 This video's title and tag references Lords of the Fallen because you can only choose one game tag on YouTube, but the video itself will talk about two different Souls likes that released this month. I chose to focus on Lords of the Fallen because it annoys me that one of these games has gotten universal praise from players and critics and one is mixed, and the one that's mixed is the much better game as far as I'm concerned. Both games are pretty punishing and both games take an awful lot from the FromSaw formula, and while I enjoyed both of them, I genuinely did like them both, only one of them had me immediately begin playing NG+. Now both of these games are fantastically made games. They both have great graphics, amazing sound design, smooth play. They're both great about that. The reason I enjoyed one of these games more than the other is all about difficulty, but it's not about which game is more difficult than the other. In fact, I think I probably died more often in Lords of the Fallen than I did in Lies of Pee. The reason I preferred the former to the latter is how that difficulty is designed, and the fact that I seem to be in the extreme minority here might mean that I just am no longer the target audience for many of these games. Today, let's talk about Lords of the Fallen and Lies of Pee and all of the things they both do well, but also how massively the things they do differently ended up affecting how much enjoyment I got out of them. The autumn of the souls like after the logo. Lies of Pee I've been waiting for Lies of Pee from the time I first saw the trailer. Along with Black Myth and the Lords of the Fallen reboot, it was one of a few notable souls likes that looked like they had a chance to finally expand the genre beyond just from Team Ninja, Deck 13, and one of a few indie titles. And then once I found that the Deck 13's new game, Atlus Rising, wasn't a souls like, Lies of Pee looks like the safest bet to be an excellent game. By the way, Deck 13's new game is just so boring. Man, what a disappointment, anyway. Then I played and really liked the demo. I had some concerns about how the combat system worked, but I was still looking forward to it as one of my most anticipated games of the year. After finishing the game and messing around a little bit in NG plus 1 a little while afterwards, I came away from Lies of Pee pretty conflicted on it. First off, let me repeat this. Lies of Pee is an extremely well made game. It is amazingly polished. It had almost no bugs that I can recall. Fantastic art design, really top notch music. Fantastic graphics, great sound design. It's a game that looks and plays like a legit triple A souls like. For the first half of the game, my only major complaint was that the levels, while beautiful and detailed, felt pretty linear. The game had the minimum required number of doors does not open from this side, but after the first two levels, things start to get fairly straightforward. I also had some complaints surrounding enemy movesets, but for the most part the game felt pretty fair. But as the game continued on, a pattern started emerging. After reaching the main hub area, almost every single enemy literally every single enemy had extremely delayed attacks and elite enemies featured not only extremely delayed attacks, but also extreme amounts of poise and very long attack chains. And again, it's important to really drive this home. This is not a complaint about the total difficulty of the game. Most bosses required between one and two tries, and only two bosses required more than five. But it's the kind of difficulty. Because attacks are absurdly delayed and come out extremely fast, the player has to wait. The only way to beat bosses is to keep fighting them until you have an internal clock that counts off in your head when they lift their arm up. The elite enemies often require you to bait out specific attacks that are easier to parry or dodge, or it requires you to lean on blocking. Or worst of all, to trade. I understand completely why the game plays like this. As I pointed out before, players have gotten much, much better at the genre. And as a result, the games have had a search for different ways to damage and kill the player. And there are only a few ways to do that. You can raise enemy health and damage, you can increase enemy density, you can craft extremely tough encounters or ambushes, or you can add very unintuitive attack animations like very long delays or super fast swings. Lies of P went with very high enemy and boss damage and very, very long attack delays, combined with very fast attack speed and crazy long combos with a lot of poise. Many people absolutely loved this design. They seemed to really love it in Elden Ring. And judging from the media and player reviews, they loved it even more in Lies of P. But I hate it. I absolutely hate it. I liked the game quite a lot, but I absolutely despise the way the difficulty is implemented. Every time I'm damaged by an attack with a 3.5 second delay, I hate it. Every time an enemy attack starts after my animation and is fast enough to hit me before my recovery is over, I hate that. I hate it because like in Elden Ring, it often feels like you're brute forcing your way through the game. The player inevitably ends up winning by trading hits. It's impossible to naturally respond to animations because the player has to count in their head. They have to bait out attacks, or they have to see an attack so many times that the unintuitive becomes intuitive. I'm almost certain that I died more in Lords of the Fallen than I did in Lies of P, but I was way less frustrated, not because of the absolute difficulty, but because of the way that difficulty is designed and how the player ends up reacting. Now, let's get to Lords of the Fallen and go over why I think it's amazing before drilling down on why I so vastly prefer its difficulty to P's difficulty, and why the reaction of players in media really annoys me. It makes me think the genre is moving towards a difficulty model that I'm just not that interested in, which sucks because Souls Likes are my favorite games of the last decade and a half. Lords of the Fallen Alright, first off, let's briefly touch on something funny. The original Lords of the Fallen was a bad game. Deck 13 would go on to make two of the very best games in the genre, but their first attempt was very poor. The new Lords of the Fallen