The Puppet-Human Schism

Lore & Background

Krat is a city built on labor, and labor in Krat is divided along a line that has no clean border. Puppets—beings assembled from wire, porcelain, cloth, and some unnamed essence—work the forges, tend the looms, and fill the ranks that Humans find beneath them. They are, in the eyes of many citizens, tools with the uncanny courtesy of life. The Schism is the name the world gives to the growing rift: Puppets who demand a seat at the table of personhood, and Humans who fear that granting one unravels the social order they have built on the assumption that only the born can suffer, love, or die meaningfully.

Geppetto, the artificer who shaped the protagonist, embodies the Schism's most intimate face. His creation is not a mass-produced worker but a singular being, and the question of whether that being can grow a heart—whether a crafted soul can be as genuine as an inherited one—haunts every interaction in Krat. The Marquis, meanwhile, treats the divide as a lever: by stoking fear on one side and resentment on the other, he keeps both populations too distracted to question the structures that profit from their separation.

The collected Lies that the Puppeteer gathers are not merely a currency. In the world's own mythology, a Lie is a fragment of story, a piece of the narrative a being tells to sustain its sense of self. To hold Lies is to hold the raw material of identity, and the Schism is, at its deepest, a war over who is permitted to author their own story and who is condemned to perform one written by another hand.

In Their Own Story

The rain in Krat does not wash things clean; it makes the soot run in dark rivers down the brickwork. You stand in the lower quarter where the Puppet workshops cluster like a nest of half-finished birds, and the air smells of hot metal and the faint sweetness of varnish. A Human foreman leans against a loading dock, arms crossed, watching a line of Puppets file past with their heads bowed in the practiced rhythm of the shift. One of them—a small thing, barely taller than a workbench, with a cracked porcelain cheek—pauses. It does not break the line. It simply looks up, just for a moment, at the foreman, and something in its glass eyes flickers with a question the foreman is not prepared to answer. The line resumes. The foreman looks away. Somewhere above, in the Marquis's tower, a bell tolls the hour, and the sound carries the weight of every story this city has told itself to keep the gears turning. The small Puppet walks on, and its shadow stretches long and thin across the wet cobblestones, indistinguishable, for a brief and terrible moment, from a human one.

Reader's Guide

What the citizens of Krat agree upon is simple enough: Puppets are made, Humans are born, and the gap between those two verbs is a chasm. The lower quarters, the workshop districts, the forges where bodies are assembled and disassembled with equal casualness—these are the spaces where the Schism is lived daily, where a Puppet's worth is measured in output and a Human's in lineage.

What is contested is everything else. Whether a Puppet can grieve. Whether a heart grown in a workshop is less a heart than one inherited. Whether the Marquis's rhetoric of unity is a shield for a deeper design. Item descriptions scattered through Krat's ruins—half-finished letters, workshop ledgers, a child's drawing of a Puppet holding a small, beating heart—offer fragments that contradict the official narrative. The player uncovers these pieces slowly, and the game never delivers a single authoritative verdict.

This is where the Schism becomes a gameplay theme rather than a backdrop. Every Bow you equip is a story you choose to tell with your hands. Every Lie you collect is a fragment of someone else's identity you now carry. The game asks, without lecturing: if you can swap the shape of your weapon mid-combat, can you not also swap the shape of your self? The performance is the point. The truth is the thing you protect underneath. And in Krat, no one—Puppet or Human—has ever been certain which is which.

Did You Know?

• The game's collectible currency, called Lies, is thematically tied to the idea that identity in Krat is constructed from narrative fragments rather than being an inherent, fixed essence.
• The protagonist's creator, Geppetto, is framed not as a distant mythic figure but as a personal, present relationship—making the Puppet-Human divide an intimate, familial question rather than purely a political one.
• The Bow weapon system, which lets the player swap weapon types on the fly, mirrors the game's broader theme that identity in Krat is performative and mutable rather than fixed at birth or creation.
• Lies of P is explicitly positioned as a dark reimagining rooted in the Pinocchio tradition, translating the original fairy-tale question of 'can a puppet become a real boy?' into a full-scale societal conflict.