Grayout
Step into the gaming world with Grayout, one of the top $2.99 games in the App Store! Crafted with creativity and innovation by Mrgan LLC, this captivating Word game is bound to grab your attention. With its content rating of 12+, it caters to a wide audience. Ever since its release on 16th December 2015, it has been constantly updated, with the latest version rolled out on 7th October 2019.
Whether you have a liking for Word, Puzzle, or Books games, Grayout is sure to keep you hooked!
User Ratings
Join the crowd of 60 gamers who have given their verdict on Grayout.
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Dive into Grayout
“One of the most essential iOS games of the year. Proves just how interesting and vital gaming as a medium can be. 9/10” —Pocket Gamer
“Grayout is exceptional as a game, as a compelling narrative, as an experiment in communication. It is simple, poignant, and horrifying.” —Gamezebo
Grayout is an aphasiac text game set in a medical dystopia. It’s a prequel to the censorship game Blackbar.
In Grayout, you play Alaine, a rebelious resident of the totalitarian community called The Neighborhood, who wakes up in a hospital research lab following an accident… or so she is told. The game is a series of conversations with hospital staff, made challenging by Alaine’s post-traumatic aphasia—a disorder that affects one’s ability to process language.
Grayout simulates the experience of having a word on the tip of your tongue, the frustration of knowing what you mean but not how to say it, the feeling of being overwhelmed by the runaway thoughts inside your head and struggling to reign them in.
This is a game for fans of text adventures, interactive fiction, word puzzles, story-driven games, and emotional simulations.
“Marvelous.” —The Guardian, The best iPhone and iPad apps of 2015
“Liked Blackbar? This is harder but also cleverer. Lots more feels too. Prepare your brain.” —Sam Barlow of ‘Her Story’
We hope your stay in the Neighborhood Hospital is pleasant and brief. Get well.
What’s Fresh in the Latest Update?
Discover what’s new in the recent update of Grayout on 7th October 2019:
Thanks for playing Grayout! We’re a small team, so we really appreciate your reviews of the game. Tell your friends!
Here’s what’s been fixed in 1.0.3:
- Updated to fix a crash in iOS 13
- Properly supports newer iPhones
Hear from the Players – Grayout Reviews
Find out what gamers are saying about Grayout:
As a class we did Grayout over the course of 3 weeks. The kids say: creepy, fascinating disturbing… But in a good way. Exciting and full of twists. Make a new one! We already did Blackbar.
We applaud the designers for this unique idea, but we found the right sentences were not always logical, or other possibilities that were equally valid e.g. Yeah sure instead of Yeah rightwere not accepted. And the game is very short for the money.
A very interesting concept, but the story is lazy, as it seems most of the effort went into the word play (which was often clever). Beyond that, it provided less than an hour of gameplay. To be fair, that may be because we had to look up instructions online. Not answers: instructions. The game provided none. Do we use all the words? Am we supposed to form grammatically correct sentences or just whatever gets our message across? Even with instructions, it was difficult to know what we were trying to say, what our response was supposed to be. Maybe we missed something, but this game was not worth the price it asks for. Bonus points for mentioning a polyamorous relationship though, we guess.
Well designed and thought out. We tried this after loving Blackbar. Looking forward to more from Mrgan LLC.
We are sooo addicted to this App! If you are A.D.D. You may not like it. VERY CHALLENGING!
Amazing how character-driven this seemingly simple app is. Feels almost… Real. Thank goodness it’s not!
Although it relied heavily on text, it used color and lower and upper capitalization to separate the characters. Eerie and one of a kind storyline and frustrating game play. And that what made playing Grayout a fun experience. Some puzzles were easy and some puzzles made us surprised that we figured it out. We used walk thoughs for hard puzzles. The characters were three dimensional and the backstory and details were slowly revealed so you understood as the story went.
Simple in the sense that it is elegant. Excellent in the sense that it’s a work of art that really has something to say, and has a story to tell. More iOS games like this, please!
This was a challenging, interesting game and we found the storytelling to be very effective. Uneven at times but it’s so rare to see real innovation and artistry in storytelling in games, we’re always happy when we do.
It takes about 90 minutes to work through and would have gladly have kept playing. So glad to see the makers of a blackbar making something in a similar flavour. We hope they make more!
Great sequel to Blackbar! Looking forward to more games like this in the future. Thanks to everyone involved in making this game happen!
Fun to unscramble. We’ve played Blackbar too and would be up for any new games from this author!
We thoroughly enjoyed it. Well worth the money.
We refuse to look up on Google for help.. But we’ve been stuck for a month.. Nice while it lasted.
This game, like Blackbar, is something new and different. We love word games so we had to try them both. The downer on this one is you cannot turn off the music, very annoying. It’s very hard. Two questions in and we found myself stumped for two days.
It does often turn out to be nothing more than a guessing game sometimes, and there were several parts where we ended up searching for answers online because we had no clear idea what to do (and upon reading some of the later answers, sometimes we had no idea how the heck we were supposed to figure the puzzle out). Very interesting story and idea, though, just wish it couldve been something more.
We loved the idea of playing with language and the challenge of expressing thoughts using limited words. We hated trying to guess the RIGHT thing to say – what the game expected. Developers: this would be really cool to experiment with some AI and language parsing – a kind of double-sided Turing test.
But there needs to be some kind of hint system. We’ve been stuck on the same level for hours unable to get it right. If it at leas gave the first word we might be able to steer it into the right direction but there are so many different sentences you can make with all the words given to you. We dont want to look it up either and just be spoon fed the right answer.
This is easily better than most app games but that is a low bar. We downloaded this after having loved Blackbar but this was too easy and the challenges felt incredibly redundant. The key to solving many of the puzzles was often trial and error rather than a comprehension of the puzzle’s rules and mechanics. We felt myself wishfully thinking it would get more difficult but after less than 48hrs we have completed the game.
