The following contains major spoilers forLies of P: Overture.
Difficulty is hardly what has ever solely defined the merit of a Soulslike game, and the same is true ofLies of P. Difficulty can be an endearing reason as towhy players love Soulslikes, but difficulty alone wouldn’t account for exceptional boss design, world design, and so forth. Still, difficulty is an essential element in Soulslikes regarding the challenge one posits in comparison to another, and assessingLies of Pagainst its expansion,Lies of P: Overture, demonstrates how greatly difficulty can increase between a vanilla Soulslike and its DLCs.
Concerning sheer quality, FromSoftware’s Soulslike catalog has always set a masterfully high bar when it comes to DLCs. BetweenDark Souls’ Artorias of the Abyss,Dark Souls 2’s Crown DLCs, andDark Souls 3’s Ashes of Ariandel and Ringed City, much lessBloodborne’s Old Hunters, some of the best FromSoftware content has been DLC. The same can arguably be said ofElden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, too, which itself set an insurmountable bar regarding what can be expected of a DLC, andLies of P: Overturedoesn’t disappoint in comparison to its level of difficulty.
Shadow of the Erdtree Makes Elden Ring Seem Like Cake in Comparison
Interestingly,Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtreeis more or less what a complete sequel could have amounted to. It may not be as gargantuan asElden Ring, but Shadow of the Erdtree is nonetheless enormous with a labyrinthine open world, new features and quality-of-life improvements, and a laundry list of bosses who all give the base game’s bosses runs for their money.
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree’s Scadutree Fragment systemis a big part of why the DLC can feel like a sequel as it operates on an alternate means of leveling up that is distinct from traditional rune levels in the base game.
As forElden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree’s bosses, nearly every one adopts a design style that was basically absent in the base game: incredibly long attack strings with barely any punishable windows. However, no boss can hope to compare to the difficulty posed by Promised Consort Radahn, who may have been nerfed after launch but remains one of the hardest FromSoftware bosses to date.
Elden Ringis still quite challenging, but Shadow of the Erdtree is a different beast entirely.Elden Ring’s Malenia, Blade of Miquellahas always been a troublesome and harrowing boss, for example, but the pace and aggression debuted in Shadow of the Erdtree make her and a lot of other bosses seem retrospectively sluggish.
Overture is to Lies of P What Shadow of the Erdtree is to Elden Ring
Lies of Pis one of the hardest Soulslikes around, yet its DLC’s difficulty eclipses it in many ways while also giving players the choice to side-step such difficulty and affording an easier experience. For instance, players do not have tedious gank fights to worry about, likeLies of P’s two Black Rabbit Brotherhood encounters. Instead,Lies of P: Overture’s Markiona, Puppeteer of Deathsets the stage for a duo boss fight, and all other bosses in the DLC are singular enemies who only have one health bar, with Arlecchino as a lone exception.
LikeElden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree’s Radahn,Lies of P: Overture’s Arlecchino, the Blood Artistis undoubtedly the hardest boss in the game.Lies of P: Overturemakes a hard game even harder if players are abiding by the same conventions they adapted to in the base game, but their difficulty is mitigated by a lot of choices players can make, as throwables are still fairly overpowered.
The Tracker being summonable for the Two-faced Overseer and Lea being summonable for Arlecchino, the Blood Artist can make those boss fights remarkably trivial, whereas Radahn being fought with either Sir Ansbach or Thiollier can be more detrimental than helpful. Overall,Lies of P: Overture’s difficulty has the same atmosphere thatElden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtreedoes as flavorful Soulslike DLCs, but the latter maintains the edge.
Lies of Pand its DLC now have difficulty options—Butterfly’s Guidance (very easy), Awakened Puppet (easy), and Legendary Stalker (the base game’s original default)—and will soon include “various adjustments, including difficulty reduction,” meaning that Overture may be as easy or as hard as players wish.
