RedLine

REDLINE

London, 2058. The river runs black under a sky that never quite gets dark, and the skyline belongs to the corporations. Ostrava BioSystems sells longevity, pills, implants, forty more good years. Nobody asks what it costs, or where it comes from.

Adrian Kell signs Ostrava’s shipping manifests every week and never wonders what’s in the crates. Then, at the company party, he meets a woman in red.

He wakes up bitten and left for dead, almost fully turned. The only thing holding back the change is MERIDIAN, the dry, clinical AI in his neural implant. Now he’s caught between the two: stronger than any human, hungrier than he can bear, and hunted by the company he works for.

What you’ll do

• Explore rain-soaked London by night: Shoreditch flats, Soho clubs, a night market under the railway arches, a back-street clinic and Ostrava’s glass tower.
• Feed, or resist. Hunger rises all night. Feeding makes you stronger and less human. Holding back keeps your relationships intact, but leaves you weaker.
• Talk your way through. Every character has a face, a mood and a memory of how you treated them.
• Fight in turn-based tactical combat when talking fails, using claws, Blood Dash, Mesmerise and your implant’s hacks.
• Jack into the Nightwire, a virtual city of brokers, ghosts and corporate vaults. Break in using two hacking minigames.
• Beat the sunrise. Get home before dawn, or burn.

This playtest (version 0.6) contains the full Prologue and the first part of Chapter One

Controls

• Click or tap to move, talk and interact.
• E scan the room · M talk to MERIDIAN · I items · N find the nearest network node · J journal (from Chapter One) · Esc menu.
• Headphones recommended. The game saves automatically, and there are three manual save slots in the pause menu.

A tribute
Redline is an original title heavily inspired by, and created as a tribute to, MicroProse’s classic BloodNet. It walks its own path while honouring the bloodline that came before. It features a newly recomposed score that channels and expands on the original themes.

Feedback and support: markj595@outlook.com