Shadowmon Hunters is a free online monster catching game that runs in your browser. You
explore, you fight wild creatures in real time, and you catch them — but only after you have
broken the armour they are wearing.
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.
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.
Jabs, beams, bursts and armour-breakers. Real cooldowns, no turns anywhere.
15
STARTERS
One per type, each with a three-stage evolution line. Your first pick matters.
9
ZONES
Two towns, six routes and the Underforge, laid out on one continuous map with a loop, not a corridor.
8
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.
Fifteen starters, with matchups shown before you commit.
Cinderhollow — buildings you walk into, people who talk back.
The Shadowpedia, grouped by type.
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.
Coldiron — the second town, and the Unshadowed hall.
The Kiln Road. Quiet in a way grass is not supposed to be.
The Spine, where the wind strips grown plating in a season.
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.
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
WASDmove — in the world and in a fight
Mouseaim
123your three moves, on real cooldowns
Spacedash — briefly invulnerable
Cthrow a Shadowcube
Etalk / use
Qtry to disengage
Mmenu
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.
Common questions
ABOUT SHADOWMON HUNTERS
Is Shadowmon Hunters free?
Yes. It is a free online game that runs in your browser with no download, no account and no in-game purchases. Your save stays on your own device as a code you keep.
How do you catch a shadowmon?
You have to break all three of its armour plates first. Each hit you land shatters exactly one plate. Once all three are gone the shadowmon goes feral — double attack and double speed — and only then will a Shadowcube take it, because the cube captures the creature's shadow and armour casts no shadow.
How many shadowmon are there?
200 species across 15 types, with 100 moves between them. Fifteen of those are starter lines with two evolutions each.
Is this a turn-based game like Pokémon?
No. Battles are real time. You move, aim and fire while the other creature does the same, so cooldowns and positioning matter as much as stats do.
Can I play Shadowmon Hunters on my phone?
Yes. The game re-lays itself out for a phone screen with touch controls, and you can add it to your home screen and play it offline.
Can I play with a friend?
Yes. There is a link feature for trading and duelling with someone else, and a TV mode where the game runs on a big screen and your phone becomes the controller. It exchanges game data only — there is no chat.
