About Desert Dash
Desert Dash is an endless runner. Your camel runs automatically across the dunes, and you have one job: jump over the cacti and rocks in its path. The run only ends when you hit something, and the camel keeps getting faster the longer you last.
How to play
- The game starts with your first jump. From then on the camel runs on its own.
- Your score is the distance you cover, shown in the corner and on the score bar.
- Obstacles are either rocks (low) or cacti (taller). About a third of them are cacti.
- You can only jump while on the ground. Each jump is the same height and length; there is no double jump and no way to make a jump bigger by holding the button.
- Running speed rises steadily every second with no upper limit; after one minute you are moving more than two and a half times as fast as at the start.
- The gaps between obstacles are random, and they also shrink a little over the first 48 seconds of a run.
- Touching any obstacle ends the run. The hitboxes are slightly smaller than the pictures, so a near miss is usually safe.
Controls
- Keyboard: Space or the Up arrow jumps.
- Mouse: click anywhere on the game to jump.
- Touch: tap anywhere on the game to jump.
Tips and strategy
- Jump timing changes as you speed up. Early on you can jump late, close to the obstacle; later you need to jump earlier because you cover more ground in the air.
- Each jump lasts about seven tenths of a second. When two obstacles are close together, wait until you have landed before pressing again; presses in mid-air do nothing.
- Watch the gap after an obstacle as well as the obstacle itself. Landing right before a second one leaves no time to jump again.
- Cacti are taller than rocks, but the jump clears both with room to spare, so focus on timing rather than height.
- Keep your eyes towards the right side of the screen where obstacles appear, not on the camel.
Background
Endless runners, where the character moves forward automatically and the player only handles jumping or dodging, became a major mobile genre around 2009 to 2011, as the single-input design suited touch screens. Side-scrolling running games with obstacles to hop over have older roots in arcade and home computer games, but the endless format made each run a test of how long you can last rather than whether you can reach the end. A well-known example is the dinosaur game built into the Chrome browser as an offline screen in 2014.
Questions
- Does it get faster?
- Yes, continuously. Speed rises by a fixed amount every second for the whole run and never stops increasing.
- Can I double jump or duck?
- No. There is a single jump of fixed height, and it can only be used while the camel is on the ground.
- Where is my best distance saved?
- In your browser's local storage on this device. It stays there until you clear your site data.