About This Game

Three brothers and their father

Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov — an old man, a buffoon and a sensualist, a father who cannot remember when he last gave his sons a thought. They grew up apart, in other people's houses. Now all three have come back to his home at once.

Dmitri has come for his mother's inheritance, which his father will not hand over, and for the woman the two of them cannot divide.
Ivan with a thought that chills him too: if there is no God, everything is permitted.
Alexey, the youngest, a novice from the monastery, is the only one in that house who wants nobody to perish.

Not one of the three loves the father, and each of them fails to love him in his own way. While they quarrel, envy one another, make peace and quarrel again, everything moves towards the terrible thing that will happen in this house.

The whole novel, word for word

All 96 chapters of Dostoevsky's last novel. Not a retelling, not "based on": the original text.

Two ways to read — you choose at first launch:

• Unabridged — every paragraph of the novel in full, as in the book. About 1030 book pages, ≈25 hours.
  
• Abridged — the key passages of every chapter, the whole story, nothing skipped. About 480 pages, ≈12 hours.

You can switch between them in the settings as you read.

What you see and hear

• Painted scenes — the elder's cell, the father's house, a blizzard on the road, the Grand Inquisitor's auto-da-fé, the starlit night of "Cana of Galilee".
  
• Characters stand in the frame at full height, and their faces change with Dostoevsky's own stage directions: "he cried out", "he turned pale", "he laughed".
  
• Fifteen quiet ambient beds, one for every place. No music and no voice acting: this is a book, and it is quiet here.
  
• 52 optional minigames — deal a sharper's faro, sew the amulet shut, cross yourself. No timers, no fail states; you can leave at any step.

The novel will ask you

At the hardest moments the page stops and asks: what would you have done? Take a side, condemn, forgive, say nothing. Your answer does not change the novel. But the game remembers which of the brothers you stand closest to, and at the end it shows you who you were while you read this book.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Image and video: the backgrounds, character portraits and animated backdrops in this game, and the artwork on this store page, were created with generative models, then selected and edited by hand.
Text: the prose of the novel is not generated. It is Dostoevsky's own text and historic public-domain translations. The exceptions are the Italian and Spanish translations, and about thirty lines of the Chinese, which were produced with a language model from the Russian original and then reviewed by a human.
In-game audio: not created with generative models. The ambience is fifteen loops — fourteen built from CC0-licensed field recordings (Freesound), one synthesised with plain DSP. Credits and licences ship with the game in CREDITS.txt.
Music: the game itself contains no music. Music appears only in the marketing trailer on this page, and it was generated with Suno.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

This game is an unabridged telling of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1880), in public-domain translations. It deals frankly with adult themes as text, not imagery: murder within a family, detailed accounts of cruelty toward children, a character's suicide, a sexual assault referred to in the backstory (not depicted), heavy drinking, self-harm, the death of a child from illness, and extended arguments about faith and doubt. There is no on-screen blood, nudity, or sexual content of any kind — everything above is conveyed through prose.