Pinocchio wants to be a real boy. While I can't weigh in yet on whether the Timothée Chalamet-coded protagonist of Lies of P is more than string and wood tacks, this Bloodborne clone has conclusively proven that my old Xbox One S is still very much alive.

I bought the box on the knife edge of the new console generation. I had never owned a Microsoft system before, but I had gotten the opportunity to review Ori and the Will of the Wisps for a big outlet and the code was for Xbox One. So, I headed out to Best Buy — one of the last times I was out in public before lockdown kicked in — picked up the stark white box, brought it home, and, once the review was in the can, started working my way through some of the exclusives I had never been able to play.

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And, as much as I enjoyed doing co-op Halo campaigns with a friend in the early pandemic, my Xbox One quickly felt out of date. Unless I was trying to play an older game or an indie I picked up on Game Pass, my PC and PS5 were better places to play. I was happy that Microsoft was supporting the One after the Series X|S hit the market, but when I tried to play Forza Horizon 5, the loading times were too long and frequent for me to get into it. The next gen was here, and the Xbox One felt old.

So, it became a streaming machine for the apps that weren't available on Sony platforms, like the Criterion Channel and Shudder. But, when my parents got a new TV, I inherited their smart TV, a friend of my wife's inherited our 2007 plasma screen TV that was miraculously still working, and suddenly my last good reason to use the Xbox One S was out the door. I had all my apps in one place.

But when, I saw that Lies of P was available on Xbox One via Game Pass and, given that my PC storage was clogged up by Starfield and Baldur's Gate 3, I decided to give the last gen version a try. I was skeptical, and that continued through my first few minutes with the game. The frame rate stuttered a little bit, and I considered waiting until I had space on my laptop.

But, then, for some reason, the frame rate smoothed out. The game's rain-slicked Gothic city looked terrific. The load times after deaths were barely long enough for me to reach for my phone, and there weren't any during gameplay. It felt positively… current gen. I played another hour of Lies of P the next morning, and had a similarly great experience as I explored the first section of the city after you exit the train station and battled the first boss, Parade Master.

I never expected to get this kind of performance for a new game out of my Xbox One S again. I'm so impressed, my nose would grow if I said I didn't plan on playing many more new games on Xbox One S. It's a real live console again.

NEXT: Lies Of P Is The First Soulslike That Feels Made By FromSoftware