is basically a totally different game in literally every way. It doesn't have the bad cutscenes or the pointless dialogue system. It plays quite a lot like the Surge 2 actually, and basically nothing like the original Lords of the Fallen. As this game moved through development, every time I saw stuff about it, I became more intrigued. First of all, the art and graphics are excellent. It's an Unreal 5 game, and it looks it. When they first unveiled the Umbral Lamp mechanic, I was very interested, but I kind of feared it was going to end up being a gimmick that would be used to find chests every so often and nothing else. Well, the Lamp is not a gimmick. In fact, it basically takes the game from really good to amazing. The new Lords of the Fallen shares a ton of DNA with Dark Souls 1 and quite a bit with Dark Souls 2, but the Lamp is totally unique. It is used consistently as a kind of exploration puzzle. There's tons of places where it's a mandatory mechanic to progress, but also it's used a ton of places as an optional thing to find chests and loot. So it's not just kind of a thing you instantly go to because you know you need it. You often are walking around holding it out to look and see if something's there. The level design in the game is as good as any in the genre, and the world design is the first game since the Surge 1 to have the fully interconnected world of Dark Souls 1. Every level features multiple shortcuts, elevators, and optional paths. Several of them are so dense that it's easy to get lost the first time you play through, but they're well enough designed that on NG Plus, you know exactly where to go because you've explored them thoroughly, and most levels all end up curling back on the hub area through one hidden path or another. When you add that Lamp to a game that would already have some of the very best level design and exploration in the genre, it makes it one of the best Souls Likes ever made. Now the combat in Lords of the Fallen, as I said, is probably closest to the Surge 2. Movement is fast and snappy, and the dash dodge is fast and covers tremendous distance. Like the Surge 2, this means that the camera feels a little weird at first. It often takes a second to catch up to the player so it can feel like it's swinging wildly. This is definitely a bit tough to get used to, but like the Surge 2, once it clicks, it's one of the best-feeling combat systems in the genre. Fast, precise, and extremely satisfying. The game allows for different combos between heavy and light attacks. The game also has a separate combo attack that you use left bumper and right trigger on that changes based on which weapons you're using, or if you're two-handing or dual-wielding. It has the best kick in the genre, which you perform with both bumpers. It's very easy to pull off as opposed to the Dark Souls 1 right bumper and flick the stick thing, which is so inconsistent. And again, let's be kick enemies off of cliffs. We'll always have a place in my heart. It also demands that you use ranged attacks, and its progression softcaps means that you will have more than enough levels to near max out your weapon scaling while also using bows or grenades or one of the three types of magic. It's rings and necklaces combined with a rune system to allow very high amounts of significant and powerful build diversity. Levels, combat, progression, every one of these pillars is exceptional in Lords of the Fallen. Exceptional. And then there's that lamp that's also used very often in combat. You use it to break enemy shields, you use it to rip enemy souls out of their bodies for free damage, and best of all to literally throw them off of cliffs. And most importantly, that lamp is a crucial tool both for pacing and the way the game does its difficulty. Where Lies of Peace difficulty is almost entirely about avoiding death from elite enemies and bosses, Lords of the Fallen's difficulty is all about stamina. It does something none of the more recent Souls Likes do. It consistently runs you out of your Estus items and it consistently has you looking for a bonfire after a long run of difficult encounters. When the game demands you go to the Umbral, it also begins to spam you with extra enemies and puts a timer on you. When that timer is up, it spawns an enemy who's extremely hard to take down early in the game but much more manageable after the mid game, but still it creates a sense of pressure that is excellent. This lamp is simultaneously the very best thing about the game and also the source of a bunch of the negative reviews from players. All the negative reviews center on difficulty and enemy spam. And here, let's talk about why I vastly prefer the difficulty in this game to the difficulty in Lies of Peace. It's the kind of difficulty. If you peruse the threads on Reddit and Steam for Lords of the Fallen, you'll see a ton of stuff talking about how the game is too hard or has too much Dark Souls 2 artificial difficulty in it. And you know what? There's a nugget of truth in that last part. It does indeed have quite a lot of Dark Souls 2 influence. The reason it's less annoying here than in Dark Souls 2 is the hip-hoxes are pristine in this game and the movement is great as opposed to the janky movement in Dark Souls 2. Platforming actually feels great in Lords of the Fallen and absolutely horrific in Dark Souls 2 as much as I love that game. But in reality, all the complaints revolve around enemy spam. And indeed, there are several spots in the game where it can feel unfair when it kills you. And much of the damage you will take is from encounters with multiple enemies or melee enemies while being pelted with range attacks. Most enemies are easily dealt with, but there are several that do a ton of damage and have a lot of health, and the most dangerous enemies feature ranged attacks with punishing status effects. When the game layers these enemies with a ton of fodder enemies, it can feel unfair at first. But almost all of these encounters have obvious strategies to them. The game gives you the lamp, it gives you a ton of consumables, it gives you easy access to magic or ranged attacks. And that magic is balanced perfectly because they're not overpowered and the player has extremely limited mana and the lamp. At the beginning of the game, you can use it once to rip out souls. After upgrading it, you can use it like three times in between bonfires. It's a super powerful