I think there's a reason why the Pinocchio story is such a common one that artists and storytellers come back to. The crux of it is about an artificial being that yearns to be human - and that journey, that quest, is one that forces us as both artists and as audience to consider what it actually means to be human.
One of the central ideas in Lies of P, and visible right there in the name, is the idea that a human is capable of lying. The "puppet" we play as has the capacity to tell lies. Of course, in the original story (and the Disney cartoon that I imagine is most peoples' more direct reference,) Pinocchio is punished for lying by seeing his nose grow longer. Pinocchio is a boy, exposed to a world that demands moral behavior while enticing him to all manner of vice and sin, and lying is the most cardinal of all those sins, it would seem - the sin that can cover up all other misdeeds.
Lies of P leans into the classic science-fiction trope of what it means to create sentient, artificial people. In many such narratives, robotic minds are incapable of nuance and abstraction, and have to act in some preordained pattern. Truth, as in the statement of fact, is something that flows logically, and would thus seem easier for an artificial mind (in theory) to do (of course, in our current age of generative AI, we've seen that machines are fully capable of making stuff up that has nothing to do with the truth - and yet, the messiness of its output may in fact be one of the reasons people are so convinced that we've truly, or are truly on the cusp of, creating genuine artificial intelligence - whatever that means).
Over the course of the game, largely through sidequests, Pinocchio has the opportunity to help various survivors in Krat in various ways, and often prompts some kind of question from them. Most of the time, the question is either a painful truth or a comforting lie.
Krat is in utter chaos, and death is coming for most of the people we seem to encounter. And so, while you are capable of lying or telling the truth, often the lie is the kinder thing.
And this actually has an in-game effect.
When you make these decisions, if you choose the more human option (which seems to mostly be the lie) you get a message: "your springs are reacting", and later, as your humanity rises, "the ergo whispers," "you feel warm," and finally, "your heart is pounding." These changes will affect the endings you can get (I haven't beaten the game yet, but I think I've got like two major bosses left) and over time, you'll eventually see a long nose grow out of a painting of Gepetto's flesh-and-blood dead son, who happens to look identical to Pinocchio. The nose eventually, if you attain a high enough level of humanity (and I was worried I'd missed out on it, as I made some non-humanity-raising choices, but I did just get it) becomes The Golden Lie, a weapon.
I'm reminded a bit of the story of Neverafter, a season of Dimesnsion 20, the actual-play TTRPG show on Dropout. Neverafter was, like Lies of P, a horror take on fairy tales, with each of the players playing as a classic fairy tale character. In the case of Pinocchio, the backstory involved the arrival of a terrible, monstrous individual in Pinocchio and Gepetto's community, who went to all the children and asked them where their fathers were, and when she found out, the fathers each dropped dead. Pinocchio lied to protect his father, but in doing so, was reverted back to his wooden, puppet form.
Children's stories are often light on nuance, because complex ideas are hard for kids to understand. Truthfulness is a virtue in most cases, but there are times when the ethical and the moral are not aligned. Consider the meme/notion that goes around on social media: that if you see someone shoplifting baby formula, no you didn't. Yes, stealing is generally wrong, but if someone is pushed to the point where they need to steal to feed a helpless infant, the moral thing is to allow them to get away with it - if anything, as a corrective to the society we have in which anyone would be in such a position.
Hard and fast rules are easier for a child's mind to understand, but the deeper implications - the deeper reasons we have those rules - are the reasons we have them.
Coming back to the idea of artificial life, we imagine that a man-made mind would be childlike and simple, and thus, we equate the ability to understand complexity, nuance, seeming self-contradiction, as a sign of humanity.
All the while, of course, there is the question of whether things are actually just nuanced or if someone is claiming complexity to justify misdeeds. We are, after all, good at lying to ourselves, and telling us that actions we take are for some greater good. And yet, we can't give into pure cynicism, either. Finding the right moral path forward is a lifelong journey for all humans, but that journey, rather than some perfected state of enlightenment, might be the truest version of humanity.
I'm convinced I'm very near the end of the game. The final "dungeon" is massive, and if I'm honest, a bit lacking in the charm and detail of the earlier parts of the game. Where we have been in a kind of nightmare-steampunk-Paris up until this point, the last area feels like a big ancient stone temple, with less of a clear sense of how each area is used by the people who inhabited it.
In terms of difficulty, I think the rate at which I'm making it through means it must be easier than most of the FromSoft games I'd compare it to, though of course, I have to account for the fact that when I first played through Bloodborne or Dark Souls, I was not nearly as good at these games. While I burned through a lot of Star Fragments on Laxasia, for the most part, after trying to solo bosses without a Specter to help, summoning one in made quick work of them. It's a big enough difference that they make me feel a bit guilty for using them as compared to, say, the summons in Elden Ring. But still - it's a game mechanic and I will make use of any edge I need to beat the game.
I did something perhaps unwise - I've been hearing great things about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and saw it was relatively cheap (50 bucks) on the PS Store, so I bought it. Unfortunately, that makes me feel a little impatient to finish Lies of P. I do think I'm going to make myself do so, lest I never get around to it.
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