There was a moment, after watching Pinocchio carve through his 200th rampant puppet with a squeal of grinding gears, when I wondered how we got here as a people. Impossibly, in a year where Elden Ring’s expansion is still waiting in the wings and Lords of the Fallen is reusing the name of 2014’s most middling Souls-like, our best shot at an off-brand Dark Souls is a Korean-Italian puppet and his chatterbox cricket companion.
But somehow you can put an oversized bonesaw in Pinocchio’s hands and it just feels right. While Lies of P trips over some mechanical clumsiness and can’t escape its inspirations, it’s a competent action game with a unique toolset for experimentation. Maybe more impressively, through the grim spectacle of puppet violence, it’s a successful gothic folktale reimagining.
Pinocchio is cool now. That simple assertion is the source of a lot of ’s joy: Instead of the jolly singing puppet, he’s a blank-faced metal death machine. He’s the
