Lies of P: Overture shadow-dropped during Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest 2025 and, unsurprisingly drawing more inspiration from FromSoftware in its design ethos, the DLC is nestled deep within the base game. This wasn’t at all out of the realm of possibility, though, as the entry point for Lies of P: Overture was all but spelled out to players when they initially came across it as one of the few unsolved mysteries that the base game left dangling. Moreover, it was revealed long ago now that Lies of P: Overture would be a story-driven prequel DLC, in that it sees P and Gemini travel back in time, and features a boss rush mode.
This was all greatly anticipated as Lies of P is debatably one of the best non-FromSoftware Soulslike games to date and, naturally, a DLC that expands on it further while potentially concluding Neowiz’s loose and grisly Adventures of Pinocchio adaptation meant there was a ton to look forward to. However, despite players having an awareness of Lies of P: Overture indeed launching sometime this summer, the suddenness of its launch is as negatively alarming as it is positively celebratory.
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Lies of P: Overture DLC is Taking Players Back in Time
Lies of P makes an appearance at Sony’s State of Play event to reveal its new Overture DLC.
Soulslike DLCs Have a Tendency of Being Locked Behind Progression
Unlike other DLCs that are accessed indiscriminately and separately from a base game’s content, Soulslike DLCs often take a lot more effort to get to unless players have preemptively readied a save file. FromSoftware’s Soulslikes alone relish in this methodology among all of its applicable games:
- Dark Souls’ Artorias of the Abyss DLC tasks players with defeating the Darkroot Basin’s Hydra, rescuing Dusk of Oolacile, retrieving the Lord Vessel (delivering it to Kaathe or Frampt), and obtaining the Broken Pendant from a crystal golem in the Duke’s Archives.
- Dark Souls 2’s Crown of the Sunken King, Crown of the Old Iron King, and Crown of the Ivory King DLCs task players with finding specific keys to access them, but vanilla Dark Souls 2 gifts players these keys automatically, whereas Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin ironically does not.
- Dark Souls 3’s Ashes of Ariandel DLC tasks players with reaching the Cleansing Chapel in the Cathedral of the Deep, and beating it grants access to the second DLC, the Ringed City, which is otherwise inaccessible until players reach the Kiln of the First Flame’s Soul of Cinder at the end of the base game.
- Bloodborne’s Old Hunters DLC tasks players with defeating Vicar Amelia and returning to Cathedral Ward, yet the ease with which it’s accessed is met with a blistering and insurmountable difficulty in the Hunter’s Nightmare when players originally come across it at the beginning of the base game.
- Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC tasks players with defeating Caelid’s Starscourge Radahn and Mohgwyn Palace’s Mohg, Lord of Blood.
For Lies of P: Overture, players are explicitly told via text prompts to return to the golden, broken stargazer found near Chapter 5’s ‘Path of the Pilgrim’ stargazer. This means players aren’t tasked to do anything beyond progressing the base game’s story, though that’s easier said than done when progression up to the end of Chapter 9 (restoring the Hotel Krat stargazer, specifically) is required and the likes of the Eldest of the Black Rabbit Brotherhood, Romeo, King of Puppets, and Walker of Illusions stand in their way.
Plus, like with Bloodborne’s Old Hunters DLC, players will want to be well-equipped and sufficiently leveled beforehand as Overture’s regular enemies and mini-bosses can be more terrifying and grueling than some base game bosses.
Lies of P: Overture’s Shadow Drop Pulls a Rug Out from Under Players
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree shadow-dropping would have been quite disastrous due to how long it can take to finally reach Mohg in Elden Ring’s base game, let alone how long Elden Ring is in general with hundreds of hours and a lot of level, build, and spec choices to make along the way. These DLCs usually expect players to be tackling them after all base game content has been beaten, to be fair, but that only exacerbates the inherent problem of shadow-dropping Lies of P.
Lies of P is a linear Soulslike action-RPG, but anyone who had been meaning to begin a new playthrough instead of hopping into the DLC in one of infinite New Game Plus playthroughs may be disappointed that they have no time between a release date reveal and launch to make the necessary preparations. Overture is also scaled fairly high and is thus incredibly demanding and challenging on a New Game save file, regardless of which brand-new Lies of P difficulty setting players have selected.
Thankfully, respeccing is a quality-of-life feature that Lies of P grants relatively freely.
This won’t be a gripe for anyone who doesn’t mind waiting a while and preparing a new character with whatever amount of time they deem appropriate before indulging in the DLC. But, with the obvious excitement an imminent Lies of P DLC release would have, it can be disappointing that no time at all was afforded beforehand to anyone who was eager to enter it immediately. Either way, Lies of P: Overture is a sublime extension of what made the base game astonishing and the wait for it was decently lengthy to begin with, but even a week’s worth of notice would’ve been ideal—of course, it wouldn’t have had the pleasure of shadow-dropping during an event as momentous as Summer Game Fest otherwise.