Shadowmon Hunters

The one thing to understand

ARMOUR IS THE LOCK ON THE CAGE

Every shadowmon wears three armour plates, and those plates are doing two jobs at once. They are the reason it is hard to kill, and the reason it is impossible to catch.

3 plates = DEF ×3. 2 plates = ×2. 1 plate = ×1.
Every single hit shatters one. So armour is only ever three hits deep — and a plated shadowmon cannot be taken at all.

A battle in progress, one plate shattered

SO EVERY FIGHT ASKS THE SAME QUESTION

Fast moves barely dent plating. The heavy ones marked BREAKER tear through it but leave you wide open. You are choosing, constantly, between killing the thing in front of you and cracking it open so you can keep it.

AND THEN IT GOES FERAL

Strip all three plates and a shadowmon changes: double attack, double speed, and no defence bonus left at all. That is when a Shadowcube will finally stick — and it is also when the thing is most likely to kill you.

It happens to yours too. Whoever loses their plating first becomes dangerous and fragile at the same moment.

A Shadowcube does not hold a body. It takes the shadowmon's shadow and keeps it. Armour casts no shadow — which is exactly why you have to break it off first.

What is in it

A WHOLE GAME, IN ONE FILE

200

SHADOWMON

Every one drawn procedurally — no two silhouettes alike. 80 of them evolve.

TYPES

Ember, Tide, Verdant, Bolt, Stone, Gloom, Radiant, Frost, Gale, Toxin, Iron, Mind, Beast, Aether, Spore.

100

MOVES

Jabs, beams, bursts and armour-breakers. Real cooldowns, no turns anywhere.

STARTERS

One per type, each with a three-stage evolution line. Your first pick matters.

ZONES

Two towns, six routes and the Underforge, laid out on one continuous map with a loop, not a corridor.

CHAPTERS

A story with an antagonist who has an argument, a rival who pays for it, and a finale you win with the armour mechanic.

Choosing a starter — Fifteen starters, with matchups shown before you commit.

Cinderhollow — buildings you walk into, people who talk back.

Party screen — Party, cube storage, and slag tuning at the Forge.

THE REST OF IT

Nine zones — Cinderhollow, Ashen Ridge, the Sump, Coldiron, the Kiln Road, the Glass Flats, the Spine, Lastlight Hollow and the Underforge — with wayhouses that heal you and become your respawn, and fast travel between the ones you have found. Trainers who spot you from across the path. Doors, interiors, shopkeepers. Supply counters in every wayhouse that sell cubes, patch kits, mend kits and rouses for slag — the same slag the Forge wants for tuning, so you are always choosing between being stronger and being ready. Music generated in the browser, note by note. Save codes instead of accounts.

The story

SOMEBODY DECIDED TO FREE THEM

A Shadowcube takes the shadow, not the animal — and armour casts no shadow. That is why a plated shadowmon can never be caught, and Cinderhollow has spent a hundred years using it to keep its hunters alive.

Vesk works it the other way round. Give every wild shadowmon plating that never comes off and no hunter can ever take one again. He is not wrong about what catching is. He is wrong about what it costs: a shadowmon whose shadow never comes back stops being itself, and then stops.

EIGHT CHAPTERS, AND A FINALE THAT USES THE MECHANIC

Crates in the Sump stamped with your own town's forge mark. A recruiting hall in Coldiron. A road where nothing casts a shadow any more. Your rival, holding the lead of something that does not know her.

Vesk's shadowmon wears sealed plating: thicker, and it never goes feral when it breaks, because there is nothing underneath it to go feral with. Break all three plates or do not beat him. That is the whole game, asked once, properly.

The Kiln Road. Quiet in a way grass is not supposed to be.

The Spine, where the wind strips grown plating in a season.

A Shadowpedia entry — Every entry: stats, learnset, evolution line, where it lives.

Two players

PLAYING WITH SOMEONE ELSE

Three of these are just text you paste to a friend. One of them needs a small server, and the game will tell you so.

TRADE · DUEL · LIVE

Send a shadowmon as a code — it leaves your party and arrives in theirs, level, moves and tuning intact.

Share your team and a friend fights your exact party, run by the AI.

Live battle is real-time, one shadowmon each, over a five-letter room code.

OR PUT IT ON THE TV

Open the game on anything with a browser plugged into your telly, pick PLAY ON THE TV, and it shows a five-letter code. Type that code into BE A CONTROLLER on your phone and the phone turns into a gamepad — stick, your three move names, dash, cube and run, with your shadowmon's health along the top.

The phone draws none of the game, so it stays cool and the input is instant. Nothing to install, no account, and no server to run — the code pairs the two devices and then they talk straight to each other. Hold the phone sideways; the pad turns itself.

Feature	Needs a server?
The entire single-player game	No
Save codes	No
Trading by code	No
Fighting a friend's exported team	No
Live real-time PvP	Yes — the little relay in `relay/`
TV screen + phone as the controller	No

The relay is about 200 lines of dependency-free Node. Run node relay/server.js, then point the game at it under Menu → Settings → Relay Address. Full instructions are in the README.

On your phone

PUT IT ON YOUR HOME SCREEN

It installs like an app — its own icon, no browser bars, and it keeps working with no signal. There is no App Store or Play Store step, and nothing to pay for. Pick your phone:

iPhone & iPad

Open this page in Safari (not inside another app's browser).
Tap the Share button — the square with the arrow out of it.
Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen.
Tap Add. It appears with the rest of your apps.

iOS will not show an install button on its own — the Share menu is the only way Apple allows it. Once added, it runs full screen and offline.

Android

Tap INSTALL below, or open the ⋮ menu in Chrome.
Choose Install app or Add to Home screen.
Confirm. It installs as a normal app.

Chrome shows the install prompt here once the page has loaded.

Or just keep the file

Tap DOWNLOAD. You get one file: shadowmon-hunters.html.
It saves to Files on iPhone, or Downloads on Android.
Tap it any time to play. No internet needed, ever.

DOWNLOAD (250 KB)

The whole game is that one file — creatures, music, world and all. Email it to yourself, put it on a USB stick, hand it to a friend.

Your save is a code, not an account. Take one from Menu → Save before you wipe anything, and you can paste it back into any copy, on any device. If you want to start again from scratch: Menu → Settings → Start Over.

How to play

CONTROLS

WASD move — in the world and in a fight

Mouse aim

123 your three moves, on real cooldowns

Space dash — briefly invulnerable

C throw a Shadowcube

E talk / use

Q try to disengage

M menu

On a phone the left stick moves and aims, the buttons on the right are your moves, dash and cube. It scales to any screen.