Unlike the FromSoft games that inspired it, Lies of P's story is a little more straightforward - a city thrown into chaos by callously ambitious men, a lie of progress resulting in suffering and death, and a special automaton who may be more than he seems.
This game is a couple years old, but I suppose what we're talking about will be spoilers, so just in case, I'm going to put the cut in here. The post will also discuss revelations found in Overture, the game's much more recent DLC.
Spoilers Ahead:
While more straightforward than, say, Bloodborne's story, that's not exactly saying much. There are a lot of ambiguities within Lies of P.
Central to these ambiguities is actually the identity of our player character. "Gepetto's Puppet," or perhaps more easily, Pinocchio (though this name is never mentioned in the game,) is a "puppet" (the term for an automaton powered by the mysterious Ergo) who was constructed to resemble Carlo Gepetto, the son of Giuseppe Gepetto, the head of Krat's Workshop Union and inventor of this type of automaton.
Gepetto lost his son at some point, though we don't get a really explicit explanation for how. Carlo died, and Gepetto, in his mourning, made Pinocchio.
But, as we discover over the course of the game, this was not merely an act to compensate for the loss of his child. It was part of a plan: a plan to ultimately revive his son.
Ergo, we discover, is not just some miraculous substance - or rather, it is, but what it actually represents is something less benign than one might think. It's the condensed memory of human beings who have died (if they can even be said to have died) of Petrification Disease, a plague that has swept Krat.
And, we discover, Pinocchio's "P-Organ," (a name that for English-speaking players elicits childish giggles for numerous reasons, but is evidently a pun based on the Korean word for blood, which is "Pi," meaning it's his heart) actually houses Carlo's Ergo.
Gepetto appears quite benevolent when we meet him over the course of the game - he hangs around Hotel Krat, or home-base hub, for a good chunk of it. But when we reach the end of the game, we discover that Gepetto is not so innocent: he programmed in a "rule zero" into the Grand Covenant (the equivalent of Asmiov's Three Laws of Robotics that is meant to prevent the puppets from doing people harm). The Grand Covenant's first law is that the puppets must obey their creator, but this hidden, zeroth law, is that Giuseppe Gepetto is their creator - the inventor, rather than the person who built them.
Thus, the mystery of the Puppet Frenzy, of how the puppets could turn on humanity when bound by the Grand Covenant, is resolved: they didn't act outside of the Grand Covenant at all, because Gepetto sent them on their rampage.
Why, exactly, he did that? Well, I'll confess that I don't 100% understand the motivations. One theory that has been put forth is that the Ergo within the puppets helps empower Pinocchio and his heart. Later in the game, around the end of what I'd consider "Act Two," we go to the Barren Swamp, a massive scrapyard of discarded puppets. Evidently, scavengers come here to extract the residual Ergo in the broken puppets, so there's a whole lot of it.
Each time we defeat an enemy (and all enemies are in some way empowered by Ergo, except, I guess, the fully human Stalkers we fight) we get Ergo, which serves as this game's equivalent of souls or runes. We can spend this on various things, but the main one is leveling up (again, like your typical Souls-like).
Gepetto's ultimate plan is to take Pinocchio's mechanical heart and implant it in The Nameless Puppet, the game's true final boss and strongly implied to be Carlo's body, reanimated through some combination of alchemy and puppetry. Indeed, when we arrive at the Opera House to face down the King of Puppets, we see a scene playing out that warns us of this eventuality, which at first seems like some kind of cruel mocking.
Still, as I interpret it (and I suspect it's the intended interpretation,) because Carlo's Ergo is inside Pinocchio, that means that Pinocchio is Carlo. The game doesn't refer to souls or consciousness, but even if the details are very fuzzy, it's clear that Pinocchio has Carlo's memories, and I'd be inclined, given the mystical nature of Ergo, to suggest that there's probably a continuity of consciousness. That, admittedly, is somewhat more ambiguous: is Pinocchio his own separate being, who isn't Carlo but is still worthy of life and existence as Carlo was?
If we don't refuse Gepetto's demand to give over the P-Organ to install in the Nameless Puppet (which is not the ending that I've gotten,) Pinocchio dies and Nameless/Carlo 2.0 actually becomes the player character, and evidently Gepetto kills the remaining inhabitants of Hotel Krat and replaces them with puppets (Lies of P doesn't automatically send you to NG+ at the end, which is particularly nice to let you experience the DLC in your first run.)
