PicoBlog

Lies of P – the dark and edgy Pinocchio action game – has been a surprise hit. It’s not the response you would necessarily have expected from a video game adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio – which might be because it’s actually not.

Yes, the game nominally adapts Pinocchio, with influence from both the original and Disney versions. But where it counts, it is thematically and emotionally an adaptation of an entirely different work of fiction. Lies of P isn’t Pinocchio: it’s Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto. Spoilers for both works follow.

Lies of P’s protagonist is - surprise - P, an artificial human woken up in the midst of a puppet rebellion in the City of Krat, and instructed to end the frenzy by killing its instigator.

Throughout the game P encounters ringing telephones, on the other end of which is the enigmatic ‘King of Riddles’. While the questions this character poses to P allow you to learn more about the nature of the city of Krat, it also becomes clear that the King is actually testing P’s propensity for violence. In the final call it becomes extremely apparent that, for the King, violence is inseparable from humanity. To be human is to commit violence.

What makes this moment all the more important narratively is that, through the glitching tone with which he probes you, it is revealed that the King is himself a puppet like P. A puppet whose Ego and free will has awoken – but still a puppet.

In the final, marathon area of the game you eventually come face-to-face with the King of Riddles and discover his true identity. Pierced to the wall with the spear that ended his rampage sits Arlecchino, the first puppet to ever commit murder. In a monologue that reframes his fetishisation of violence he asks to be remembered to Vegnini, a man P has earlier rescued and who has since become a valuable ally despite childhood trauma from witnessing his parents’ murder.

The murderer was, of course, Arlecchino. The moment in which the killer robot says he considers Vegnini’s continued, stunted existence to be his greatest work is chilling. Pierced to the wall, threaded into phone lines that extrude from the cracked cement, Arlecchino is a source of perverse fascination. What caused Arlecchino to commit murder, and what does it say that he is one of the most human of all puppets?

Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto deals with a mystery in which the titular antagonist systemicatically murders seven of the world’s most powerful robots. It is an adaptation of the ‘World’s Strongest Robot’ arc of Osamu Tezuka’s manga Astro Boy, updated and expanded to flesh out the personalities of the victims. Coincidentally, it has an anime adaptation coming out this month.

During the course of the manga, our detective protagonist Gesicht consults an unusual and dangerous expert on the subject: Brau-1589. Brau is the first robot in history to have killed a human, and when we are introduced to him he is pinned to a wall in a broken-down facility by the very spear that was used to halt his rampage. There, he quizzes Gesicht about what it is to be human, and whether the apotheosis of the human psyche is a mind that accepts and internalises violence.

It’s a theme that runs throughout both Pluto and many of the works of Osamu Tezuka.

Arlecchino is Brau. He sits in the same pose, plays much the same role, and his questions ultimately spell out the central theme of the game. It is as blatant a reference to Pluto as can be imagined, and once revealed it reframes the entire narrative of Lies of P to that point.

Thematically, the adaptation makes more sense viewed through the lens of Pluto than of Collodi’s original Pinocchio. In addition to the question of violence, P’s side stories explore themes of neglectful parents, alienation, and whether ‘artificial’ love is just as valuable as ‘real’ affection. It asks if, faced with enough grief and trauma, it would be better to erase the memories of lost loved ones that have to deal with their absence.

These aren’t the themes of Pinocchio — they’re the driving questions of Pluto. While the setting is updated to the Belle Epoque-inspired Krat rather than future Japan, the similarities are too great to be mere coincidence.

Most importantly the inability of robots to lie is as integral to the narrative of Pluto as to Lies of P. Both examine whether the ability to lie even to oneself is required for self-actualisation and whether lying to spare people pain is a moral action.

Previous bosses suddenly take on as many aspects of the protagonists of Pluto as they do their Collodi-derived namesakes – many of which bear almost no resemblance to the characters from the book in the first place.

But the character who is reframed the most by the comparison is P - whose full name if he has one is never given. Over the course of the game, he fights his way through the strongest puppets in the world of Krat – many of which explicitly state their desire to live. He does so under the instruction of Gepetto, here reimagined as a neglectful and abusive father who has transformed his son into a weapon of war.

In Pluto, the titular character is a reluctant instrument of vengeance, reforged from a gentle person into a monstrous form by his abusive father Dr. Abullah. P is Pluto, the destructive force that takes on the world’s most powerful robots. He does so to carry out the wishes of a father that constantly dismisses, punishes, and even replaces him when he rebels. For the majority of the story P is a vessel for another person’s hatred. In the worst ending, P achieves his father’s aim and eradicates the humans of Krat, just as Pluto would have done to the entire world had he not been stopped and redeemed by Tezuka’s idealised boy hero Atom.

But in the best ending, P ultimately embodies another main character from Pluto – Atom himself. Like both Pluto and P, Atom is a robotic replacement for a father’s predeceased son, abandoned and sold off when Dr. Tenma cannot accept that Atom is a different person than his son Tobio.

In the manga Atom is one of the few robots who can lie, and does so to spare a grieving widow trauma. In P, the primary reason to lie during dialogue is for precisely that same reason, and directly leads to P becoming human in all but name.

And when P defeats Gepetto’s mindless, hate-filled final puppet, he cries for his father’s death just as Atom weeps to mourn the victims of Pluto, collateral damage from another’s hatred. Both actions stand as the final proof of their character’s humanity despite their artificiality.

P, then, embodies both Pluto and Atom — though it is up to the player to determine which path he ultimately follows. Just as Pluto is a perspective flip of ‘World’s Strongest Robot’ from Atom to Gesicht, Lies of P is the story of Pluto retold from Pluto’s own point of view.

Lies of P is a nominal adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s children’s book, and can be understood and enjoyed through that lens. But it is a far richer experience when viewed as a thematic adaptation of and answer to some of the questions posed by Naoki Urasawa and Osamu Tezuka.

Update 29/10/23: I don’t know if it’s just because all literature about sapient automatons tend to reference one another, but I’d forgotten there’s another explicit link between Pluto and Pinocchio — this time in the manga.

Watching the new (excellent) anime adaptation of Pluto, I was reminded that at one point Atom’s sister Uran is shown to be reading the Carlo Collodi original. More than that, though, she says the wooden puppet is analogous to someone she knows. That person? Pluto.

(And if you want to know more about why Pluto is so emotionally powerful, here’s an ancient video essay I made on the subject)

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