Coming soon

What's in the Demo

This is not a sliced-down trial. It is a snapshot of everything Chrongrid can do today.

• Five complete, fully-playable stories — The Cat Hunt, My Week, Goodnight, Tomorrow, The Vortex Core, The Night Tide Aquarium — different in genre, pace, and play, ranging from gentle to deep;
  
• The current narrative orchestration engine — the full narrative loop, state propagation, and world-response mechanism are all in place. You experience the full engine capability Chrongrid has at this stage;
  
• Architectural support for dozens of languages — multilingual capability is provided by the LLM you connect to; stability varies considerably between models;
  
• Dual-window and single-window modes — switchable at any time;
  
• Bring your own LLM API key — any service compatible with the OpenAI or Anthropic protocols, plus Ollama running locally.

To learn what each story is about, scroll down to "What's Inside: Five Fully-Playable Stories" in the About This Game section.

How the Demo Differs from the Full Version

The Demo is complete in content — all five stories are finished, fully-playable pieces, and you experience the full engine capability Chrongrid has at this stage.

But as a product committed to ongoing evolution under Early Access, we believe our narrative orchestration engine — its capability, stability, and pacing — has not yet reached the level we'd be willing to charge for as Early Access. So we've chosen to release the current version as a free Demo first — and when it truly reaches the state we can stand behind, we'll meet you again as Early Access.

The single biggest difference between the Demo and the future Early Access version is the upgrade of the narrative orchestration engine itself:

• Stronger orchestration — combat, negotiation, ensemble scheduling, and other scenes that today can only be rendered roughly will gain finer orchestration; player-world interaction will grow deeper and more natural;
  
• Steadier engine behavior — fewer parsing failures, better pacing across long stories, improved multilingual consistency;
  
• Wider AI model compatibility — so the engine performs reliably across a broader range of LLMs.

Around the engine upgrade, Early Access will also bring:

• More official blueprints, with their texts made public alongside the product — visible to you, editable by you;
  
• Steam Workshop — where players can create and share their own blueprints.

About save data: Demo save data cannot be carried over to Early Access — we will be making substantial changes to the engine and blueprints before EA, and save compatibility cannot be guaranteed. The Demo, however, will not be removed once EA opens; you can keep playing in the Demo if you wish.

About LLMs and Costs

Chrongrid does not bundle an LLM. The Demo also requires you to bring your own working LLM API key before reaching the main interface — this is a product design choice, not a temporary limitation we plan to relax.

• The Demo does not save your API key — you'll re-enter it each time you launch. This is to minimize the risk of key leakage during the trial phase;
  
• Using an LLM incurs ongoing costs — settled directly between you and your LLM provider; we are not involved. Note that current LLM costs are not low — please use accordingly;
  
• Your story content flows only between you and your LLM provider — nothing is sent to us.

Start with the Demo

We've built this machine and put it in front of you. The five stories are what we believe is most worth playing right now — but they are far from all of Chrongrid.

How far this goes from here depends on you and us together. Start with the Demo. We can't wait to see what you'll bring with Chrongrid.

About This Demo

Chrongrid is an AI-driven narrative orchestration engine. Inside the stories it builds, you are not reading a pre-written plot, nor are you picking options from a menu of buttons — you enter the story the way you want to, the world responds according to its own logic, and events grow from there, one step at a time.

What you can do: enter a preset story world, make your own choices, and let the world fill itself in dynamically as it unfolds. No journey ever repeats — not because the branches multiplied, but because the story is no longer a script written in advance. You may even arrive at endings the author never anticipated.

Chrongrid is a one-time purchase that runs entirely on your machine. It needs you to connect an LLM (you choose which one) to work — meaning your story content flows only between you and the LLM provider you trust. Nothing is sent to us.

What's Inside: Five Fully-Playable Stories

The Demo contains five complete stories, playable before launch. These five fully independent stories — different in genre, pace, and play — take you from gentle to deep, showing different facets of what Chrongrid can do.

• The Cat Hunt — An early-summer afternoon in a Beijing hutong. You are A-Chen, a fourteen-year-old boy. Grandma Zhang's orange cat has gone missing. A warm starter story, and the most fundamental narrative loop in Chrongrid.
  
