Lies of P director Choi Ji-Won has revealed that NeoWiz’ upcoming maso-core game will have three endings.
In an interview with DualShockers, Choi explained this about Lies of P’s endings:
“One thing we planned in advance is that you wouldn’t want to just play it once. If you have only played it once, then it’s not complete. We really highly recommend you play it several times.
Basically there are three endings. But we really, really, really recommend playing the ending until the very, very, very end.”
As the theme of Lies of P is lying, Choi seems to heavily imply here that Round 8 Studios has assigned one canonical ending, and the two other endings are likely to be lies.
Now, to put this in context, usually, games with multiple endings will have to assign one canonical ending. Since the other endings are not canonical, they can be considered to be wish fulfillment, and unimportant for when the game gets sequels in the future.
But then, Lies of P did not invent the idea of unreliable narrators and fake endings in video games. We do know that games like The Darkness II and Spec Ops: The Line are designed to evoke a dreamlike state. You aren’t always sure what parts of these games are real and which parts are imagined by the characters. In the nature of these games, you aren’t even sure if there are any canonical endings, or if the events in the game even happened at all.
There’s also an approach used in games like Nier: Automata, where there aren’t really fake endings per se, but an ending is not really an ending. Which is to say, if you want to get the real ending, that is tantamount to having to see all the endings. In some games, you have to go through all the other endings to get to the real ending.
So Choi seems to heavily imply that they are employing similar shenanigans for Lies of P. It could be a situation where you have to watch the two other endings to understand the real ending. They may not be canonical or made of lies, but they will also have parts that hint heavily at what the real ending could be.
Lies of P will be released on September 19, 2023, for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and Windows via Steam.
