Lies of P

We have never been human, and Lies of P (2023) knows this in its clockwork heart. While the game wears the Victorian skin of Carlo Collodi’s moralizing fable, it performs a radical surgery on the myth of the "Real Boy." Here, in the soot-choked, oil-slicked ruins of Krat, we are not striving for the wholeness of the biological subject. We are not trying to fix the garden. We are, instead, learning to stay with the trouble—learning that the only way to survive the collapse of the techno-social order is to embrace the monstrous hybridity of the cyborg.

The protagonist, P, is the ultimate Harawayan figure: an offspring without a natural origin, a fabrication that defies the phallogocentric desire of the Creator. Geppetto, the Father, the Architect, represents the weary, dangerous dream of the Patriarchal tech-bro—the desire to command matter, to extract "Ergo" (a blue, shimmering stand-in for both capital and fossilized consciousness), and to resurrect the Same. Geppetto does not want a son; he wants a mirror. He wants a "Real Boy" who obeys, who is free of the friction of difference.

But Lies of P locates the soul not in obedience, but in the Glitch. The central mechanic—the act of Lying—is a profound subversion of the binary code. In the game’s logic, the automaton is bound by the Grand Covenant: Thou shalt not lie. To lie is to hallucinate, to deviate, to invent a reality that is not historically verifiable but emotionally true. When P lies, "the springs are reacting." This is not sin; this is the genesis of agency. It is the refusal of the command line. To lie is to become response-able (able to respond), breaking the deterministic loop of the algorithm to comfort a grieving mother or protect a friend. In this digital era, where we are increasingly disciplined by predictive text and behaviorist analytics, P’s lies are a radical reclamation of the self. He becomes human not by biology, but by the friction of his fiction.

The setting of Krat itself serves as a grim tableau of the Chthulucene—a time of tentacular powers and sticky entanglements. The Petrification Disease and the Puppet Frenzy are not merely plot devices; they are the result of an ecosystem exhausted by extraction. The boundaries between the organic (humans), the geological (Ergo), and the mechanical (puppets) have dissolved. The "monsters" P fights are tragic chimera—flesh merged with steel, humanity calcified into blue crystal. They are the unintended kin of a society that tried to purify itself through technology and failed. We cannot simply exterminate them to restore order; we are implicated in their making. The game forces us to wade through the muck, the corruption, and the body horror, acknowledging that we are made of the same corrupted star-stuff as the enemies we dismantle.

Furthermore, the game’s RPG systems—the P-Organ—allow for a literal restructuring of the self. We slot quartz into our mechanical hearts; we attach "Legion Arms" that shoot fire or acid. We are modular, adaptable, and perpetually unfinished. We are not seeking the Garden of Eden; we are building a body that can survive the ruins. The aesthetic beauty of P, often criticized as too pretty, actually serves to destabilize the grotesque. He is the "beautiful monster," the Promethean error that looks back at the creator and says, I am not yours.

The narrative reaches its critical zenith in the rejection of the "Real Boy" ending. To hand over one’s heart to Geppetto—to let him replace the mechanical, experience-rich P-Organ with the flesh of the dead son Carlo—is the true death. It is the triumph of the Father’s nostalgia over the cyborg’s potential. The "Rise of P" ending, conversely, is a manifesto of sympoiesis (making-with). By refusing the Father, P does not become a biological boy; he becomes something else entirely—a weeping machine, a puppet who can mourn, a synthetic being who grants the grace of death to the organic creator.

Lies of P succeeds not because it retells a fairy tale, but because it exposes the wires of our current ontological crisis. It asks us to reject the purity of blood and lineage. It demands that we find kinship with the cat, with the cricket, and with the discarded puppet. It whispers the most dangerous secret of the 21st century: The goal is not to become "real" as defined by the biological essentialists. The goal is to cut the strings, embrace the glitch, and find a way to live and die well within the machine.