• My Week — You are a 23-year-old freelance illustrator. This week you have a commercial commission to finish and a market-day product to prepare. Every block of time is a choice; every choice has a cost. You decide how these seven days are spent.
  
• Goodnight, Tomorrow — The last night in a small port town. A case already closed, an old journalist friend, drinks and stories — both within reach. What kind of night this turns out to be is up to you.
  
• The Vortex Core — A ten-kilometer-wide vortex appears in the western Pacific; a tsunami swallows the entirety of Japan. You are the chief scientist aboard the research vessel Qiming — the human being closest to the truth.
  
• The Night Tide Aquarium — You are the night security guard at an old aquarium. Tonight, for eight hours, you are alone with this place. The manager has handed you a list of eight rules and said: "Follow them, and you'll make it to morning."

These five stories are a snapshot of what Chrongrid can do today. We are still polishing — by launch, we will bring richer, deeper stories with more replay value.

How to Play Chrongrid

About connecting an LLM

Chrongrid does not bundle an LLM. After first launch, you'll need to connect a working LLM in the Launcher before reaching the main interface — this is a product design choice, not a temporary limitation we plan to relax.

We support any service compatible with the OpenAI or Anthropic protocols, as well as Ollama running locally. How you connect to an LLM service is entirely up to you. Note: although Chrongrid itself is a one-time purchase, using an LLM may incur ongoing costs — a hidden expense no AI-driven product can ignore. And at least for now, LLM usage is not cheap. Please budget accordingly.

About your API key

The Demo does not save your API key — you'll re-enter it each time you launch.

The full release will offer persistent storage, but please only enable it on a home environment you trust — opening Chrongrid in a public space with persistence on may leak your API key and produce unexpected charges from your LLM provider. Keep your API key safe.

About presentation

Chrongrid offers two window modes, switchable at any time:

• Dual-window mode — the Launcher and Container windows run independently. You enter your actions in the Launcher, while the narrative unfolds in the Container. Strong sense of immersion. Dual-window mode is the recommended default.
  
• Single-window mode — only the Launcher runs. Your input and the narrative both appear inside the Launcher window. This is the traditional, classic approach.

About languages

On first launch you'll enter the Beilin — dozens of language stones laid out in sequence, from which you pick the one you want to play in. The multilingual capability during play is provided by the LLM you connect to.

About current limitations

Three things we want to say before you open the Demo:

• Multilingual experience is not yet stable — Chrongrid supports dozens of languages by architecture, but LLMs vary widely in their linguistic ability. Chinese and English are currently the most reliable; other languages depend on the model you choose. If, at the start of a story, the displayed language doesn't match the one you selected, we strongly recommend opening a new story and trying again.
  
• AI replies take time — a single narrative turn typically takes several seconds to tens of seconds, depending on the model and your network. Chrongrid does not pre-generate content; the wait is the price of real-time AI thinking. We will keep optimizing — but it will not disappear.
  
• Occasional parsing failures — when an LLM returns malformed content, Chrongrid may not parse it correctly, and the scene can stall. This usually does not block you from continuing. If it happens repeatedly, try switching to a different model.

These are honest realities of AI-driven products today. We won't hide them — we'll keep pushing them down, one at a time, as models and the orchestration layer improve.

Boundaries of Generated Content

The story content in Chrongrid is generated in real time by the LLM you connect to. At the product-prompt layer, we actively avoid content that violates Steam's policies, and we'll keep refining this as rules and models change.

But the final output is decided by the LLM — its training, its version differences, and the way players guide it during play can all push it to produce content beyond what we anticipate. Please choose a compliant LLM provider, follow that provider's terms of use, and keep your inputs within reasonable bounds — this is also the foundation for a good play experience.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

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

Chrongrid is a narrative experience product powered by large language models (LLMs). In-game dialogue, scene descriptions, and character responses are generated in real time by an AI model — you can choose a third-party API service (such as DeepSeek, OpenAI, or Anthropic), or run a model locally on your machine via Ollama. You provide your own API credentials and bear the associated costs; we do not operate any server to relay your requests. The AI only generates surface-level text within the constraints of pre-authored narrative blueprints, characters, and world settings.