-on is abysmal when facing multiple enemies. Movement is slow, so you’re constantly running to get anywhere, and actions in general feels sluggish. The upgrade system is unintuitive. To level up, you have to teleport back to the Hotel instead of at Stargazers, which is just pointlessly slowing down progression. The game incentivizes Perfect Guards instead of dodging, but they don’t interrupt enemy combos, so you need multiple Perfect Guards in a row before they mean anything. Enemy attacks are a mix of fast and delayed, so it’s frustrating on its own getting the timing right for Perfect Guards. As another review says, the basic mobs are easy to beat and don’t really prepare you for the bosses where difficulty really cranks up.

Compared to The Surge (another Souls-like), which for reference I beat multiple times including NG , combat in Lies of P is frustrating and not in a “git gud” way; it feels like the mechanics are bad. It’s also missing some quality of life features. In The Surge, you can level up at any Medbay, but to incentivize not returning to rest and bank your XP, you get multipliers increasing your XP gain. Lies of P, instead, makes it cumbersome (have to go back to hotel) instead of providing a reward for more aggressive play.

Graphics looks great, performance is good, and they released on macOS.

I'm running this game on a M1 Ultra Mac Studio. The game appears to run fine with one very frustrating exception. There are windows that appear during the game that contain important information but for some reason, they appear for about 2 seconds and then disappear before you can get more than a few words into the information provided. For the software senseis that designed this game, if your're going to provide windows with important information, you should design it such that the user is the one that closes it. Each user has different reading needs. Don't assume a user can read two or three paragraphs in 2 seconds. This is a major annoyance and needs to be corrected. Additionally, this game could use a "User's Manual" that describes "how tos" for the various maneuvers and actions needed to control the character and weapons. What is provided within the game is painfully inadequate. The game appears to be designed assuming all this is intuitive, which it is not.