The Theban tragedies of Sophocles have been staged countless times and they will be staged and adapted over and over again as long as mankind exists. This interpretation of the Ancient Greek drama has a fairly obvious distinct feature: it takes the form of a visual novel.

There are three tragedies included:

• Oedipus the King (also known as Oedipus Rex)
• Oedipus at Colonus
• Antigone

The Theban plays deal with the story of Oedipus and his family, but it is important to understand that they don’t comprise a formal trilogy. Originally they were written over the course of almost four decades. Oedipus at Colonus is one of the last plays of Sophocles and it was staged after his death. And the earliest play here is actually Antigone.

All of the characters in the game are represented as marble sculptures. Usually quite damaged sculptures. The sole developer of the Oedipus/Antigone project is perfectly aware of the fact that ancient statues were painted. And that actors in ancient theaters wore masks. The choice of this particular style was absolutely conscious and one of the main ideas was to evoke a certain feeling. This is pretty much how objects of material culture from classical antiquity came down to us. This is how we frequently perceive classical antiquity. And it has this flavor of the beauty of the broken things that fits the subject matter of these tragedies quite well.

The imagery was generated with the aid from the AI (most of the time using references) and then tweaked manually.

The translation (by Richard Jebb) is in prose and accompanied by the original text in Ancient Greek (for reference) on the right side of the screen. The soundtrack is by FEBRVVM. And it is available as a free DLC.

You can watch the videos from the developer’s YouTube channels dedicated to Classical Antiquity (including the overview of the Ancient Greek Theater, also included above). The main channel is called Optimus Minimus. The second channel is focused on shorter videos, it is called History Myths & Myth-Conceptions.