The Fall of the Old World

Lore & Background

In the mythic past, the Puppet World was a functioning civilization of crafted beings—puppets, dolls, and automatons—existing in a shared stage where every actor knew their part. The Fall did not arrive as a single cataclysm in the way a war or a flood might. It was more like a play losing its script mid-performance: roles dissolved, the audience vanished, the stagehands forgot the set pieces, and the puppets were left mid-gesture in a world that no longer had a director. What remains in the present-day Krat is the residue of that abandoned production—frozen figures in doorways, streets that loop back on themselves, and a pervasive sense that everyone is still waiting for a cue that will never come.

Geppetto, the puppet-maker, occupies a complicated position in the Fall's aftermath. He is simultaneously the creator who built the world's inhabitants and the figure they blame for its abandonment. Whether he fled, was consumed by his own making, or simply walked offstage while the curtain fell is a question the game's text never answers definitively. What is clear is that his absence became the world's central wound: without a maker, the puppets have no origin story, and without an origin story, their claim to personhood is perpetually in question.

The Puppet—the player's character—exists in the long shadow of the Fall. It is a creation without a clear creator, a performer without a play, a being that aches for the one thing the old world could never grant it: the unarguable fact of being alive. The world's lies are not malicious; they are structural. They are the load-bearing walls of a building whose foundation cracked centuries ago. To pull one out is to risk the whole edifice, which is why the inhabitants of Krat cling to their small deceptions with the desperate tenderness of people holding a leaking boat together with their bare hands.

In Their Own Story

The street in Krat's lower quarter still smells of sawdust and old varnish, the way it did before the Fall, when the carpenters worked in shifts and the little wooden hands clapped in rhythm. Now the sawdust has settled into the grooves of the cobblestones like grey snow that never melts. A puppet stands at the intersection, one arm raised in a wave it has been performing for longer than any living memory. Its face is a smile. Its eyes are two dark button-holes looking at nothing.

You pass it. You always pass it. But tonight the pin in your hand catches the lamplight and throws a small, sharp star across the cobblestones, and for one half-second the puppet's raised hand twitches. Not a wave. A reach. As if, beneath the performance, beneath the script, beneath the lie of the smile, something small and wooden and terribly lonely is trying to grab the light before it moves on.

You keep walking. The hand drops. The smile remains. The street smells of sawdust and old varnish, and the night goes on, and the play continues for an audience of dust.

Reader's Guide

The Fall of the Old World is never told to you in a single cutscene. It is archaeology. You dig it out of the world the way a puppet might dig out its own maker's name from a layer of varnish.

Item descriptions are your primary text. A discarded pin, a cracked music box, a child's wooden shoe found in a ruin—each carries a fragment of the old world's story. Read them in context. A line that seems like flavor in one area becomes a keystone in another. The game rewards players who treat every object as a sentence in a larger, broken book.

NPC dialogue is layered. The same character will say different things depending on which pins you've collected, which optional encounters you've completed, and whether you've spoken to them before or after a pivotal moment. Fara's comments, Geppetto's half-finished explanations, the quiet observations of street vendors in Krat—each is a shard of the same mosaic. No single voice holds the full picture.

Environmental storytelling carries the weight of the 'before.' The frozen figures, the looping streets, the stage sets with no actors—these are the Fall made physical. They ask you to feel the absence rather than read about it.

The thematic throughline is identity under construction. The Fall stripped the world of its author, and every character since has been improvising their own origin. The Puppet's journey is the most literal: a being that must build its own humanity part by part, pin by pin, while the world insists that a crafted thing can never be real. The game asks you to sit with that tension without resolving it neatly. The lies are not the enemy. The lies are the world. The question is whether you can live inside them and still call yourself alive.

Did You Know?

• The Puppet's body can be disassembled and reconfigured with different parts throughout the game, making the player's own identity as mutable and constructed as the world around it.
• Krat's architecture frequently features half-finished sets, frozen performances, and empty stages—visual metaphors for a civilization that lost its script mid-show.
• The game's title 'Lies of P' operates on multiple levels: the lies that hold the world together, the lies characters tell each other, and the lie the Puppet must confront about whether it can ever truly be human.
• Geppetto's role as creator is deliberately ambiguous in the available text—he is simultaneously the world's father, its abandonment, and possibly its still-present ghost, and the game never forces a single reading.