We loved Blackbar, so gave Grayout a whirl, too. The story is wonderful; it places you in a chilling dystopian scenario with sadistic keepers and little hope of escape. We enjoyed it. But as for gameplay, theres not much here. The only puzzle comes from trying to figure out what the game designers thought our responses to other characters ought to be. And if the game designers thought, for example, that we ought to respond Thats the right answer then saying That is correct or Youre right or That is right or Youre not wrong there or even That is the right answer wont be accepted by the game. We understand they wanted us to experience the frustration of helplessness and aphasia. But this is just the frustration of pure guessing, like randomly trying numbers on a bike lock until it opens. Theres never the delighted feeling you get when you finally figure out a puzzle based on cleverly hidden clues. There are barely any hidden / contextual clues to discover. The rest is just moving words around until you guess right.
The app still does not support the iPhone X and has very few design elements. Changing it to support it would be easy. Dev is either unskilled or lazy.
Am interesting world and concept and we liked Blackbar- unfortunately theres a game breaking bug that makes it impossible to progress past the (irritatingly obscure) waiting for godot reference. We checked a couple of walkthroughs, the correct answer doesnt work, impossible to move forward…
Would have made a great dystopia short story but as a word game not so good. We found the game awkward. We didn’t enjoy it. But the story was great!
There’s no logic or "game" feel to it. You just have to guess what words are supposed to go up there. It would be better if it told you how lose to being right you were but you get no feedback until you’ve somehow guessed the right combo.
The premise sounded great but actually playing the game is not much more than a frustrating guessing game. The idea is that you are waking up as a patient in a hospital with limited verbal ability and you must express yourself using just the words made available to you. The game is very inflexible in what is considered valid input which turned a promising game into a frustrating one. We would enter phrases that were complete and fit in with the question asked and it wouldn’t be accepted. It’s sad, too, because it seems like a lot of work was put into making it an engaging story. We just couldn’t become immersed in it when we kept getting reminded of the fact that it’s just a dumb computer that has a limited set of valid input.
Logic isnt great from clue to clue. No ability for hints, not really great leading. It ended up being mostly a waste of time and Im deleting it without finishing because Im so bored with it.
This is one of the worst games we’ve ever played. We have no idea how it got so many glowing reviews. The answers to the puzzles are completely arbitrary and oftentimes make zero sense. Do not recommend.
Its a guessing game that has no logic. Just read the story on google and save yourself feeling annoyed you spent money on this.
A tour de force of storytelling through both words and not-words.
This game is incredible at delivering words that are not only cleverly written but also presented in a brilliant way that makes the player personally undergo a miniaturized version of the protagonist’s struggle. It’s more puzzle than choose-your-own-adventure, but you will feel more empathy for the lead character than you would in other "interactive fiction". Grayout’s greatest achievement is its incredibly successful marriage of mechanics and theme.
This game captures the beauty of word usage and the frustration one can have when words escape us.
A lot of fun. Got stuck a couple times, but went back to it the next day/brute forced the solution. There was a typo on the page with the doc’s joke about estragon where he says "wuldn’t". Also… When visiting the red-backed page with the allergic reaction at any time, went to a different page, if we then switched to a different app and back, the words would be shaking like the allergic scene. Thanks for making such a great follow up!
A great game and a worthy companion to the also-excellent Blackbar.
Such a fun puzzle game, great story, great music. Highly recommend.
Blackbar was such a stumbled-upon little gem, it’s always had a precious quiet place in our mind, even after we completed it and removed it from our phone. We got irrationally happy when we saw Grayout was available. And it’s just as good and rests in our mind with Blackbar as the best short fiction/game hybrids we’ve ever seen. Anything these guys make, we’re waiting.
Such a great story. Characters and bits of the world are framed and the rest is fleshed out with gameplay in a way that traditional stories can’t. We wish the text interaction was a little more snappy and that it all fit on our iPhone 6 screen. Made things a little tedious on the bigger pages. I’d love to hear why the visual style is so different than blackbar. Is there some sort of Lucasonian explanation or is it just a desire to be minimal? Great stuff as always!
Sometimes frustrating, but very satisfying.
Games can exist purely for fun or challenge, but they can also be a new medium for storytelling. This game is an engaging method of telling a story, while still being fun and challenging. We have to admit to using a guide for 3 pages, but it was because it was like a book we couldn’t put down. A couple of the phrases could be more accepting of slightly different order. Otherwise excellent. We hope we get more games like this and Blackbar.
Bravo to the developers! The mix and pacing of easy and difficult steps is very good. On several occasions we needed to put Grayout aside for a while in order to think of a different perspective. The challenge continues all the way to the ending credits.
We love these style of games and this is incredibly good. Like a killer sci-fi novel set in a future you never want to live in.
What an amazing way to tell a story! We loved it, although we did have a little frustration because responses had to be exact ("yeah sure" and "yeah right" should be interchangeable, for example) but mostly it was challenging and satisfying.
On screen 33, the green one after Eston says he’s a "slopoke," there’s no dialog, only the word cloud. Is this intentional? Also, a hint about what the character is feeling would be nice in a future revision. Nothing sophisticated, mind you, because of the word salad thing with the brain. But a single word like "confused" or "ouch" might be nice. Other than that, rad game! Nice work on this. Thoughtful visual and sound design.
Like its predecessor, blackbar, this is a great dystopian tale wrapped in a novel puzzle… But gameplay is way too short.
Mildly interesting and definitely unique, but it’s just not that fun to play. The interface could be a lot easier (why can’t you drag words to reposition them?) and the music can’t be muted. We guess we were expecting more of an "experience" rather than a game of making awkward sentences.