One android. A city that never asked to be saved. This guide maps every axis, every door, and every ending, so you can walk the New Angeles you mean to walk.
A companion to the interactive demo. It follows the shipped playable exactly, including the near-balance rule that finally makes the fourth ending reachable.
You play Rylin, one of the built, whose Baseline recitation has begun to fail. That failing recitation is the prologue. What follows is three acts and twelve decisive moments. The walk saves nothing. At the end it reflects back who you chose to be, then lets you walk it again.
Every decisive answer leans one of three axes. There is no meter to grind and no correct answer. The axes are simply a tally of how you met each moment.
The Baseline recitation is the prologue and scores nothing. Of the twelve numbered moments that follow, eleven score exactly one axis; only the Last Door (Moment 12) is a single-path beat that scores nothing. So the whole walk turns on the eleven axis choices from Moment 1 through Moment 11.
Prologue, the Baseline. Recite the first memory. The rain-window fragment surfaces and your Baseline begins to fail. No axis.
Moments 4 through 8 are the Act II hub. The game presents them as doors rather than a fixed sequence (see below), so their internal order is yours to set. Their numbering here is just the slot they occupy.
After the case points to Deep Angeles, Act II opens as a hub. The game calls it the Three Doors, but the shipped hub holds five scenes: the Lab (Voss), the Rally (Kael), the Archive (Nara), the Child (Elys), and the Tower (Maren Kai). You may walk them in any order. Each returns you to the hub, and the doors you have not opened stay lit. Only when all five are walked does the hub converge and the prism opens into Act III. No door can be skipped, and none can be walked twice.
Two of the five carry a follow-on beat that sets a flag but scores no axis: after the Rally, Jax offers Voss's write-logs (Accept or Decline), and after the Tower, you either Engage Silas or Focus on Maren. Both matter at the epilogue.
At the Last Door the walk reads your three axis tallies and resolves one of four endings. The rule the shipped game uses is precise, so you can steer it.
The rule. Let hi be your highest axis and lo your lowest, across Trust, Doubt and Will. The spread is hi - lo.
If the spread is 2 or more, your single highest axis leads and you get that axis's ending.
If the spread is 1 or 0 (hi - lo <= 1, the near-balance rule), no axis leads and you reach The Prism. This check comes first, so near-balance overrides any nominal lead.
| Ending | Condition in the shipped playable | The reflection |
|---|---|---|
| The Open Door | Trust is your single highest axis and the spread is 2 or more. | You opened the record to the city and trusted New Angeles to hold the truth and change. A self built on trust. |
| The Proven Thing | Doubt is your highest axis (strictly above Trust) and the spread is 2 or more. | You ended the program on evidence, every edit logged, every subject named. A self that would not be told what it was. |
| The Chosen Name | Will is your highest axis (strictly above both Trust and Doubt) and the spread is 2 or more. | You bent the outcome past Voss's science and Kael's revolution and authored a new settlement, and a new name, for the built. A self that chose its own name. |
| The Prism | Near-balance: hi - lo <= 1 across Trust, Doubt and Will. Takes priority over any lead. |
No single axis led. You held all three in tension and left New Angeles genuinely open. A self that refused to be reduced to one. |
When two axes tie for the lead and the spread is still 2 or more, the shipped game breaks the tie in the order Trust, then Doubt, then Will. Trust wins a tie outright; Doubt wins only above Trust; Will leads only when strictly above both. So Trust equal to Doubt gives The Open Door, and Will must stand alone to claim The Chosen Name.
The Prism is not a three-way dead heat. Eleven moments each score exactly one axis, and eleven does not divide by three, so an exact tie of Trust equals Doubt equals Will can never happen. The shipped playable therefore admits the Prism on near-balance (hi - lo <= 1) rather than a strict tie. In practice that means an end tally like 4 / 4 / 3 across the three axes: no axis more than one point ahead of the lowest.
This near-balance rule is the difference between the shipped game and the dialogue graph it was cut from. See the source-fidelity note at the end.
