Harkfell

Harkfell is a quiet little platformer about listening. The stones on the fells used to ring, and now only the wind does. Somewhere far below, a very low note is waiting for its overtones to come back, and you're the small, long-eared creature who goes looking for them.

Find it by ear

The thing you're looking for is something you can hear. A missing note sounds from its direction and gets louder as you get closer, and if you stand still for a moment, the land will tell you where to go. Every note you bring home joins the drone you hear everywhere after that, so you can hear how far you've come with your eyes shut.

Every so often, in a room you've never seen, the world plays you a song!

There are no words in the world and no tutorial. It just begins, and you explore.

Headphones bring it closest

Everything you hear is synthesized live while you play. There isn't a single recorded sound in the game! It's made to work on laptop and phone speakers too, but with headphones you'll hear which way things are much more clearly, and that's a big part of the fun.

What's in this slice

This is an early slice of Harkfell: the first three regions of the world. The Hollow is a ring of old standing stones where you wake up. Reedfen is a wide, wet fen of reeds, still water and frogs. Glasswood is a birch wood west of the Hollow where everything is frozen and glazed in ice, with caves of blue ice underneath that the moths light for you. That's 58 rooms to wander through, climb, wall-jump, swim and listen to. More regions are on the way, and each release gets a post on the News page.

How to play

• Keyboard: the arrow keys or WASD to move, climb and swim, and Space or Z to jump. You can cling to walls and jump off them, too. To drop down through birch branches, hold down and press jump. In the browser, F goes fullscreen, and the game pauses by itself when you switch tabs or windows.
• Touch: the ring in the lower left is your joystick, and a tap anywhere on the right half of the screen jumps. To drop through branches, hold the stick straight down and tap to jump.

Play it free, or download it

The browser version on this page is free, and so is the one at harkfell.com. The downloads are pay what you want. $0 is completely fine! If you'd like to support the game, the suggested $5 helps me keep making it.

How it was made

I designed Harkfell and I direct every part of how it's made. AI agents write the code, the rooms, the pixel art and the music from my direction, and I play every build, listen to every sound, and decide what stays. No image generator was used: an agent wrote the code that draws the pixel art, pixel for pixel. If the use of AI is a dealbreaker for you, I understand! The source and the commit history are public, so you can see exactly how it was made.

It's written in Sigil, my own Scheme. The code is GPL-3.0-or-later and the art and music are CC BY 4.0; the source is on GitHub and Sigil Forge. The Flux Harmonic mark is not covered by either license.

Made by David Wilson at Flux Harmonic. Also from Flux Harmonic: Crash The Stack, cyberpunk takes on Mahjongg solitaire, Klondike, Minesweeper and a rhythm game.