Hexbound is a dark fantasy first person shooter from AZGames, and you play it for free in a browser with no download. You control Palmer, a demon hunter clearing five cursed worlds with guns, spells and gold funded upgrades. Colored keys, hidden rooms and towering bosses stand between him and the corruption at the heart of everything.
What a Run Feels Like
The setup is simple enough. Each world drops you somewhere grim, and none of the five locations feels friendly. There is a ruined castle, a frozen research facility, dusty Egyptian ruins, a dead laboratory and, eventually, hell itself. Every level is built like a maze, so a lot of your time goes into peeking around corners, checking side rooms and hunting the colored keys that open the next stretch. Something is always shuffling toward you out of the dark, and the enemy mix changes as you push deeper, so the same trick rarely works twice.
What keeps me hooked is the rhythm of it. You shoot, back up, swap weapons, find a moment to heal, then push forward again. It feels old school in a good way, closer to the shooters people grew up with than to anything modern and complicated, and the retro look sells that mood without trying too hard. The gold you pick up matters as well, because it feeds straight back into your hunter and makes the later worlds survivable.
Hexbound’s Weapons, Spells and Upgrades
Palmer carries several weapons and learns eight spells, and the spells are the part I did not expect to enjoy this much. Bullets handle most problems, but a well timed spell gets you out of a corner when three monsters are crowding a doorway. Gold raises your health, mana, strength and ammunition, and the permanent perks you unlock along the way quietly stack up until your hunter feels nothing like the one who started the campaign. AZGames shipped the game in August 2026, and there are multiple endings waiting at the end, which gives you a real reason to run the campaign again once the layouts are familiar.
Keep a little gold in reserve for ammunition before a big fight. Running dry halfway through a boss is a rough way to end a run, and I have done it more than once.
Controls
On desktop it plays like a classic keyboard and mouse shooter, and the scheme takes about a minute to learn:
- WASD or the arrow keys move Palmer
- Mouse looks around
- Left click shoots
- Numpad 1 to 4 switches weapons
The HTML5 build also runs in the browser on tablets and phones, though the desktop setup is where the controls feel most natural.
Games With a Similar Mood
- FRAGEN
- Backrooms Butcher
- Grandfather Road Chase Realistic Shooter Guns
