Free stealth game · plays in your browser
Lead a lone alpha through a forest at night. Follow the golden scent, collect the pieces of an old mask, and stay out of the hunters’ lamps.
Night falls
Pieces of a golden mask lie scattered through the wood. Hunters walk the paths with lamps. Keep to the shadows and bring every piece home.
W A S D or arrows to move · Shift sprint · C sneak · Space sniff · Esc pause · M sound
Everything you need fits on one hand. The game area takes the keys only while a hunt is running, so the page scrolls normally the rest of the time.
Each hunter carries a lamp that throws a cone of light about 300 px ahead. Stand in it and an alert meter fills; the closer you are and the faster you move, the quicker it fills. Tree trunks and rocks block the beam, and a hunter also senses anything that comes within 40 px.
Your own eyes only reach as far as your vision cone and a short circle around you — the rest is night. Bushes are your best friend: while you are inside one, a lamp spots you 4 times more slowly.
Patches of dead twigs crack underfoot. Walking over them is heard 170 px away, sprinting 300 px away, and even sprinting on bare ground makes a 110 px patter. Sneak across and nobody hears a thing.
Traps hide in the leaf litter and only show up inside your smell radius. Step in one and you lose one of your 3 hearts, stay stuck for 1.5 seconds and the snap is heard 320 px away.
A smoky gold trail drifts from your nose toward the nearest piece of the mask. Press sniff and your nose reaches 320 px instead of 140 px for 3 seconds, which also reveals traps further out. It then needs 6 seconds to recover.
Every map has a den under old roots. It stays shut until you hold every mask piece on that map; then it glows gold and the scent leads you there.
Each map is bigger and busier than the last. Finish one to unlock the next; together their pieces make the whole Golden Mask.
Hunt 1
One hunter walks a square beat in the middle of the wood. Follow the gold scent to three pieces of the mask, keep out of the lamp, then slip into the den on the far side.
Hunt 2
Two hunters cross paths in a hollow full of dry birch twigs. Walking over them snaps them; sneak across and nobody hears a thing.
Hunt 3
A trapper has worked this creek bank. Steel jaws hide in the leaf litter; only your nose finds them. Sniff often.
Hunt 4
Open glades along the ridge leave little shadow. Three lamps sweep the gaps between the pines; wait for them to turn away.
Hunt 5
The last pieces lie around the old clearing. Four hunters, dry wood everywhere, traps on every path. Bring the whole mask home.
Hunters are not scripted to spot you at a set moment. Each one runs the same four-step routine, and what a hunter does next depends only on what they see and hear.
The hunter walks a fixed beat between waypoints, swinging the lamp gently from side to side. Learn the beat and you can slip through behind them.
A snapped twig, a trap going off, or a glimpse of you that fills their meter past 35% sends them to look. They walk to the spot and sweep the lamp for 2.5 seconds.
When the meter is full they run at you at 190 px/s with the lamp locked on. Your walk is 140 px/s and your sprint 230 px/s, so break the line of sight — a tree, a rock, a bush — rather than just running.
If they lose sight of you for 1.2 seconds they go to where they last saw you and search for 4 seconds before heading back to their beat.
| Each mask piece | +250 |
|---|---|
| Each second under par time | +10 |
| Finishing without losing a heart | +300 |
| Each chase you trigger | −150 |
A hunt’s score never drops below zero.
Your best score and stars for each hunt are kept in this browser. Finishing a hunt unlocks the next one. Being caught, or losing all three hearts, simply restarts the hunt.
Yes. There is nothing to buy, no account, no advertising and no tracking. The whole game runs in your browser from this page.
Yes. On a touch screen a stick appears on the left and Sniff and Sneak buttons on the right. The game area takes your touches, so the page does not scroll while you play. Landscape orientation gives you the widest view.
Standing still in a lamp beam still fills the hunter’s meter, just more slowly. Distance helps (the meter fills much faster close up), and a bush slows it by 4 times. Best of all is to stay out of the beam altogether: trees and rocks block the light.
In your browser’s local storage on this device, under the key whimbyte_alphahunt. It holds your best score and stars per hunt and the sound setting. Nothing is sent to a server. Clearing your browser data resets it.
No. Hunters carry lamps, not weapons. If one reaches you, the hunt simply restarts. Traps take a heart and hold you for a moment; nothing graphic is shown.
Yes — night ambience, twig snaps, trap clicks and a few chimes, all generated live by your browser. Press M or the speaker icon to turn it off; the setting is remembered.
Email [email protected] with the hunt name, what you were doing and your browser. A screenshot helps a lot.
I’m Tahlia, and I make small games from Newport, on the west side of Melbourne. Alpha Hunt started as an evening experiment with lamp cones and shadows and grew into five full maps.
Everything you see is drawn by code in plain JavaScript on a canvas — no game engine, no libraries, no image files — and every sound is synthesised in your browser. That keeps the whole game small and quick to load on a phone.
If a hunt feels unfair, a hunter gets stuck, or you have an idea for a sixth map, I’d genuinely like to hear it.
— Tahlia Briggs, Newport VIC
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