For Fans of Fyodor Dostoevsky

The argument at the heart of Crime and Punishment is not really about whether a 'great man' can justify murder. It is about what happens to a mind that has lived inside a theory so long that reality becomes an inconvenience. Raskolnikov is not monstrous. He is recognizable: a bright, frustrated person who has mistaken intellectual arrogance for moral clarity. The novel's genius is that Dostoevsky lets him believe his own argument for several hundred pages before the body starts pulling him back toward the world. The confession at the end is not defeat. It is the first honest thing Raskolnikov has done.

Dostoevsky built his last and largest novel so that each of the three brothers reads as a complete argument: Dmitri is the body, Ivan is the intellect, Alyosha is the soul. Each could carry a lesser novel by himself. Together they form a system where Dostoevsky can dramatize the argument for and against God, the argument for and against free will, and the argument for and against the goodness of people, without ever having to settle any of them. The Grand Inquisitor chapter is the most concentrated piece of theological philosophy in any novel. And it is presented as a story one brother tells another in a tavern.

Before Nabokov, before Highsmith, before any 20th-century novel made readers distrust the voice telling them the story, Dostoevsky wrote a 50-page monologue from a man who announces in the first paragraph that he is sick, spiteful, and unattractive, and then proves it in the most compulsively readable way possible. The Underground Man does not want sympathy. He wants to be seen clearly. The irony is that his very act of explaining himself keeps distorting the image. Every unreliable narrator in contemporary fiction owes something to this strange, brief, furious little book.

Ice-Pick Lodge's Pathologic 2 does something almost no game attempts: it makes you feel morally implicated in failure. The town is dying from a plague you cannot stop. Every choice to save one person costs another. The game does not let you optimize your way to a good ending because there is no good ending. The suffering is the point. Like Dostoevsky, Ice-Pick Lodge is interested in people at the edge, in the ethics of triage, and in the specific exhaustion of trying to be good when the world will not cooperate. It is also, like Dostoevsky, frequently accused of being unpleasant to experience. That is not a coincidence.