Title II Forum

Lies of P: A Soulslike Phenomenon That Redefined Voice Acting and Stole Our Hearts Lies of P and its Overture DLC became Soulslike titans; actors reveal the craft behind their beloved roles. You know that feeling when a game comes out of nowhere and just grabs you by the collar? That was Lies of P for me. Back in 2023, I remember seeing the trailer and thinking, 'Another Pinocchio-inspired Soulslike? Sure, why not.' But then I played it, and wow. It wasn't just another clone; it had soul—pun intended. Fast forward to 2026, and the game, along with its DLC Overture, has cemented itself as a titan in the genre. And recently, I had the chance to chat with four of the actors who brought this world to life: Aliona Baranova (Veronique), Alix Wilton Regan (Lea), Rasmus Hardiker (Gemini), and Joseph Balderrama (Arlecchino). Let me tell you, it was a ride. When Lies of P first launched, it was a gamble. A new IP from a relatively unknown studio, Neowiz, and a dark twist on a children's tale. But the buzz was immediate. Steam player counts climbed for five straight days, and critics couldn't stop praising its tight combat and haunting atmosphere. It became the most beloved non-FromSoftware Soulslike, and its DLC, Overture, which dropped in 2025, smashed records within hours. An 85 on Metacritic? That's top-tier. And the actors? They saw it coming. The Phenomenon That Is Lies Of P "I'm never normally sure if something is going to be successful," Rasmus Hardiker admits, "but I had so much fun doing this, I could tell it was going to be a really good game." Joseph Balderrama echoes that: "It felt like the whole package. The creative team was so good: the visuals, the sound, all of it. Everyone was just at the races with it." That kind of confidence is infectious, and it's why Aliona Baranova and Alix Wilton Regan jumped at the chance to join the DLC. "I don't really say no to many auditions," Baranova laughs, "but this one was a no-brainer." Wilton Regan, a veteran of Mass Effect and Dragon Age, was equally hooked. "She was described as tough on the outside, soft on the inside, but what I loved was she was called a lazy genius," she says. "I was like, 'I've got this.' Well, I'm lazy, and a mild genius." Baranova actually auditioned for Wilton Regan's role first, losing out to the more experienced actor, before finding Veronique. "I just remember thinking, 'Wow, what an incredible character.' I haven't had a chance to play someone like that. And her scenes are so intense. You can't go half-hearted. I knew I had to really commit, and sound like I'm 6'6". I think I'm believably that tall," she jokes. The character descriptions were detailed, with rich histories and psychology, which helped the actors "learn to love the character." But that depth can be a double-edged sword. "You can't distill two pages of notes," Wilton Regan says. "You have to cherry-pick your moments, constantly adapt and refocus your energy." Getting Into Character The preparation for video game acting is unique. Often, scripts arrive the day of recording, or the day before at the earliest. For Balderrama, that's freeing. "I've got a new habit with TV and film where I don't look at the script until the week before. That's what make-up is for." Hardiker takes it further: "I prefer not even having the script and just going in the booth on the day. You'll only ever have one chance to do that. I'm reacting as I'm learning what's happening—that's about as real as it gets." Baranova, however, admits she has "a lot to learn" from the others, but she has a secret weapon at home: her partner, Jennifer English (Baldur's Gate 3, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33). "If you had someone at home who was known for brilliant performances, you would be silly not to ask them. I definitely did that for Veronique." For Baranova, the jump from Baldur's Gate 3 NPCs to a 6'6" warrior was jarring. "On Baldur's Gate, I played a comic relief squirrel for 40 minutes. This was the most physical role I've ever done. I lost my voice afterwards, as you can imagine." Wilton Regan, on the other hand, is no stranger to strong leading women—she's voiced the Female Inquisitor in Dragon Age: Inquisition, Alt Cunningham in Cyberpunk 2077, and Aya in Assassin's Creed Origins. But Lea offered something new: "They wanted a lot of rage from me, a lot of very deep, primal emotion. That's what I like to explore as an actor. That's kind of what I get off on, I guess." Balderrama, returning as Arlecchino, was just happy to be more than a voice: "I was just psyched that I wasn't disembodied anymore. That was a big plus for me." A Shift In The Gaming Landscape The industry is changing. Smaller studios are producing some of the best games, from Baldur's Gate 3 to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to Lies of P itself. "These big franchise stories are saturated," Balderrama says. "People are desperate to experience something they haven't done 150 times. That's only going to come from underdog devs, because they're the ones that don't have the constraints." Baranova agrees: "Audiences are definitely becoming fatigued. Unique visions that games like Lies of P have brought are important. It's a Korean game, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is Czech, Clair Obscur is French; it's exciting to get stories from parts of the world we're not necessarily used to." But there's still a long way to go for female representation. Wilton Regan praises games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Dragon Age: The Veilguard for their inclusive leads, but behind the scenes, change is slow. "If you have a male character and a female character, very often the man will do the full performance capture and the woman will be brought