Games like Hunter Assassin: stealth games in the browser

What makes Hunter Assassin work

Hunter Assassin, a 2019 mobile game from Ruby Game Studio, has a simple deal: you have a knife, they have guns, and they cannot see behind themselves. You tap where your assassin should run, and if you reach a guard unseen, the guard goes down. Guards walk set routes with a visible cone in front of them, and stepping into a cone gets you shot within a second or two. A level is one screen and about a minute long, and each one is a small puzzle about timing: wait for the turn, run, strike, hide.

The idea is much older than phones. Metal Gear made being seen the way you lose back in 1987, and Metal Gear Solid's radar drew the guards' cones on screen. Commandos and Desperados built whole tactics games around cones you could inspect, Thief taught players to watch a light gem, and Mark of the Ninja made light and darkness the heart of 2D stealth. Hunter Assassin stripped all of it down to one finger and one minute, which is why it works on a phone and in a browser tab.

Umbra, a stealth assassin game built for TabSpawn

Umbra is this site's take on the idea, free and playable in a browser tab with nothing to install. It keeps the deal, one assassin, one knife, guards with flashlight cones, and adds the thing the older stealth games were built on: light. Some rooms are lit and some are dark, and a guard takes more than twice as long to notice you in the dark. A light gem in the corner shows how exposed you are, so the shadows on the floor become a second map of the level.

You also get two tools. A pebble thrown past a guard pulls them off the route to look, and Shadow Step is a quick dash, untouchable for a moment, for crossing a cone you could not wait out. The guards answer with variety: riflemen on routes, watchers sweeping from a post, shotgunners who charge, snipers with laser sights across the map, and dogs that notice you all the way round. Bodies matter too: a patrol that finds one raises the alarm and every guard gets sharper.

There are 50 levels in five districts, from The Warehouse to The Citadel, each generated from a fixed seed and played through by a bot with the real rules, so none is impossible. Three stars per level reward a clean clear, never being seen and beating par; targets drop gems that unlock six assassins with their own perks, and your total goes to a public Top 10.

How to get better at stealth games like this

• Wait more than you move. Guards repeat themselves; one full loop of a route tells you where the gap is.
• Strike from behind or from the side. A guard's meter fills only while you are inside the cone, and slower the further away you are.
• Use the dark. In Umbra a dark room more than doubles the time a guard needs to see you, which is often the difference between a strike and a shot.
• Lure, then go. A noise turns a guard's back to you; move the moment they turn, not when they arrive.
• Mind the bodies. Take a guard down where the next patrol will not walk past, or the whole level wakes up.
• When you are spotted, break the line of sight. A wall between you and the gun is worth more than speed.

Other TabSpawn games for a short break

If you like planning a route and then executing it, Trustfall is a troll platformer where each level is a ten-second plan that the level tries to ruin, Bowfall is a ragdoll archery campaign about angles and timing, and Airlock is a 3D social deduction game where you are the one hiding in the shadows if you draw the impostor.

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