The Pin

Lore & Background

In the world of Lies of P, Pins are not merely toys or automatons; they are the living citizens of Krat, a city built on the backs of their labour and their silence. The Pin who serves as the player's avatar is one such citizen, yet something is different. They carry no memory of a maker, no recollection of a name, and an unsettling awareness that the stories they are told about their own origins are, in the game's own terminology, Lies. The narrative is structured around the collection of these Lies—fragmented narrative shards scattered across Krat and its surrounding regions—that the Pin must gather to piece together a truth that the city's power structures have deliberately buried.

The thematic core of the Pin's arc is identity under authorship. Every Pin in Krat was designed, scripted, and given a purpose by forces that no longer exist or that have moved on. The Pin's journey is, in a very literal sense, a journey of reading one's own source code: what was I made to do, and do I have the right to do something else? Hugo, the gentle Pin who walks beside the player, embodies the question of loyalty and love within a constructed existence. The General, the martial Pin who leads Krat's resistance, embodies the question of duty and the willingness to burn a city to protect its people. Both are mirrors the Pin must look into before choosing their own reflection.

The world itself is a character. Krat's towering clockwork spires, its perpetual haze of industrial smoke, and the rigid social order between Pins and their human overseers create a setting where freedom is not a given but a narrative you have to write for yourself. The game's title—Lies of P—points to the idea that the stories we are told about who we are are the first and most dangerous lies we must unmake.

In Their Own Story

The first thing the Pin remembers is the smell: iron filings and burnt tallow, the particular stench of a city that has been grinding itself to dust for a hundred years. They open eyes that were not supposed to open, in a street where the other Pins are already marching, already fighting, already dying in the precise choreography their makers intended.

A hand reaches down. Hugo's hand. Small, jointed, warm in a way that should not be possible for a mechanism. "You're awake," Hugo says, and the words land like a key turning in a lock the Pin didn't know was there. Around them, Krat groans and ticks, its great clock-towers marking a time that belongs to no one. Somewhere above the smoke, the General's banner flaps in a wind that smells of gunpowder and old promises.

The Pin stands. They do not remember why they are standing, or who told them to stand, or whether standing is what they were made to do. But their legs hold. And for the first time in a story they are only beginning to read, that is enough.

Reader's Guide

The Pin's arc unfolds in three broad movements. In the first, the Pin is a blank page: they wake in Krat, collect their first Lies, and learn the world's rules through combat and exploration. Hugo introduces the player to the emotional grammar of the story—trust, loss, the small kindnesses that Pins extend to one another in a city that treats them as instruments. Every Lie gathered in this phase is a thread; the player is weaving a tapestry they cannot yet see the full pattern of.

The second movement is confrontation. The Pin's path crosses the General's, and the war between Pins and humans forces a choice that cannot be deferred. Here, the earlier Lies begin to contradict each other. A story the Pin was told about their own origin rings false. Hugo's memories do not align with the Pin's. The narrative reframes: the Pin is not simply a citizen in a war; the Pin is the question the war is fighting over.

The third movement is the Pin's own authorship. The ending conditions hinge on the cumulative weight of choices made in the first two acts: how the Pin treated Hugo, whether they sided with or against the General, and which Lies they chose to believe versus which they set aside. The game does not present these as a checklist but as a character test. The ending the Pin reaches is, in effect, the story the Pin wrote about themselves. Some paths lead to a quiet, aching acceptance of the role a Pin was made to fill. Others lead to a breaking—literal and figurative—of the strings that bound them. A third, harder-to-reach path suggests that the Pin was never meant to choose between the two, and that the true Lie was the binary itself.

Across all endings, Krat endures. The city ticks on. But the Pin who walks its streets at the end is not the Pin who woke in the first act, and that difference is the point.

Did You Know?

• The term 'Pin' in the game's world refers to a puppet citizen of Krat, a deliberate nod to the Italian 'pupazzo' tradition and the Pinocchio lineage, yet the game subverts the fairy-tale tone with industrial-gothic reali
• The narrative fragments the player collects are called 'Lies,' a deliberate inversion of the word 'truth': the game suggests that the stories a Pin is told about their own origin are the most important lies to interrogat
• Hugo, the Pin companion, is designed to function as an emotional anchor throughout the game; the player's choices regarding Hugo's fate are among the most consequential to the final ending.
• Krat's architecture is built around a clockwork aesthetic—gears, pistons, and ticking mechanisms are woven into nearly every environment, reinforcing the theme that the world itself is a mechanism someone designed and ma