// GAME GUIDE //

Fenny

Dune slide runner · free in your browser · also on Google Play

What is Fenny?

Fenny is a small fennec fox with one job: stay ahead of the night. The desert rolls past from left to right in long sand waves, and the sun is going down the whole time you are on it. Nothing out there can hurt you. There are no spikes, no enemies and no pits. The only thing chasing you is the dark, and the run ends when it catches up.

The whole game is one input. Hold to tuck and dive down the face of a dune, let go at the bottom and the slope throws the fox into the sky. Read the sand well and every valley hands you speed you did not have before. Read it badly and you land flat on the next rise and lose the pace you spent the last dune building. Nobody explains that to you in a tutorial screen, because two dunes are enough to feel it.

Ten mesas roll past under your paws, each with its own shape and colour and its own drift in the terrain, and the water between them is one long jump. That jump is a leap you cannot miss: it plays out on its own once you reach the edge, so the island hop is a reward rather than a place to fail. Arriving on a new mesa rolls the sun back a little and buys you more of the day. So do the sun coins scattered along the good line, which is why the fast route and the long route are usually the same route.

Two systems sit on top of the slide. Trails are the streak: chain three clean slides in a row and a trail ignites behind the fox, doubling your score for as long as you keep the rhythm. Trials are the ladder: small objectives that arrive one group at a time, cross themselves off as you clear them and give you something to chase on a run where the score is not going well. Between them, a bad run still moves something forward.

Every day the desert is rebuilt from a fresh daily seed, palette and all, so the terrain you learn today is not the terrain you get tomorrow. It works offline, it asks for no account, and a session is about two minutes long unless you are having a very good day.

How to play

• Hold to dive: press and hold going downhill. The fox tucks, gravity takes over, and speed builds.
• Release to fly: let go at the bottom of the dune. The slope you just rode is what launches you.
• Land into the next slope: come down on a descending face, not a flat or a rise, and the speed carries through.
• Collect sun coins: they roll the clock back. They sit on the line a good slide already takes you along.
• Reach the next mesa: the island leap is automatic. Arriving buys you daylight.

Controls

One button, everywhere. On a phone or tablet, hold anywhere on the screen and release. On desktop, hold the left mouse button, or the space bar, or the down arrow, whichever your hand prefers. There is nothing else to learn, no menu to memorise and no second control that only matters later. The game is played the same way on the first run and the four hundredth.

Tips from the developers

• Release a fraction before the bottom of the dune rather than at it. The launch angle is what carries you, and the very bottom points you flat.
• Watch the next slope, not the fox. Where you are going to land is the only decision the game asks you to make.
• A small clean hop beats a big messy one. Height costs you time in the air, and time in the air is time the sun keeps moving.
• Do not cross the screen for a coin that is off your line. The daylight it gives back rarely covers the slide you wrecked to reach it.
• Trails are worth protecting. Once a streak is lit, take the safe landing rather than the ambitious one until the terrain calms down.
• Read the trials list before you start. Two of the three are usually things you were going to do anyway, and knowing the third changes how you play the first mesa.
• The sun coming back at a mesa is the real economy of the game. If a route reaches the next island sooner, it is the better route even when the score says otherwise.

Under the hood

Fenny is made by MobX Games, a small indie studio in Germany, and it is a love letter to the one-touch slide games of the early smartphone era. The terrain, the sky, the water and the pickups are all generated by code rather than drawn by hand, which is what lets the whole desert change from one day to the next without shipping a single new asset. The fox and the painted logo are the hand-made parts. It is built in plain JavaScript on a 2D canvas with no engine underneath, and the same build runs in a browser tab and inside the Android app.

FAQ