Key Hunter

How to play

Hit the key shown, as fast as you can. A miss takes time off the clock.

What it trains

Raw latency, one key at a time, with nothing to read ahead to. Every other exercise mixes reaction with reading; this one strips the reading out, so what is left is how long your hand takes to find a key. A miss costs you clock rather than a life, which keeps accuracy worth having.

How progress works here

Each game has eight levels (Ghost Race has one for each of your best runs, up to five) and they unlock in order, so clearing one opens the next. A level is cleared by meeting its own target rather than by scoring highly, and a level you have beaten stays beaten. Your best score and the highest level you have reached are kept on this device, separately for each language.

Whatever you type here counts as practice. Keystrokes are attributed to the character the game asked for rather than the one that arrived, which is how a run of wrong keys still teaches the model something useful about the key you were reaching for. That is what makes these worth playing rather than merely diverting.

Five of the seven publish to a leaderboard, one board for each language and level, and what they rank is typing speed measured during the game, recomputed on the server from your keystroke timings - never the game score, which is a number a browser asserts and nothing can check. Skyfall and Rhythm Keys have no board: both set your pace themselves, so everybody who clears a level did it at the level speed, and a board would rank the level rather than the player.

The levels

1. Home row
2. Home row, faster
3. Top row
4. Whole alphabet
5. Alphabet, faster
6. With numbers
7. With symbols
8. Everything