Game update

1.0.4 — Launch fix, a pass over who says what, and a note on the Chinese text

The Brothers Karamazov · published 29 Aug 2026, 16:58 UTC

All events Players around this date Read on Steam

Launching the game

Fixed the black screen some of you hit on Windows. The rendering process could die before the first frame ever appeared, leaving a window with nothing in it. The game now notices that and restarts itself with the sandbox switched off — no launch options needed any more. If you added --no-sandbox by hand, you can remove it.
This one was found by players, not by us. Thank you to everyone who sent in startup.log — without those files we would still be guessing.

Who is speaking

A large pass over attribution. Passages that belong to the narrator no longer appear under a character's portrait, and paragraphs that glue two voices together are now split between them.
The elder Zosima's manuscript reads as narration again: only the mysterious visitor keeps a name over his words.
Alyosha's thoughts during Father Païssy's reading are no longer credited to Father Païssy. Rakitin's tirade in the pine grove is no longer credited to Alyosha. The police captain's shout at Mokroye is no longer credited to Grushenka.

The Chinese text

The Chinese in the game is a public-domain translation from the 1940s, and its style is archaic. This is not a matter of traditional versus simplified characters — it is the age of the translation itself. A translation into more modern Chinese is being prepared; the current one will stay, and you will be able to choose between them. A note in the menu now says so.

Art

Fyodor Pavlovich was cut out again, from the source painting. His calm and shouting portraits now share one silhouette, so his outline no longer changes when his expression does.
Removed the pale fringe along the edge of every figure — the thin bright pixels that made the cut-outs read as cut-outs against a dark scene.

Also in the recent August updates: the hint card scales with your text-size setting, the hint comes back if you undo a choice, and the canon dot marks the line it actually belongs to.

Keep the reports coming in the discussions — nearly everything above started as one.

Other announcements

All events

Game update5 Sep 2026Book III now in the new Chinese translationWhat changed Three books now run in the new translation: “The History of a Family”, “An Unfortunate Gathering” and “The Sensualists” — twenty-four chapters, made from the Russian original rather than from another translation. Until now the Chinese text of the game was Geng Jizhi's translation from the 1940s. It is in the public domain, which is why it could ship with the game lawfully. But its…Game update1 Sep 2026Book II in a new Chinese translationWhat changed Both opening books now run in the new translation: "The History Of A Family" and "An Unfortunate Gathering" — thirteen chapters, translated from the Russian original rather than from another translation. The Chinese text of the game used to be Geng Jizhi's translation from the 1940s. It is in the public domain, which is why it could ship with the game at all. But its style is archa…Game update30 Aug 2026Book I in a new Chinese translationWhat changed The Chinese text of the game has until now been Geng Jizhi's translation from the 1940s. It is in the public domain, which is why it could ship with the game at all. But its style is archaic by today's standards, and Chinese readers said so — some took the old text for machine translation. It is not machine translation. It is eighty years old. Book I of twelve has now been translat…