If you do gain enough humanity over the course of the game (rule of thumb: lie. But also, just think about what would comfort and be kind to the people you talk to - most of the lies are to spare them some grief or pain) you can refuse Gepetto, and he turns on you, sending his Nameless Puppet to take the heart by force. Only after you beat the boss (and even then, the boss gets the upper hand in the cutscene that follows) and the Nameless Puppet threatens to destroy the heart, does Gepetto realize what he's doing: that he's put the last remnant of Carlo at risk, and he takes the fatal blow that would have ended Pinocchio.
It's a satisfying and emotional end to the game. But it leaves a question open:
How and why did Carlo die in the first place?
I hope this isn't too disappointing after reading all of this, but I've only got vague theories.
We know the following:
Gepetto was not a good dad. He sent Carlo off to the Monad Charity House, essentially an orphanage, founded by Valentinus Monad, the previous (or perhaps founding?) leader of the Alchemists. Valentinus... I don't actually know what his deal is. My sense is that he was not as malevolent as Simon Manus, the current leader and potential final boss of the game (he is if you don't refuse Gepetto in the end, otherwise he's the penultimate boss).
I suspect that this happened after Carlo's mother, Camille, died in a shipwreck (with some implication that the Alchemists were involved, though it might have been an accident,) and Gepetto likely wasn't up to raising a kid on his own. Carlo grew up there and befriended Romeo, aka Candlewick. The two of them, as they got older, aspired to become Stalkers - the term for heroic warriors who fight on the streets of Krat. They apprenticed under Lea Florence Monad, whom I believe is one of Valentinus' daughters (the other being Sophia, our "blue fairy" and this game's equivalent to our Shrine Maiden,) a woman known as "The Legendary Stalker," being the hands-down most badass warrior on the streets of Krat.
This actually explains why, after we awaken in that train at the start of the game, we're already really good at fighting - we possess Carlo's memories, and Carlo was the apprentice to the greatest of all Stalkers.
Now, at some point, Carlo died - this happens prior to the events of Overture, as when we meet Lea, she is deeply thrown by the fact that we look like her young friend.
Lea earned her moniker by defeating Arlecchino, a puppet who had become a serial killer. We learn that Arlecchino killed the parents of Lorenzini Vegnini, and that was what inspired Vegnini to create the Grand Covenant in the first place. We uncover Arlecchino's past with Vegnini over the course of the main game, and can confront and ultimately kill the broken, trapped Arlecchnio on the Isle of Alchemists, where he has connected himself to the phone lines so he can play his "King of Riddles" role with us.
However, Lea's victory was undone when the Alchemists found his body and reactivated it to study and make use of it. Overture sees us tracking down Arlecchino, who has kidnapped Romeo - whom we know will later be turned into a puppet in a similar manner to Carlo, as he becomes the King of Puppets we face at the Rosa Isabelle St. Opera House.
But once again, even if we've gone a few years into the past (not that many - Spring the cat, an adult in the base game, is a kitten in this one, so at the absolute outside we're talking maybe 20 years, unless Spring is a very long-lived cat) we are still in a post-Carlo world.
How did he die? When did he die? Why did he die? Lea herself looks like she's maybe in her early 30s at the oldest, so clearly her young apprentice has got to be like a teenager or in his early 20s.
The only possible clue that we have, I think, is a gift we get from interacting with the friendly puppet girl, Rosaura. Rosaura is... I genuinely don't know what the hell is going on with her. The fact that she has red shoes feels like it could be some kind of weird walk-back on the original game's post-credits scene implying a sequel might be built around Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz (though I'd be super curious to see what they do with that). However, if we gift her an ergo crystal when we meet her the second time, she gives us a gift: an invitation for Carlo Gepetto to come see a great find of the Alchemists. This seems likely to be the Anguished Guardian whom we fight as a boss later in that chapter. The Anguished Guardian is some kind of ancient, pre-human being whom I believe was some kind of benevolent figure before he was twisted and enslaved by the Alchemists - likely a member of whatever civilization built Arche Abbey and the other ancient ruins we find in the game.
Was Carlo ambushed and murdered at such a meeting? Carlo was not, himself, an Alchemist. He was a Stalker, like Lea and Romeo, or at least a Stalker-in-training. Mainly, his connection to the Alchemists was through his father and through the Monad family. Thus, it's a little strange that there's the invitation for him to come to this thing alone rather than going with his father.
One last note: Ergo seems to be derived specifically from people suffering from the Petrification Disease. The disease causes parts of their body to solidify into crystalline structures which become Ergo. Does that mean Carlo must have also had the Petrification disease?
The Carcasses we encounter, who are probably the most common enemies we face in the game (as someone playing through on an Advance build, it's a little sad when I hit the point where there aren't many puppet enemies left to fight, as my electric weapons sort of fall by the wayside) seem to be the result of experiments in curing the Petrification Disease. The successful experiments allow the individuals to retain their intellect and personalities, and this seems to be the nature of the "human" Alchemist enemies we fight beginning I believe in the Grand Exhibition.
