In relay, you play as a modern-day hacker. Unlike what the movies would lead you to believe, you're not going to be typing fast in a terminal in the back of a coffee shop, though there might still be some of that if you can look in the right place.
The game simulates a very accurate Linux environment, with everything working. If you're not familiar already, you'll learn
The desktop is not the only thing simulated in detail. The entire computer around it is simulated as close as you can possibly get without actually running the specifications, down to the network connection and disk read speed. You start with a second-hand office desktop with a physical hard drive.
If you find the start just too easy, you can start on a decade old laptop with a dial up modem, earn half of the money, with all your bills costing twice the amount they normally would.
You have a friend! Wren will act as your companion through the game, but she's not just some person that will randomly bug you. She serves as your guide to the game, as she has access to a database of knowledge about the game which she can use to help you out if you get lost or stuck along the way. Don't just ignore her though; she'll get upset with you and block you if you ignore her for too long or make her otherwise upset.
If you choose to stay on the right side of the law, you'll be doing work primarily in your web browser, occasionally opening up the terminal. You'll be looking for bugs, stress testing websites; things like that. Later on, you'll get to do bigger things like testing software for the biggest corporations. Doing these jobs will keep your heat down, which is ideal so you don't get arrested the next morning. Here, you will get paid in actually useful currency which you can use to purchase new parts for your computer, purchase food to keep your hunger satiated, purchase coffee to keep your tiredness at bay, or most importantly of all, keep the roof over your head.
Should you choose the wrong side of the law, you'll be primarily social engineering. Be it convincing a service desk employee to run some sketchy software, or trying to squeeze a code out of a help desk employee. Later on, you'll start to target corporations, banks, and even the federal government at the very end. This is a high risk, high reward endeavor. This will raise your heat, and if you raise your heat too high it's game over. This path will pay you better, but also will only pay you in Umbra, the cryptocurrency used in-game, which can be transferred into your bank account, but do this with caution; high amounts will raise your heat drastically.
Another option to make legitimate money is freelance programming for companies. If you have a little bit of programming knowledge, you will be able to make money with ease! Just make sure you choose a job for the programming language you're used to. Don't know how to program? Ask the AI assistant, Magpie for help! The AI assistant is stupid so it won't be able to do the work for you (most of the time), but it will be able to help you at the very least.
Don't like any of the options? You can always visit an offshore online cryptocurrency casino, though the odds that you'll actually make any profit here whatsoever are very, very low.
All of the AI runs on your computer, so the performance of the AI is dependent on what system specifications you have. The launcher will walk you through setting things up. You aren't locked to the models that relay recommends you to download, nor are you locked to using models on your computer, you can use any OpenAI-compatible service (e.g. OpenRouter)
