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Continental

The Hyena's Laugh

An audio game played in the dark: a hyena calls from one of eight directions and you must name which, twenty times over, using stereo hearing alone.

The board

Play against the machine. Your best score is kept in this browser only — nothing is sent to the archive.

Click or tap to play. Keyboard works too where the game uses it.

What is playing against you

Nothing plays against you — obstacles arrive on a timer.

No opponent — a timer or a spawner
Nothing is playing against you. There is no opponent in this game at all — no model of you, no plan, no choices being weighed. What feels like an adversary is a spawn timer and a random number generator: obstacles appear on a schedule that tightens as your score rises. This is worth noticing precisely because it can feel otherwise. Difficulty that rises with time reads as an opponent responding to you, and it is not.

Compare every opponent in the archive →

What this version is not

The calls are synthesised from oscillators, not recordings, and sound only roughly like a spotted hyena. Best with headphones. Hyenas across much of the continent are persecuted on the strength of exactly this reputation, which is largely undeserved.

Sources

No sources have been attached to this entry yet. Until they are, treat everything above as provisional.

Related boards

The Archive · Play as Record The Hyena's Laugh Africanpedia