If the Nameless Puppet is made from Carlo's body, then perhaps Gepetto used the research done by Simon Manus and his ilk to remove the disease from the body, and "perfect" it the way the Alchemists ultimately do to themselves.
But again: how did Carlo die?
If we assume he was murdered by the Alchemists, we might ask why.
Well, we know that the Alchemists underwent a change in leadership. Valentinus Monad was the order's leader, but after his death, Simon Manus took over, pursuing his ultimate goal of ascending to godhood and creating a "world without lies," his disillusionment with humanity born from his ability to read minds and growing resentment about all the little ways that people constantly lie to one another.
Again, I think I found one lore item that implied Valentinus wasn't super-great either, but it's possible I misinterpreted that. While I don't know that Carlo grew up truly thinking of the Monads as his family, it is clear that he was distant from his father, or rather, Gepetto was distant from his son (we see some correspondence in the earlier version of Hotel Krat between Antonia and Gepetto where she tries to encourage him to visit his son more often, and he repsonds with "oh, ok. I sent some more money to help with any expenses to keep taking care of him."
If Carlo was a Stalker, it would mean that he might have been looking into some shady dealings going on. Over the course of Overture, we can, with the help of the real, not-yet-dead Alidoro (the one from the base game being the imposter who murdered him,) we can solve a number of murders, where we find out strange and fantastical tales of peoples deaths all turn out to be cover-ups for murders by the Alchemists (among the most tragic is a miner who is trapped in a collapse with a miner puppet - while the story goes that the puppet caused the collapse to kill him, in fact the puppet was just trying to rescue him, and has spent years breaking through rock in an effort to save them both, even though the miner died long enough ago that he's just a skeleton now. We break through the last bit of rock and witness the miner puppet tell the miner that they've finally escaped, only for his power to run out at that moment.)
The point is, Carlo is something of a detective, and I wonder if he had been investigating some of the strange deaths (including, perhaps, the death of his mother,) and tracing it all back to the Alchemists. This would be a rather strong motive to kill him.
Overture's final dungeon is the Monad Charity House, where we start to put the pieces together, like discovering Sophia lived there (and that she's Valentinus' daughter). But when we arrive, there's been a massacre. The entire place is filled with Carcasses. Lea is there to find Romeo, who has been kidnapped by Arlecchino (as a note, this is the name that is anglicized to "Harlequin," the central romantic hero in comedia dell'arte, though in a fascinating note, apparently he got his name from a villainous "devil" character from earlier Passion Plays). Arlecchino seems to have escaped containment by the Alchemists (we see a cell out of which he seems to have broken in one of the shipwrecks we pass through in the DLC's penultimate chapter, along with the bodies of like, half a dozen dead Alchemists). Arlecchino serves as the DLCs' final boss - presumably (I still haven't done this fight) we leave him in the state we later find him in on the Isle of Alchemists at the end of the base game.
But what purpose did the Alchemists have for Arlecchino? Did they think, perhaps, that this ego-awoken puppet might serve some use, turning a serial killer into an assassin?
So, let's toss out a hypothesis here:
What if Carlo uncovered some kind of plot to overthrow Valentinus as head of the Order of Alchemists (by Simon Manus, most likely)? And what if, in pursuing his leads, he was lured to the mines in which the Anguished Guardian was discovered. There, he was ambushed and killed, and the warning he had for the Monad family was lost with him.
Toward the end of the base game, the Black Rabbit Brotherhood and the Red Fox and Black Cat kidnap Gepetto (and leave a big banner that says "hypocrite" across the Hotel Krat lobby). The Black Rabbits are there to have their eldest resurrected the way that the Alchemists did for Champion Victor after we kill him in the Malum District, while Fox and Cat are trying to get a cure for Black Cat's illness (likely the Petrification Disease). Because our Gold Coin Fruit can genuinely cure the disease rather than turn someone into a Carcass (or even use it to become a posthuman) we can ultimately avoid a fight with both the Cat and the Fox if we hand them each one fruit (and I cannot imagine not being able to spare them).
We can rescue Gepetto and release him from his cell shortly before facing Simon Manus, but it seems pretty clear that Simon needs Gepetto. I suspect this is primarily because Gepetto is truly an unparalleled genius, but it's also possible that there's some kind of secret alliance.
I haven't actually watched any big lore videos on YouTube about this game, so this is all just what I'm putting together on my own. It's very possible I'm overlooking some crucial clue here.
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