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Having some Lies of P tips and tricks to hand will give you a solid introduction to the game, as you've got a tough time ahead of you on Pinnochio's adventures and there's much to learn. There are plenty of systems and rules that aren't explained particularly well, and having a clearer understanding than that provided by the game will provide a significant advantage.
Having played through a ton of the game myself and consulted with other players, I've been able to assemble this list of eleven essential tips for Lies of P to help players break in as gently as possible. Beware though, as the introduction is still likely to be a little rough on a big, brutal game such as this.
The top tips and tricks for Lies of P
- Travel options in Stargazers often mark nearby sidequests
- Many boss fights can be delayed for when you're ready to deal with them
- Emoting serves as a way to unlock secrets
- The perfect parry is an essential ability you should learn quickly
- If enemies are proving tough, try assembling new weapons
- Make note of all the locations of the Wandering Merchants
- Remember to use your Grindstone between every fight
- If your Ergo turns blue, you can level up
- You should use Pulse Cells more often than you think
- It's better to be patient and cautious than aggressive
- Technique, Motivity and Advance all enhance different types of weapons
You can click on any of these for more info, or scroll down to see them in order. Lies of P is a very challenging game, and ultimately it's essential to learn as many of these aspects as soon as possible, as not only will they make you better at the game, but set you up with better loot and powers early on to help you with those later sections. With that in mind, let's discuss what you actually need to know, and what should be going through your P-organ from the second your strings are cut.
1. Keep checking the fast travel menu for quest icons
As you explore Krat, certain side quests and special items will make themselves available. These are (sometimes) marked on the fast travel menu accessed through Stargazers, though it's a little imprecise and requires you to hunt around, only narrowing so far as to explain which Stargazer it's closest to. Still, you should continually make sure you haven't missed any icons, and if they match an item in your inventory, you can check its description for a clue about what you're supposed to do - though it's likely to be cryptic and not necessarily helpful.
2. You don't have to fight every boss immediately
This can apply in two ways - for one thing, you can always hold back to grind or explore before confronting the boss of an area, but also, some bosses are wholly optional, either in dead-ends or slow enough that you can sprint past them, such as the Puppet of the Future in Venigni Factory, or the Mad Clown Puppet on the road to the Opera House. Killing them is certainly beneficial - you'll get extra rewards - but it's not essential, and they can always be left alone until you feel more ready and comfortable with confronting them.
3. Try emoting at everything and everyone
Side quest and characters you interact with in Lies of P give you new emotes you can try out - which is initially strange, considering it's not a multiplayer game and there's nobody to see you do it. In fact, emotes serve largely as special puzzle solutions, as certain objects and characters will give you rewards for doing the right emote - such as praying to an altar in the Cathedral, for example, or showing off the school uniform to the old lady in the Hotel Krat. Look for context clues to help narrow it down, and keep in mind that you'll sometimes get the special emote after you encounter whatever item or person you're supposed to use it on.
4. Learn the perfect parry ASAP
There's almost no attack in Lies of P you can't Perfectly Parry, with the exception of non-physical attacks like splashing liquid decay and jets of fire from flamethrowers. Those are rare though, and I found that generally the ability to perfect parry is something you definitely need to have down, especially in boss fights. Perfect parries negate all damage, only draining a little of P's stamina in the process, and do massive "Stagger" to the enemy. There's no way to keep track of Stagger, but once it maxes out, you can knock them over with a heavy attack, and set them up for a massively damaging finisher that'll kill all foes but bosses straight away. Some bosses are almost impossible to beat without the Perfect Parry, so it's worth practicing on early enemies and bosses like the Lies of P Parade Master.
5. Alter your weapons and equipment to better deal with foes
The ability to assemble various Lies of P weapons isn't just to find one that you like the most - I can tell you from experience that it's essential to creating counter-strategies for bosses and foes you might otherwise struggle with. Elemental effects, speed of attacks, matching their speed and pace; think about what you're having trouble with, and make a setup to deal with that.
And not just weapons - your Legion arm, your bag of items, the elemental effect on your Grindstone (when you unlock that feature), everything about your character can be changed easily and without consequence - and you need to keep that in mind. You're a very modular puppet, after all.
6. Remember where Wandering Merchants are set up
Throughout the game you can find various Wandering Merchants, little vendors who sell and buy equipment. It's important to remember them and their locations, as although there's Polendina the merchant and others back at the Hotel Krat once you get past the Lies of P Hotel Door, most merchants don't come back to the Hotel, keeping their post at wherever you first find them, and they sell various unique items and weapons. If you didn't exhaust their stock the first time around, I can assure you that you'll want to make a mental note of where they are when you have more Ergo later on.
7. Using your Grindstone should be a reflexive habit
It's essential that you keep your Grindstone somewhere you can quickly and easily use it, as weapons in Lies of P aren't especially durable and the Grindstone is what repairs them. You'll need to make a habit out of using it between every fight, as there's no cost to doing so and the penalty for forgetting is severe, especially if you get caught mid-boss fight with your weapon suddenly breaking.
8. If your Ergo counter is blue, head for a Stargazer
Once you know how to level up in Lies of P, you'll want to keep an eye on all the "Ergo" you collect from defeated enemies (seen in the top right of the screen). The amount of Ergo you need to level goes up each time you do, and while there's a way to check it in the character menu, there's a much simpler method - if the number of Ergo in your body displayed is blue, you can level up! That should be your clue to immediately head to a Stargazer and redeem that Ergo, before a rogue puppet's errant candelabra turns you to scrapwood.
9. Make liberal use of Pulse Cells
Your Lies of P Pulse Cells are the main way in which you heal, and while there are others, it's the Cells that you want to use most - and more often than you think. For one thing, they don't necessarily fully heal you, only restoring a set amount of health, so depending on how much you've levelled up your health bar, it might restore as little as a third of your maximum. Secondly, when you run out of Pulse Cells, damage you inflict on enemies slowly fills you back up to having a single usable one - a process you can repeat over and over.
Therefore there isn't a huge amount of reason to conserve your Pulse Cells - instead, it's far better to use them up when you need them and earn them back. A Stagger-attack on an enemy can restore a Pulse Cell almost by itself, so a good player will never fully run out.
10. Patience is more important than aggression
While the Guard Regain mechanic in Lies of P might make you think that playing aggressively is the key like it was in Bloodborne, we found that patience and caution were ultimately more important than wild frenzy, holding back and parrying before lunging in for a well-timed assault. Bosses tend to have fast attacks you need to be prepared for, and a counter-attack is much more likely to succeed than just wildly running in swinging.
11. Technique is for speed, Motivity for Strength, Advance for weird science and magic
Weapons generally scale in damage according to any of three Lies of P stats and abilities: Technique, Motivity, and Advance. It's not clear at the start what the connection between these is and what they mean, but they're actually slightly esoteric names for far more understandable ideas: Dexterity, Strength, and Special Magic Stuff. Technique is generally for fast, quick or ranged weapons - rapiers, daggers, cutlasses, anything where speed is essential. Contrarily, Motivity is for big, heavy weapons that can smash through defenses, and Advance is a general catch-all term for all the weirder weapons, things that glow or spark or have magic qualities or peculiar features.
Many weapons scale to more than one thing - for example, the all-rounder Puppet Saber you get from the Path of the Cricket, as outlined in our Lies of P best combat style guide, scales to both Motivity and Technique roughly equally. Keep an eye on your preferred weapons' scaling, and pick your level ups accordingly.
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