Planned Release Date: Oct 28, 2026

About This Game

Everyone knows the city will fall. No one knows who they'll be that day.

Venice, 1500. Anna Notaras — daughter of Byzantium's last great duke, who left before the end and spent fifty years ransoming its survivors — is writing down testimonies of the siege. Four witnesses sit at her table. Their accounts don't always agree. She writes them down anyway.

1453: Fall of Constantinople is a choice-driven, illustrated historical novel about the fifty-three days that changed a city's fate — told from both sides of the walls, in four interlocking stories.

Four testimonies, one clock

• The Janissary — born Greek, taken as a boy, now besieging the city his grandmother prayed toward.
  
• The Baker's Daughter — running the ovens, the queues, and the rumors of the Petrion quarter as the bread runs out.
  
• The Engineer — a foreign specialist fighting the underground war of tunnels, water bowls, and burning towers.
  
• The Noble — carrying the emperor's secret census, hearing the surrender embassies, weighing the Church's gold for the mint.

All four share the same fixed calendar, April 6 to May 29. The tension is never whether the city falls — it's who you will be when it does.

The city remembers

Your choices cross between testimonies. Mercy shown in one story becomes a sixth ending in another; a bribe paid at court becomes the boat a girl might board on the last morning. One city, one clock, interlocking fates.

What the sources say

After every chapter, the game shows its cards: is this scene in an eyewitness diary, a later chronicle — or a legend born centuries after? The fall of Constantinople is told through contested sources, and honesty about them is a feature, not a footnote.

What's inside

• Four deep routes with 5–6 distinct endings each, plus a frame story that binds them.
  
• Cross-story memory — completed testimonies visibly change scenes and endings in the others.
  
• A living visual world — painted-realism scenes of the siege, alive with slow ambient motion behind the words.
  
• A score moving between mehter rhythm and Byzantine chant as the walls and the days wear down.
  
• The sources codex — every major event flagged: attested, reported, legend, or disputed.
  
• Both sides carry equal weight — Ottoman and Byzantine lives written with equal care; no side's ending is the "true" one.

Images and music are AI-assisted with human editorial control; text and code are human–AI co-written.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

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

1453 contains pre-generated AI content. Nothing is generated while the game runs. The in-game illustrations (the scene paintings and the parchment reading surfaces) were created with generative image tools from curated reference images, under human art direction, and reviewed for historical accuracy. Their slow on-screen motion is animated in code, not generated video. The music, the ambient soundscapes and the sound effects were generated with AI audio tools, then selected, edited and looped under the author's direction. The one exception is the interface click, a human recording released under CC0. The narrative text is human–AI co-written and human-edited under the author's direction, and the game design is the author's. On the store page, the capsule artwork was made the same way as the in-game illustrations, and the trailer's cinematic shots animate the game's own illustrations with AI image-to-video tools.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

1453: Fall of Constantinople is a historical novel about a siege, written for adult readers and delivered in prose and illustration. It depicts fifteenth-century warfare and its consequences: bombardment and mining under the walls, wounds and death in combat, and the killing of captives — including prisoners executed within sight of both armies. It follows the civilian cost of a siege as closely as the military one: hunger as the bread runs out, families divided by the walls, and the captivity and ransoming of survivors after the city falls. Religious conflict between Christian and Muslim characters runs through the whole story, and both sides are written as fully human; no side's account is presented as the true one. Adult characters drink wine. The game contains no sexual content and no nudity. Violence is carried by the writing rather than by graphic imagery.