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Hollow Seeker
Saved games stay in this browser only.
About the game
The cave in Hollow Seeker is alive. Its ceiling and floor drift apart and then close again in a slow, steady rhythm, and when they meet, the only safe places are the hollows: spots where the rock leaves enough room for a small explorer to crouch.
You walk left and right, one step at a time. Every step to the right that reveals a new stretch of cave is worth a point, so the game is a constant trade-off: push on for the score, or stop where it is safe and wait for the cave to open again. Each time it opens, it opens a little wider, so the walls have further to travel when they close.
It was OBONO's first game for the Arduboy, made in 2016, and it is a good example of the small, sharp arcade ideas that fill the rest of his catalogue.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Arduboy, the open, credit-card-sized handheld with a tiny black-and-white screen: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in Ardens, an Arduboy emulator. Click Play now and use the menu on the title screen.
The game remembers its records in the emulated memory of the Arduboy, and that is kept in this browser automatically. F2 also saves the complete state of the game at any moment, and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.
Controls
| Key | Arduboy button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Left / right | D-pad | walk one step |
| Up / down | D-pad | choose a menu option |
| Z or X | A or B | confirm in menus, start again after a game over |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the state |
A few things worth knowing
The screen shakes before the crush. When the cave starts to tremble, the walls are about to meet. Get into a hollow before that, not during it.
A step is not instant. Each move takes a moment to finish, and you can only step into a column if there is room between it and the one you are in.
The menu has a record screen. RECORD on the title screen shows your best results and how long you have played.
Credits and licence
Hollow Seeker was designed, programmed, drawn and scored by OBONO, who has been making small games for the Arduboy since 2016. It is free software under the MIT licence. It is built with the Arduboy 1.1.1 library (BSD licence, with music code by Len Shustek under the MIT licence). The licence texts are linked from this page, and the source code is in the author's ArduboyWorks repository.