The ending headline comes from your axes. The epilogue underneath it is assembled from eleven separate flags, each set by a specific choice. Steer these to author a specific farewell for each character, independent of which of the four endings you land.
| Flag | Set by | Epilogue outcome |
|---|---|---|
| ada_outcome | Derived from Moment 2. Trust or Will at the placed memory sets it to symbiotic. Doubt leaves it free. | symbiotic: Ada stays. "I could be free. But I'd rather be ours. Chains and all." free: Ada leaves to find herself. "I have to know what I am without you. That isn't leaving. It's beginning." |
| elys_bond | Moment 7, the Child. Trust or Will gives bond 2. Doubt gives bond 1. | bond 2 or more: "You're real too, you know. I can tell. Somebody told me once." bond 1 (Doubt): "I stopped asking if I'm real. It's safer. Was that wrong?" |
| maren_state | Moment 8, the Tower. Trust = reform. Doubt = hostile. Will = seized. | reform: "I drew the boundary wider. Remember that I chose to." hostile: "Order held. That is the only mercy this city understands." seized: "The program is Rylin's now. What Rylin does with it is another story." |
| voss_end | Moment 11, what becomes of the program. Trust = heal. Doubt = confess. Will = seize. | heal: "We end it carefully, or not at all." confess: "Consent. You wanted a signature. It has one now." seize: "Take it, then. And when it collapses in your hands, remember I offered you the safer lie." |
| orion_lens | Moment 9, the Quantum Revelation. Trust = many. Doubt = one. Will = forge. | Colors Orion's spoken reply and the refracted prism image at the moment itself. Orion's epilogue line is the same on every lens: "You chose an angle. The prism keeps turning." |
| donor_choice | Moment 10, the Donor's Name. Trust = restore. Doubt = verify. Will = keep. | restore: "It was never mine. But I kept it safe for you." keep: "I'll remember you as mine to protect. Not mine to be." verify: "I proved where you came from. That has to be enough." |
| jax_intel | The Jax offer after the Rally door. Accept Jax's help sets it true. Decline leaves it false. | true: "The write-logs went where they could not be unwritten. You owe me a quiet year." false: no Jax epilogue line. |
| holds_archive | The Archive door, Nara. Only the Will answer ("Give me the record. I'll decide what the city knows") sets it true. | true: "You hold the record now. Wield it like it is borrowed, because it is." otherwise: no Nara epilogue line. |
| t_silas | Moment 3 Trust ("I believe you") adds 1. The Tower's Silas beat adds 1 for Engage Silas or subtracts 1 for Focus on Maren. | 1 or more: "Pinned it back on. Fragile things. With care." below 0: "He walked into the rain and did not look back at the light." exactly 0: no Silas epilogue line. |
| faction | A running tally. The Rally Trust adds 2, Rally Will adds 1, Tower Doubt adds 1; the Lab Trust subtracts 1 and Tower Trust subtracts 1. | above 0: "The underground kept the doors it opened. The city learned to live with being seen." below 0: "The towers closed the gap quietly, and called the quiet order." exactly 0: no faction line. |
| allied_kael | The Rally door, Kael. Only the Trust answer ("I trust the fire. I'm with you") sets it true. | true: "We learned to bleed with meaning. And then we learned to build." otherwise: no Kael epilogue line. |
Every farewell above is drawn straight from the shipped playable's ending code. Blank outcomes are real: some characters only speak at the end if you gave them a reason to.
If this is your first walk, lean into the title. Answer with Trust at each of the eleven axis moments, accept help where it is offered, and keep Silas close. It is the most coherent read of Rylin's Faith, and it lands cleanly on The Open Door.
What this run gives you: The Open Door ending, with Ada staying, a warm Elys, Maren choosing reform, Voss healing the program, the donor's name restored, Kael allied, Jax's write-logs delivered, and Silas pinning his badge back on. One honest note: a pure-Trust walk leaves the faction tally at exactly 0 (the Rally Trust gives +2 but the Lab and Tower Trust give -1 each), so neither faction line appears. If you want the underground to wake New Angeles, answer the Rally with Will instead; if you want the towers, that path needs Doubt at the Tower.
The Prism is the hardest ending to reach by accident and the easiest to author on purpose. You need your three axes within one point of each other at the Last Door: a 4 / 4 / 3 split across Trust, Doubt and Will. Any assignment that lands there works, because the Act II doors can be answered in any order. Here is one clean route.
That is Trust 4, Doubt 4, Will 3. Spread is 1, so hi - lo <= 1 holds and the walk resolves to The Prism: the light refracts and recombines, and New Angeles is left genuinely open. The Jax and Silas follow-on beats do not touch your axes, so answer them however you like without breaking the balance. To reach a spread of 0 is impossible with eleven moments, so 4 / 4 / 3 is as balanced as the walk can be, and it is enough.
Rylin's Faith was authored as a screenplay and a branching dialogue graph, then cut into the playable demo you play in the browser. This walkthrough follows the shipped playable, which is the truth of what the game does. A few routing details were corrected between the graph and the shipped build, and this guide reflects the corrections, not the original graph.
hi - lo <= 1), which is what this guide describes.