Geppetto's Lie

Lore & Background

In the soot-choked, gear-driven city of Klosterbell, puppets are not toys. They are laborers, soldiers, and citizens in a world where the line between flesh and wood has long since rotted away. Geppetto occupies a peculiar position in this hierarchy: he is not a puppet himself, yet he is not wholly 'real' in the way the city's other inhabitants define the term. He is the maker, the one who sits at the bench with chisels and glue, shaping wooden joints and threading silk into veins. The Player is his masterwork—or so the early chapters suggest—and the relationship is framed as one of quiet, almost tender paternalism.

But the lie at the core of Geppetto's story is not a single sentence. It is an architecture of omissions: what he did not say about why he built the Player, what he did not explain about the heart the Player was meant to receive, and what he chose to forget about the other puppets he made and discarded. The game's structure of collecting 'lies' from various NPCs mirrors this: each fragment the Player gathers from the city's broken citizens is a shard of a larger truth that Geppetto held in his workshop, locked away like a half-finished doll under a cloth. The more the Player learns about the world—about the Puppet Factory, about the fate of other created beings—the more Geppetto's silence becomes its own kind of cruelty.

What makes Geppetto's Lie resonate with players is its refusal to cast the maker as a villain or a saint. He is a man who built something he loved and then could not bear to watch it suffer, and whose solution was to pretend the suffering was not his responsibility. The lie is not malice; it is the self-protective fiction of a father who would rather his child believe the world is kind than admit he made a world that is not.

In Their Own Story

The workshop smelled of linseed oil and old sawdust. Geppetto sat at the bench, his fingers black with graphite, tracing the grain of a wooden ribcage that hadn't been finished in three years. Across the room, the Player stood motionless in the corner, joints clicking softly with the building's distant machinery, waiting for instructions that never came.

"You don't have to stand there," Geppetto said, not looking up. His voice was the dry rasp of a man who had not spoken to another living thing in weeks. "I know you're not tired. I made you. I know your springs don't fatigue."

The Player said nothing. It never did, not in the workshop. Outside, the city of Klosterbell groaned and clanked, a thousand other puppets hauling crates through the fog, and somewhere far below, the Factory's great gears turned in their endless, purposeless rotation. Geppetto set down his chisel. He looked at the Player—really looked, the way you look at a face you've seen every day for a decade and only now notice has changed.

"I'm sorry," he said, to the wood, to the silence, to the half-finished ribcage in his hands. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you what you were for."

The Player's glass eyes caught the lamplight. In that glint, for one instant, something almost like patience flickered. Then the gears outside shifted, and the moment passed, and Geppetto picked up his chisel again, and the workshop went quiet, and the lie settled back into place like a lid on a jar.

Reader's Guide

The Player's encounter with Geppetto's Lie unfolds in layers, and its full weight only lands once you've walked enough of Klosterbell to understand what the city's other puppets have endured.

Early on, Geppetto presents himself as a gentle, slightly absent workshop keeper. He hands you tools, offers half-finished observations about the world outside, and never once explains why you exist or what the 'heart' you're searching for actually is. This is the first lie: the comfortable one, the one that lets you believe your quest is a simple errand. You collect lies from the city's broken citizens—soldiers, workers, children made of wire and cloth—and each one adds a thread to a picture Geppetto never showed you.

The turning point comes when the Player's accumulated knowledge collides with Geppetto's silence. The workshop, once a place of quiet safety, becomes a site of confrontation. What Geppetto built you for is not what he told you. The heart you were meant to receive was never a gift; it was a mechanism, and the 'reality' he promised was a story he told himself to keep the chisel moving. This reframes every earlier interaction: his tenderness was not love but maintenance, and his omissions were not forgetfulness but self-preservation.

For the endings, the conditions revolve around how much of the city's truth the Player has gathered and what choice is made at the narrative's climax: whether to accept the heart Geppetto offers, to reject it and remain a puppet without a 'real' soul, or to turn the mechanism back on its maker. Each path reveals a different facet of Klosterbell's fate—whether the city's cycle of creation and abandonment continues, fractures, or is deliberately ended. Geppetto's Lie is the key that unlocks all three, because it is the one truth that, once spoken, cannot be unspoken.

Did You Know?

• The game's 'lies' are not lies in the moral sense; they are hidden truths that characters carry, and collecting them is the Player's method of assembling a new heart. Geppetto's is the most structurally important because
• Geppetto's workshop is one of the few spaces in Klosterbell that feels still and domestic amid the industrial sprawl, a deliberate contrast that makes his silence feel more oppressive than the city's noise.
• The Player is never given a name by the player in the base narrative; Geppetto is the only character who addresses the Player as a 'child' rather than a function, which is part of what makes his lie so personal.
• The game draws on the Pinocchio mythos but inverts it: here, the puppet maker is not a benevolent craftsman but a flawed, guilty figure, and the puppet's desire to be 'real' is less a wish for life than a refusal to acce