Lies of P

Lore & Background

Lies of P takes place in the fictional city of Krat, made prosperous by 'Ergo', a resource which the Order of Alchemists used to power autonomous Puppets designed by Giuseppe Geppetto. Puppets bound by the 'Covenant' to never harm humans nor lie were integrated into many aspects of life, allowing Krat to thrive. Later, a mysterious illness known as the 'Petrification Disease' swept through the city, slowly blinding people before killing them. As Krat failed to contain the crisis, a sudden phenomenon, the 'Puppet Frenzy' turned most Puppets murderous in spite of the Covenant, causing a massacre of the population. It is during this state of chaos that the game begins, following a puppet called 'P' who Geppetto considers his son and who, unlike other Puppets, looks exactly like a Human; untouched by the Frenzy, P has free will, unbound by the Covenant and is as free to lie or kill as a Human would be.

P awakens in an abandoned train at the Krat Central Station and hears the voice of a woman named Sophia, who directs him to Hotel Krat, a safe building he subsequently uses as his base of operations as he navigates Krat, rescuing innocents whom he brings back to its safety, fighting hostile Puppets who attack him on sight, and encountering various members of the 'Stalkers', the Human armed forces of Krat whose allegiances and goals largely differ from individual to individual. He is guided by Sophia, who can communicate with him remotely, and a puppet named Gemini inside a lamp carried by P. P rescues Geppetto, and later the inventor Lorenzini Venigni, leader of Krat's mechanical industry, before reaching the cathedral to which refugees fled from the Frenzy. However, most Humans in the area are either dead or have become 'Carcasses', the Disease somehow mutating them into murderous abominations instead of killing them.

Key optional plot points include: The discovery that Geppetto is behind the Frenzy, having added a secret directive into the Covenant allowing him nearly-unlimited control of most Puppets; 'Sentient' Puppets whose 'Ego' awakened, making them able to bypass the Covenants' restrictions, and who can be nearly-identical 'revived Puppet' versions of the dead Humans who turned into the Ergo powering them; That P is the revived Puppet of a deceased human.

Reader's Guide

Lies of P is notable as a Soulslike that adapts a classic children's story into a dark, Belle Époque-inspired setting. Its combat system emphasizes parrying, weapon customization through interchangeable blades and handles, and a morality system where binary choices (truth or lie) affect sub-plots and the overall narrative. The game uses Ergo as both experience points and currency, and features a skill tree unlocked with Quartz. The Overture expansion, released in June 2025, added new content including enemies, weapons, side quests, and accessibility options. A Nintendo Switch 2 version was released on August 6, 2026, and a sequel is in development. The game's reception was favourable, with particular praise for its combat, visuals, sound design, and vocal cast, while opinions on level design and narrative were mixed. By June 2025, it had sold over 3 million units and received nominations at The Game Awards and the Golden Joystick Awards, appearing on numerous lists of the top video games of 2023.

Did You Know?

• The game is dedicated to Carlo Collodi, author of the 1883 novel The Adventures of Pinocchio.
• P is a puppet with free will, unbound by the Covenant that prevents other puppets from harming humans or lying.
• The game's currency and experience points are both called Ergo, which is the crystallized form of the human soul.
• A prequel expansion titled Overture was released in June 2025.

Origins and the Shifting Beauty Landscape

The term "muscle mommy" crystallized in the early 2020s as a cultural marker of a broader shift in how women's bodies were perceived and celebrated. For decades, mainstream fitness culture for women had gravitated toward leanness and thinness as the default ideal. The 2020s saw a gradual erosion of that binary—no longer was a woman's fitness identity split between the lean pilates aesthetic and the extreme bulk of competitive bodybuilding. This cultural thaw was visible even in Japan, where a muscle-themed café and bar called "Muscle Girls" opened to an audience previously conditioned to equate feminine attractiveness with thinness. The term itself had earlier roots: Traci D. Mitchell used "muscle mommy" in her 2015 book The Belly Burn Plan, but it was the social media wave of the 2020s that transformed it into a widespread identity label. The women it described were those who built and displayed muscular strength explicitly in defiance of the expectation that women's bodies should occupy less space.

The TikTok Engine and Mainstream Validation

TikTok became the primary engine for the muscle mommy phenomenon. By 2022, the #musclemommy hashtag had accumulated over 44 million views, and many of the women featured in those videos were actively embracing the label rather than having it imposed on them. The content struck a particular balance: it celebrated physical strength and muscular development while still incorporating conventional femininity—dresses, makeup, styled hair—rejecting the notion that strength and femininity were mutually exclusive. The term also found a natural home within the "MomTok" subcommunity, where literal mothers shared their weightlifting journeys and fitness routines alongside discussions of motherhood. Mainstream commercial validation followed: in 2023, British gym apparel retailer Gymshark incorporated the term into its official promotional copy, defining a muscle mommy as someone engaged in strength training to build and maintain muscle mass. By 2025, Google search interest in both "muscle mommy" and "strength training women" had surged, which Business Insider's Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert interpreted as evidence that a strength-first mindset had moved firmly out of the niche.

Queer Adoption and the Daddy Parallel

The muscle mommy concept found particularly enthusiastic uptake within LGBTQ+ communities, especially among sapphics, drawing a direct structural parallel to the "daddy" slang long used by gay men to describe muscular, attractive men. Pride.com's Ariel Messman-Rucker captured the energy: the community had long celebrated gay muscle daddies posting thirst traps, and the discovery of out lesbians doing the same with their own muscular physiques generated an almost overwhelming enthusiasm. The 2023 film Love Lies Bleeding, directed by Rose Glass and starring Kristen Stewart alongside out lesbian Katy O'Brian, became a cultural lightning rod for this identification. Refinery29's Alexandra Koster described the film as a "bodybuilding muscle mommy love story" that made queer viewers ecstatic. Glass herself acknowledged the term after the film's announcement and embraced it. The film's release helped fuel what Messman-Rucker called a "new obsession" with muscle mommies across queer social media, cementing the term as a shorthand for a specific kind of desirability that had previously been coded almost exclusively as masculine.

The 2025 Tug-of-War with the Pilates Body

By 2025, the muscle mommy trend found itself in direct cultural competition with the "pilates body" aesthetic, a shift partly catalyzed by the widespread accessibility of the weight-loss drug Ozempic. The Observer's Róisín Lanigan framed it as a post-Ozempic phenomenon: if the drug made extreme thinness more attainable and therefore less aspirational, the next luxury signal would be a toned but not bulky, carefully feminised physique. She described the "post-Ozempic muscle mommy" as representing 2025 ideals of luxury. However, not all commentators saw the two trends as compatible. PureWow's Stephanie Maida drew a sharper line, declaring flatly that muscle mommies were out and "Pilates princesses" were in, and expressing personal frustration with the shift. This tension revealed a deeper unresolved question in women's fitness culture: whether the hard-won acceptance of visibly muscular women in the early 2020s would hold, or whether the pendulum would swing back toward a softer, more traditionally feminine ideal once again.