New Lies of P documentary teases next game "is going to be really fun and emotionally moving"

The most revealing line in Round8's new documentary isn't about passion or process. It's the name. Nough — "not enough, but without the e" — because the team is never satisfied, always refining. Strip away the poetic framing and what remains is a studio defining itself by insecurity. That's not a philosophy. It's a compensation mechanism.

Lies of P launched in 2023 to a respectable three stars from Eurogamer. The review praised its "edgy tone and tweaked weapons" then delivered the kill shot: "highly unlikely that they'll be able to beat the originals at their own game." The originals being FromSoftware's Souls series. The "tweaked weapons" being the combat system's only meaningful deviation. Nough built a competent homage and called it iteration. The market rewarded them for it. Now they're doing it again.

Choi Jiwon frames the studio's identity around a deceptively simple claim: "We are gamers before we are developers." The documentary shows the full team — director included — sitting down for collective playtesting sessions. They validate structure together. They iterate until "everyone on the team is genuinely satisfied." It looks rigorous. It sounds democratic. But internal consensus is not the same as external quality. A room full of developers who love Souls games will inevitably tune a Souls-like toward their own preferences. That's not player-first design. That's echo-chamber refinement.

The "games by gamers" slogan func'tions as marketing shorthand for "we know the genre because we play it." Every studio in this space plays the genre. FromSoftware plays the genre. The difference is FromSoftware invented the grammar Nough is still conjugating. Calling your QA sessions a culture doesn't make them a culture. It makes them a schedule.

Choi's tease for the next project lands with unintended comedy: "really fun and emotionally moving... this is the truth, not a lie." The game's title is Lies of P. The studio's name means "not enough." The director promises truth while standing inside a nested doll of negation. Whether he realizes the irony is irrelevant. The line will be quoted in trailers. It will be screenshot for Reddit. It will do the work of a tagline without committing to a single mechanical detail.

Neowiz wants a franchise. That much has been clear for two years. The sequel entered vertical slice — industry speak for a playable cross-section representing final systems — months ago. Vertical slice means the core loops are locked. Weapon archetypes, enemy behaviors, progression curves, level topology. The DNA is set. What remains is multiplication: more areas, more bosses, more items, more narrative connective tissue. The shape of the next game is already decided. The only variable is polish.

Polish is what Nough sells. The documentary is a polish delivery vehicle. It reframes derivative work as obsessive craft. It converts "we copied the market leader" into "we refined until satisfied." The distinction matters because the Souls-like market is saturating. Lords of the Fallen 2023, Lies of P, the upcoming AI Limit, the inevitable Elden Ring follow-ups. Competence is no longer a differentiator. Everyone has competent combat, interconnected maps, vague lore delivered through item descriptions. The genre has standardized its grammar. The only way to stand out is to mutate it.

Lies of P didn't mutate. It tweaked. The weapon assembly system — the "tweaked weapons" Eurogamer noted — let players combine blade and handle types for moveset variation. That's a real system. It has depth. But it sits inside a framework that refuses to question its own assumptions. Bonfires are still stargazers. Estus is still pulse cells. The paradigm holds.

Choi says the next game will be "emotionally moving." Souls games achieve emotional resonance through opacity — the player constructs meaning from fragments. Nough's first effort tried the same trick but lacked the confidence to stay silent. Its narrative signposted. Its themes announced themselves. The result was affectation, not affect. If the sequel follows the same vertical slice, the same pipeline, the same "gamer-first" consensus loop, it will produce the same outcome: a well-made game that feels like a memory of a better one.

The documentary's most honest moment arrives accidentally. "The players can always tell," Choi says. "As a gamer myself, I know they can tell when a game has been made with real dedication." He's right. Players can tell. They told with Lies of P. They recognized the dedication. They also recognized the limits of that dedication. The game sold well enough to greenlight a sequel. It didn't sell well enough to escape the "Souls-like" prefix. That prefix is a ceiling.

Neowiz knows this. Publishing arms don't fund vertical slice on hopes of critical transcendence. They fund it because the first unit proved reliable ROI on a known formula. The franchise plan is pragmatic. The documentary is the narrative overlay that makes pragmatism look like vision.

Nough's "never enough" mantra guarantees they'll ship a polished product. The combat will feel crisp. The bosses will read fair. The world will connect cleanly. The weapon system will likely expand — more combinations, more asymmetry, more build-expression. Technical execution will improve. Technical execution is what iterative playtesting optimizes. But the structural questions — why this perspective, why this grammar, what new thing does this say — don't get answered in playtest sessions. They get answered in the months before vertical slice, when the director decides what the game is actually about.

Choi's promise — "you won't be disappointed" — is the only claim in the documentary that can be falsified. The rest is process theater. The vertical slice is already playable. The DNA is already set. The only remaining question is whether Nough used their "never enough" insecurity to interrogate their own foundations, or just to sand the edges of someone else's shape.

Players can tell. Choi was right about that. They'll tell again in 2025 or 2026. The "truth not a lie" line will age poorly if the sequel is merely Lies of P with more weapon parts and better boss choreography. Insecurity that only produces polish isn't a philosophy. It's a trap. The studio named "not enough" has to decide whether they mean the game, or the ambition. The documentary suggests they haven't decided yet. The vertical slice suggests the decision window closed months ago.