The Puppet's Choice

Lore & Background

Krat is a city built on a terrible economy: puppets are manufactured, hollow and obedient, while the rare and precious resource of living Souls is hoarded by those in power. The Puppet Master, Gears, operates within this system, seeking to collect and distribute Souls to breathe life into puppet bodies. The player's own existence is a product of this process—a puppet given a Soul, made to walk, think, and feel in a world that treats such life as a commodity to be spent.

The narrative arc builds through encounters with other puppets, former masters, and the remnants of a world that once had something resembling freedom. Each boss and side-quest peels back another layer of Krat's history: the original purpose of the city, the cost of the Soul economy, and the quiet tragedies of puppets who briefly tasted life before their Souls were taken back. The Puppet's Choice crystallizes all of this into a moral crossroads that has no clean answer.

Thematically, the arc interrogates whether a life granted by another's will is truly a life at all, and whether the right to exist belongs to the one who was made or the one who made. The game resists a single 'correct' answer, instead letting the player's accumulated choices throughout the arc determine which vision of Krat's future is realized.

In Their Own Story

The corridor was silent except for the soft click of your own joints. You could feel the Soul inside you—warm, restless, alive in a way the steel of your ribs never would be. Ahead, the great mechanism of Krat hummed, its gears turning with the slow patience of something that had been grinding for a hundred years. You thought of Olivia's laugh, the way it sounded like a music box winding down. You thought of Gears, who had looked at you not as a weapon but as a question he hadn't yet learned to answer. Your hand found the lever. The city held its breath. Somewhere, a thousand hollow eyes were waiting to see whether you would pour light into them, or let the dark keep its shape a little longer.

Reader's Guide

The arc begins in earnest when the player, having traversed Krat's industrial districts and confronted its first wave of corrupted puppets, learns that their own Soul was not freely given but taken. This revelation reframes every NPC interaction: the puppets you helped, the masters you fought, the quiet kindnesses offered along the way—all were transactions in a system you were part of without knowing.

As you progress, the game layers in the history of Krat's founding and the original purpose of the Soul economy. Each major confrontation reveals a faction's philosophy: some believe Souls should be hoarded to preserve the few who already live; others insist every puppet deserves a chance at feeling. The Puppet Master's own arc mirrors the player's, forcing you to question whether his methods and your methods are truly different.

The final choice is not a binary button-press but the culmination of dozens of smaller decisions—souls collected, puppets spared or destroyed, allies saved or lost. The endings reflect these accumulated choices, revealing whether Krat moves toward a fragile, hard-won coexistence, a cycle of control repeating itself, or something more ambiguous. No ending is purely triumphant; each carries the weight of what was sacrificed to reach it, and each reframes the player's own existence as either a liberation or a new kind of ownership.

Did You Know?

• The game's entire setting of Krat is designed as a closed industrial ecosystem where the 'currency' of the world is literally a living soul, making every economic and social interaction a moral one.
• The player character's Puppet body is not a fixed design but reflects the player's own build choices, reinforcing the theme that identity in Krat is something constructed rather than inherent.
• Lies of P was developed by Round8 Studio, a Korean studio, and draws on gothic, steampunk, and dark-fantasy visual traditions rather than any single source genre.
• The game's companion puppet, Olivia, serves as both a narrative guide and a thematic mirror—her own relationship with her Soul and her master parallels the player's central dilemma.