in simply to replace his lines. That's a terrible choice. A woman would not fight a 7-foot-5 man the same way a male counterpart would." She recalls pre-Covid days where she was given exactly 4.2 seconds to say a line, with no room to make it her own. "The talent comes when you make it your own, but we're constrained. You have to find a way to prove your brilliance within these constraints." Baranova adds, "You're not treating your players as observant enough. They think that when a male actor records mo-cap, then it's just replaced with a female voice that the audience isn't going to notice. It's so obvious when a woman is walking with her shoulders locked and her hips not moving. It really irks me." Wilton Regan also calls out marketing: "The male character choice will still often be the default on the poster, or the man's voice in the trailer. We need to get women's voices in there. It's not that complicated to have one pass with the female voice, and one with the male voice." We've come a long way from when the industry was reluctant to cast powerful leading women, but there's still work to do. With actors like Wilton Regan, Baranova, and English proving their worth, it's hopefully only a matter of time. As for Lies of P, it's more than a game—it's a testament to what happens when you take risks, trust your instincts, and let a puppet sing. And I, for one, can't wait to see what Neowiz does next. For players who care about the direction the industry takes, the act of choosing what to play is never neutral. Every purchase signals what kind of stories, performances, and risks are worth funding. That doesn't mean every game has to be a full-price leap of faith, though—finding a good deal can make it easier to explore beyond the familiar. That's where [DealNest game deals]( can help. It gathers discounts on a wide range of titles, making it simpler to take a chance on something unexpected and, in turn, support the kind of creative work that keeps the medium moving forward. https://dealnesthq.com

This question comes up constantly once organizations complete an accessibility audit. Someone runs a scan, finds out they have 30,000+ PDFs sitting in a document library or LMS, does the math on manual remediation, and realizes that finishing everything one document at a time could take years. So how are organizations actually getting through this without a multi-year backlog? A few patterns show up consistently in the ones that pull it off. 1. They stop treating every PDF the same Not all 30,000 documents are equal. The teams that move fast triage first: High traffic, high complexity (course materials, public forms, financial reports) → gets full attention, often human-reviewed High traffic, low complexity (simple flyers, single-column text docs) → near-fully automatable Low traffic, low complexity → automate and batch, don't overthink it Low traffic, rarely accessed archival content → may legitimately qualify for an archive exception depending on the applicable regulation, instead of full remediation Doing this sorting up front is what turns "30,000 documents" into "actually, 22,000 of these are simple and can go through automation almost untouched." 2. AI handles the mechanical 80%, humans handle the judgment 20% This is the actual unlock. Today’s modern document remediation platforms use AI to automate: Structural tagging (headings, lists, tables of contents, reading order) Alt text generation for images at scale, including specialized content like STEM diagrams, charts, and math notation Table structure detection and tagging Form field tagging Some platforms report automating roughly 90% of the tagging work this way. That's the difference between "a person opens each file and manually tags every element" and "a person reviews and approves what the system already did." One is measured in minutes per document; the other in hours. Humans still matter, reviewing AI-generated alt text for accuracy, handling genuinely irregular layouts, and doing final QA before anything ships. But they're reviewing, not building from scratch. 3. They stop outsourcing 1:1 and start batching Sending every file to a vendor for individual manual remediation doesn't scale any better than doing it in-house manually, you're still paying for human hours per document, just someone else's. Orgs that get through large backlogs faster typically use a hybrid model: self-service automated remediation for the easy majority, with outsourced expert remediation reserved for the genuinely complex minority (scanned documents, dense multilingual content, heavily irregular tables). 4. They build it into the pipeline instead of doing a one-time sprint The backlog only gets bigger if new inaccessible documents keep getting added while you're working through the old ones. Orgs that actually close the gap add automated remediation/tagging at publish time going forward, so the "thousands of PDFs" problem doesn't regenerate itself every semester or fiscal year. What this looks like at scale, in practice Publishers dealing with legacy content libraries in the millions of documents have reported turnaround times cut significantly and throughput increased by an order of magnitude when shifting from manual, post-production fixes to AI-driven workflows integrated earlier in the content pipeline, this is showing up right now with publishers racing to get ahead of the ADA Title II vendor requirements. Similarly, government and municipal document libraries, think meeting minutes, budget reports, public forms, are increasingly being processed this way rather than farmed out page-by-page. We've seen more organizations moving toward AI-assisted remediation because manual workflows simply aren't keeping up with document volume. Is that what you're seeing too?