Walk it, ride it, build it, or just wander

A researched route through a city, stop by stop, with a map and a line to follow. The one to take the first time you walk somewhere.

Each stop is a short, self-contained story about the thing in front of you, and it starts on its own when you arrive — the phone can stay in your pocket the whole time. Follow the route in order, skip a stop that does not interest you, or play one out of order from the list. This is the mode most people mean by a self-guided audio tour, and it is where every city in the app starts: 313 published walks across 76 cities.

A public bus line you board with an ordinary ticket, the ones locals use. A short teaser plays as you come up to each place, and it counts down to the stop you get off at.

As the bus approaches a place it tells you which window to look out of — left, right or ahead — and plays that place's eleven-second teaser, which is long enough to decide whether to care. The countdown to your stop is measured along the line rather than in a straight line, because 400 m of road is not 250 m of air. Twenty-three lines are published, among them Berlin's 100, Lisbon's 728, Madrid's 001, Barcelona's 120 and 59, Budapest's 16, Florence's C1 and Hamburg's 111. If the driver takes a detour it says so and does nothing about it, because a detour is a choice.

A signed cycle route or park loop, ridden at your own pace. Each place offers itself as you come up to it, and stopping is what unlocks the rest.

A place arrives as a teaser about a hundred metres out, which is enough to decide whether to brake. Stop, and the whole story plays; ride on, and it does not. The teaser is the offer and stopping is the acceptance. Nothing ever starts talking within 25 m of a sharp turn, because a rider at a junction is choosing a lane rather than listening. Ten routes are published, including the Planty ring around Kraków's old town — fifteen narrated stops, the densest in the catalogue — the Ciclovia do Tejo in Lisbon, El Retiro in Madrid and the Karl-Heine canal in Leipzig.

Tell Neywo how long you have and where you are starting, and it builds a route out of the narrated places around you. Same stories, your route.

Pick 45, 90 or 150 minutes and a starting point — where you are standing, or a city you have not reached yet — and it orders the places nearby so that the walking makes sense. Narrow it to landmarks, museums, churches, palaces or parks and each option shows how many places it would keep, so a theme with nothing nearby is greyed out rather than quietly building nothing. The timings are fitted to the researched walks rather than guessed, including the part everyone gets wrong: a stop is about seven minutes, because standing in front of something takes longer than listening to it. The result is saved as your own walk, private to you.

No route, no order, no end. Walk wherever you like and every narrated place you pass tells its story once. Keep only the kinds of place you care about — churches, museums, parks — and the rest stays quiet.

A place speaks when you come within about 35 metres, and each one speaks once, so it never repeats itself on the way back. A radar lists the five nearest places you have not heard yet with their distance and direction, so you can walk towards one or ignore it. It never talks over a story it is already telling, and it will not start a new one on top of a place you paused. There is nothing to finish and nothing to fall behind on: roam is what to open when you are wandering a neighbourhood with no plan, killing an hour before a train, or walking a street you have walked ten times and wondering what you have been passing.

A city playlist plays every story of a city back to back, with no GPS and nowhere to be. For the train in, the flight home, or the evening before, when you want to know what you are about to be looking at.

It is the only mode with no location in it at all, which is why it works on a plane, in a tunnel and from another continent. Each city prints its own length when you open it — Madrid is 116 stories and just under four hours; Berlin, the largest, is 480 stories and nearly eight — ordered landmarks first and then alphabetically, with a filter that cuts it back to the highlights when four hundred and eighty is obviously the wrong number. It keeps your place for a month and carries on playing while you use the rest of the app.

The same stops as a walk, but the story sits behind a riddle: every answer is on the wall, the plaque or the facade in front of you, and the story plays once you have it.

Reaching a stop asks its question instead of narrating — a date over a doorway, the number of arches, the animal on a coat of arms — and answering releases what that stop has been waiting to say. Nothing can be answered from the phone, which is the entire point. Hints cost points; giving up costs the points and not the story, so nobody loses an afternoon to a plaque that has been painted over. It is scored for a group sharing one phone, passed around, with a single score to argue about afterwards. Built for walking a city with people who would never have agreed to an audio tour.

Quest mode is in the app; the first quest is not published yet. Every riddle depends on something still being readable on a real wall, and that takes a walk to check rather than a desk — so this is what it will do, not what you can open today.