Greyline

What is Greyline?

Neo City is one building on the scale of a mountain rather than a sprawl of roads. At its top sits the Crown, where clean air is sold by the breath. Below spreads the Basin, a flooded district of rolling blackouts where even basic services arrive as subscriptions.

Three days before the story begins, the fixer who ran Greyline Solutions walked out and never came back. The office, the terminal and the crew pass to the player.

Greyline is a story-first management game about running that inherited business. Days are spent at the office terminal brokering work: choosing who takes a job, what gear they carry and which faction gets the contract. Nights are for the Basin, where the people who make the city bearable can be visited and talked to.

The crew anchors all of it. Kira is the netrunner, Slade the ex-corp merc, and Wrench the mechanic who feeds everyone. Each holds a hard line and remembers when it gets crossed.

How to play

The loop moves through morning, day and night. Mornings pass at the office over breakfast and small talk with the crew. The day shift belongs to the terminal, where jobs and bills land side by side. After dark there is time for exactly one place to visit in the Basin, so each evening becomes a choice about which person or lead gets attention.

Brokering a job comes down to three decisions: who goes, what they carry, and which faction the work serves. Those decisions accumulate. Trust with crew members rises and falls, factions notice who has been working for whom, and story jobs push the plot forward.

Gear is tied to subscriptions. Corporate equipment performs strongly until its licence lapses, at which point it stops being the safe option. Freeware gear is weaker but free forever, which makes it the dependable floor of a loadout rather than the exciting one.

Choices stick. A crossed line is remembered rather than reset, and consequences are built to carry between weeks instead of being wiped clean at the end of a chapter.

Controls

Greyline plays with the mouse, which handles the terminal, menus and scene interaction. Dialogue advances with the space bar, the Enter key, or another click. Holding Ctrl fast-forwards through text for players who read quickly or want to revisit a passage. Escape opens the menu.

Settings include text size and volume controls, and adjusting text size early is worthwhile because the game uses a pixel font that rewards a comfortable scale on smaller displays.

The browser version is built for desktop browsers rather than phones or tablets, so it belongs on a desktop or laptop. Separate builds exist for Windows and Linux.

Menus, dialogue and the terminal all run through the same pointer-and-keyboard arrangement, so there is little to memorise before the first morning in the office. The only special moves are holding Ctrl to skip ahead and pressing Escape to step out.

Tips for your first run

Treat the first week as a chance to learn the shape of the job board rather than chasing an ideal outcome. The day terminal shows jobs and bills together, so the practical question each morning is what the crew can afford to take on and what has to be paid regardless.

Start with the routine rather than the plot. Spending the first breakfast listening to the crew establishes who Kira, Slade and Wrench are before any job asks for a judgement call about them.

• Advance dialogue with Space, Enter or a click, and hold Ctrl when re-reading a scene.
• Set text size in Settings before the first long conversation.
• Treat freeware gear as the baseline, not the ceiling, since it never expires.
• Keep the licence clock in mind: corporate gear stops being strong when it lapses.
• Choose the single evening visit deliberately, because there is only one per night.
• Assume a crossed line will be remembered by the person who drew it.

Content and replayability

Build 0.4.0 is an early public build. It contains the prologue and the first week of the story, with later weeks still being written. That makes it a vertical slice of the loop rather than a finished campaign: morning talk, terminal work, one night visit, repeat.

Planned additions arrive roughly in this order. Emergencies put a running job in trouble, with the crew calling mid-mission for a decision that settles the outcome. More weeks and chapters follow, along with new night locations including the Jade Market, the NC-MFA fight ring, the Packet Loss netrunner den and Central Tower. Crew members who walk out can be won back, new recruits can be brought in, and multiple endings are planned, each with its own sequence. Those plans can change as the game takes shape.

Replay value in the current build rests on trust and faction standing. Because crew remember crossed lines and factions track who worked for whom, a second pass through the same week can land differently. It is single-player throughout.

Presentation and performance

Greyline uses pixel art in a rainy, neon-lit register, with VA-11 Hall-A named as the stylistic reference point. The Basin's flooded streets and rolling blackouts carry that mood, and the clean air of the Crown above makes the contrast plain.

Text uses the Pixel UniCode font by ivancr72, released under CC BY 3.0. Text size and volume are adjustable in Settings, which matters for a pixel font on a high-density display.

The browser build targets desktop browsers, so it plays as a keyboard-and-mouse experience rather than a phone one. Windows and Linux builds are also available. Because the browser version needs no installation, it is the quickest way to check how the game runs on a given machine.

The game is free, with no ads, no microtransactions and no subscription, and every update stays free. Donations are optional.

Who should play it

Greyline suits players who want narrative weight inside a management frame: people who enjoy deciding who takes a job and then living with the crew's reaction to that call. Three named specialists, each with a hard line, give the day-to-day brokering a personal edge that a pure numbers game would lack.

It also fits two overlapping audiences at once. Readers of dystopian cyberpunk get the Crown and Basin divide, the subscriptions and the factions, while slice-of-life players get breakfast at the office and small talk before the terminal opens.

Players who need a finished storyline should wait, since the current build covers only the prologue and first week, with more weeks and multiple endings still to come. Anyone comfortable with an in-development single-player story and a mouse-and-keyboard pace will find plenty to work with now.

Expect reading and decisions rather than reflex. The tension comes from whom you send, what they carry and who notices.