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 Stories in the Demo
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.