but very well balanced tool that you must use. If you fail to use these tools and try to fight two elites and 10 fodder enemies at once, you will die over and over. But when you die in these encounters, there's always an obvious solution to the issue. Throw an enemy off a cliff or use an AoE spell on a pack to kill the guys. Soul rip the hardest enemy to have him kind of like out of the fight for four or five seconds. Or use weapons with a wide sweep. All of the most frustrating sections have very obvious ways to get through them. It just takes a couple of seconds to figure it out. When it comes to the one-on-one fights against bosses and dangerous enemies, there are literally almost zero delayed attacks. I think exactly one boss had one delayed attack. Many of the bosses can be killed in one try if your dodging is on point. The harder ones take a bit of strategy to figure out, but they rarely take more than three tries. And the hardest bosses at most would take you five tries. The core of the difficulty is moving through the levels without using all of your heals. It's not about avoiding being blown up by one difficult enemy. And I have very much missed that in the genre. The original Dark Souls had almost no enemies who were so hard to kill you outright. The difficulty was making it to the bonfire without using up all of your healing. If you miss that kind of difficulty, this is the game for you. And I do miss that a lot. No enemies or bosses fight in unintuitive ways here. No single enemy is particularly difficult on their own. Instead, what's difficult in the game is the brilliance of the encounters. It's the combination of enemies or the arenas or the way the encounters are designed. It's easy to fight these guys. It's harder to fight three of them in a pit. But it can be done because the enemy themselves are simple. You're fighting your own panic. Every time you die, you'll get pissed off and say, are you serious? How am I supposed to deal with that? But then when you calm down and go back, you'll find out, oh, I was supposed to just calm down and deal with it carefully. Having you fight on the edge of cliffs, or in narrow areas, or fighting five very easy to kill enemies with one hard one pelting you with magic, it's all about figuring out how to move through the level. What I love about Souls games is how they can feel like rhythm games. I love when you get so good at dodging that it looks like you're dancing with the enemy. I am not enjoying the new way the games are working. I don't enjoy feeling like I'm fighting spastic robots, which is literally what you are in Lice of P. I get that that's an artistic design, but I don't enjoy it. If you find delayed attacks annoying and miss the difficulty of making it to the next bonfire more than anything else, you will love Lord of the Faun. Wrapping up. It breaks my heart that this game is sitting at mixed on steam. Not only do I not think it's a mixed review game, I think it is very easily one of the best games of the last few years. Boss difficulty is perfect. Some one try bosses, some two or three try bosses, no 10 tries bosses. I beat every boss in Elden Ring and every boss in Lice of P, including the true final boss. But I simply do not enjoy taking 10 or 15 tries to kill a boss. It's too much. No Sekiro boss took me 15 tries. Nameless King and Medir did not take me 15 tries and those bosses are great. The perfect boss difficulty for me is five tries and not every boss. There needs to be a few bosses that you kill on your first try with no heals left. That feels like balance to me. I understand that this is personal taste but that's my taste. Then there's the level design here which is the best in the world levels of fucking great. Absolutely fantastic. The PvP is fantastic with amazing build variety, slick movement and perfect amounts of player health and damage. Combat is basically perfect. There's the lamp that is positively revolutionary at creating exploration puzzles and most important of all is the way the game is difficult. You will die and get extremely pissed off in Lords of the Fallen. That's core to the genre. I have always said that a great souls like game should have you being pissed off right until you win at which point you should be like ah fair enough that was awesome. That's not how I felt in Lies of P or the final three or four bosses in Elden Ring. I beat them and I went yeah I fucking hate that. I hate it. I hate delayed attacks. I hate having to count in my head. I hate having to bait out one or two attacks or trade or be really passive. I hate attacks that are delayed then come out so fast that I'm constantly stuck in recovery animations. Lords of the Fallen kills me by creating encounter puzzles. It chips away at your health with a bunch of small mistakes and tricky enemy placements so the first time through you die. The second time through you make it to the bonfire with two hills left and the third time through you've figured out exactly what the game intends. That's good difficulty. In my opinion Lords of the Fallen now takes its place with the Neo games, the Surge games and the Remnant games as the best non-from-software games in the genre. They seem to have sold a million copies in the first week so apparently buying the naming rights for a notoriously terrible game have worked. That's why I get paid due to chainsaw and other people get paid for marketing. But even that million isn't enough. This is one of the very best games of the last few years. It's the best debut souls like ever and it's good enough that the steam rating should be 99%. It had performance issues at launch and the devs patched the game literally every single day. It runs great now except in the hub and they'll fix that too. They fixed a weird design choice with NG+, they're making constant small changes in quality life updates. It's already one of the best games in the genre. If you looked at the steam reviews and decided to wait or you missed Dark Souls 1 and how that game felt to play or if you think the kind of difficulty you get in Lies of P is frustrating rather than rewarding, well Lords of the Fallen is the game for you. I love it as much as any other game I played this year. I think it's damn near perfect. Along with Remnant 2 and Lies of P it's probably the best year for souls like ever and this game is one of the best yet. Alright, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.