The Puppet Workshop

Lore & Background

In Krat City, puppetry is not a hobby or a trade in the ordinary sense; it is woven into the social and spiritual fabric of the populace. The Puppet Workshop stands as a physical testament to that devotion—a space where the raw materials of the craft (lignum, wire, thread, glass eyes) are transformed into beings that walk, speak, and in some cases, suffer. The workshop's walls are lined with half-finished forms, their joints exposed, their faces either serene or grotesquely unfinished, as if the artisans paused mid-stroke and never returned.

What makes the Puppet Workshop unsettling in the broader narrative of Krat City is the implication of *purpose*. Puppets in this world are not toys. They are laborers, soldiers, companions, and in some tellings, vessels. The workshop therefore functions as a kind of foundry for obedience, and the tools scattered across its benches—hammers, chisels, spools of wire—read less as instruments of art and more as instruments of binding. The player who lingers among the workbenches begins to sense that the puppets produced here were designed to be *controlled*, and the question of who holds the strings becomes the area's quiet, aching subtext.

The workshop also serves as a narrative bridge. It connects the more public, bustling districts of Krat City to the darker, more industrial underbelly where the city's machinery of control is maintained. Passing through it, the player witnesses the transition from a society that *uses* puppets to one that *fears* them, and the Puppet Workshop sits uncomfortably in the middle of that shift—a place where the craft is still alive, still humming, still producing its wooden children into a world that no longer wants them.

In Their Own Story

The smell hits first: linseed oil, hot wire, and the faint sweetness of fresh-cut spruce. You step over a threshold of warped planks and the light changes—amber, low, casting long shadows that pool around the legs of workbenches. A half-carved puppet sits on the nearest bench, its left eye a glass bead the color of old honey, its right eye still a hollow socket. Its fingers are articulated, each joint wrapped in thread, and as you pass, one finger twitches. You tell yourself it is the draft from the furnace behind you. You do not believe yourself.

Further in, the workshop opens into a larger chamber. Puppets hang from the ceiling by their necks, suspended on hooks, swaying gently as if breathing. Their mouths are open in expressions that are not quite smiles and not quite screams. A workman's apron lies on the floor, still warm. The tools are laid out in a row—chisel, mallet, spool of wire—as if the maker simply set them down and walked away. Or was walked away.

You reach for your weapon. The nearest puppet's head turns. Slowly. Deliberately. And its glass eye catches the furnace light, throwing a small, warm star across the dark wood of the wall.

Reader's Guide

The Puppet Workshop presents as a long, branching corridor of workshop spaces, all rendered in warm amber and deep umber tones. The visual language is consistent: exposed wooden beams, hanging tools, workbenches cluttered with half-finished puppet forms, and the occasional furnace or work lamp casting pools of orange light against otherwise shadowed walls. The architecture feels hand-built, slightly irregular, as if the space was carved out of an existing structure rather than purposefully designed.

Enemies here lean heavily into the puppet theme—wooden automatons, wire-limbed constructs, and occasionally larger assembled foes that combine multiple puppet parts into a single, lurching body. Combat is straightforward but the tight corridors and scattered debris (overturned benches, falling tool racks) create a claustrophobic rhythm that rewards keeping your distance and using dodges to reposition.

Notable set-pieces include a central assembly hall where a large, multi-limbed puppet form sits on a raised platform, and a smaller side-room that functions as a rest area with a bench and a brief environmental narrative. The area connects forward into the more industrial sections of Krat City and backward toward the city's more open, street-level districts, making it a transitional zone that shifts the player's emotional register from public to private, from society to craft.

The architecture tells you that Krat City's puppet culture is old and layered. The wood is worn, the hooks are rusted, and the newer puppet forms look almost crude compared to the older, more refined ones hanging in the background. Something changed here. The makers stopped. The puppets did not.

Did You Know?

• The Puppet Workshop's visual design deliberately contrasts the more ornate, Art-Deco-influenced public spaces of Krat City, grounding the player in the raw, utilitarian side of the city's puppet culture.
• Half-finished puppet forms scattered throughout the area serve as environmental storytelling, implying that the workshop was abandoned mid-production rather than decommissioned.
• The warm amber lighting palette of the workshop is a recurring visual motif in Lies of P, used to signal spaces associated with creation, craft, and the intimate side of Krat City's puppet-making tradition.
• The area's tight, branching layout is a deliberate design choice that mirrors the game's broader theme of constrained movement and controlled space, reinforcing the feeling of being inside a mechanism rather than a build