The Truth of P

Lore & Background

Krat is a city built on the bones of industry and the theology of creation. Scaffolding and smokestacks claw at a permanently bruised sky, and the streets are a palimpsest of half-finished architecture—cathedrals grafted onto factory floors, gardens growing through cracked iron plates. In this world, puppets are not toys or curiosities; they are a class of being, mechanical and wooden, animated by some unseen will. They labor, they suffer, they die, and they are told they are not *people*. The social order of Krat rests on that distinction, and the entire narrative tension of Lies of P is built on the question of whether that distinction holds.

P is the most enigmatic of these puppets. It wakes without memory, without a name beyond the letter, and without a master who claims it. A small doll—its companion, its conscience, its only voice of tenderness in a city of grinding gears and cold judgment—accompanies P through the districts of Krat, from the soot-blackened lower warrens to the gilded upper tiers where the city's true power resides. Along the way, P encounters other puppets who have made peace with their nature, humans who see puppets as tools, and figures who speak of a *Creator*, a Puppet Master whose design for P may be far more specific and far less benevolent than P hopes.

The thematic architecture draws heavily on the Pinocchio tradition—the boy who wants a soul, the father who made him, the lies that keep him a puppet—but Round8 Studio transplants those ideas into a world of industrial dread, existential horror, and moral ambiguity. There is no Genie offering a shortcut, no blue fairy pulling strings. In Krat, the path to becoming real is paved with choices that cost something irreplaceable, and the "truth" of P is never a single sentence but a wound that only partially heals, depending on how the player sees the journey through.

In Their Own Story

The rain in Krat does not fall so much as it *settles*, a fine grey silt that coats everything in a matte film of ash. P stands at the edge of a bridge that connects the lower foundry district to the upper terraces, its wooden fingers curled around the iron railing. Below, the river runs the color of weak tea, and the steam from the processing plants rises in slow, lazy columns that the wind keeps shredding. The Doll sits on P's shoulder, its painted eyes tracking the distant silhouette of the Grand Atelier—the place where, P has been told, the answers to every question it has ever asked are kept under glass.

"You don't have to go in there," the Doll says, its voice small and papery, like a page turning in an empty room. "You could stay here. Be a puppet on a bridge. No one would mind."

P does not answer. It never does, not at first. It simply turns, and the joints in its neck click softly, and it walks toward the Atelier with the slow, deliberate gait of something that has decided to stop being afraid. Behind it, the rain keeps settling. Ahead, the Atelier's doors are open, and the light inside is the warm, impossible gold of a candle that has been burning for a very long time. P steps across the threshold, and the doors close behind it with a sound like a held breath finally released.

Reader's Guide

The narrative arc of Lies of P unfolds in three broad movements, each one a lens that sharpens the previous one.

**Movement One – Waking in Krat.** P stirs in a world that has no memory of making it. The early districts introduce the social hierarchy of puppets and humans, the Doll's guidance, and the first whispers of a Creator. This movement establishes the *question*: Who am I, and who made me? Every NPC P meets is a fragment of an answer, and the player's first boss encounters are less about combat than about being *tested*—the city itself is gauging whether this puppet is worth the trouble of explaining itself.

**Movement Two – The Districts of Krat.** As P ascends through the city's tiers, the tone shifts from mystery to confrontation. The Puppet Master's design for P begins to surface, and the Doll's role becomes more complicated than a simple companion. This is where earlier assumptions crack: the kindness shown to P in the lower districts takes on a different meaning once the upper tiers reveal *who* is doing the showing. The player's choices here—how P treats other puppets, whether it spares or destroys, whether it trusts the humans who offer help—begin to branch the narrative toward different conclusions.

**Movement Three – The Atelier and the Truth.** The final stretch converges on the Grand Atelier, where P confronts the full scope of its own making. The endings here are not simply "good" or "bad" but *interpretive*: each one answers the question "What is P?" differently. Some endings confirm P as a creation meant to serve, some reframe P as something that transcends its design, and the most emotionally resonant conclusion suggests that the act of *choosing* to be real is what makes it so, regardless of what the Creator intended. The conditions to unlock each ending hinge on the player's accumulated choices throughout the game—empathy shown to other puppets, the fate of key NPCs, and the final confrontation with the truth of P's origin. No single ending is "correct"; each is a valid answer to an unanswerable question, and the game trusts the player to sit with whichever one resonates.

The arc's power lies in its recontextualization: once the truth is known, every earlier encounter—the kindness, the cruelty, the small mercies—becomes a line in a sentence the player is only now reading in full.

Did You Know?

• Lies of P draws its mythic DNA from Carlo Collodi's 1883 Pinocchio, but transplants the puppet-and-creator relationship into a grim industrial gothic setting where the question of becoming 'real' carries the weight of ex
• The game's companion, the Doll, functions as both narrative guide and emotional anchor, and its role shifts subtly depending on the path the player takes through Krat's districts, making it one of the most reactive chara
• Krat's architecture deliberately blends cathedral forms with factory infrastructure—stained glass above, steam vents below—visually encoding the game's central tension between the sacred (the soul, the self) and the mech
• The multiple endings are not gated by a single final choice but by the cumulative weight of the player's decisions throughout the entire playthrough, meaning the 'truth' P receives is shaped by how it treated every other