One ghost rides the MRT. Twenty-four moves to catch her.

Hantu Line, now on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, is a single-player hidden-movement deduction game set after midnight on the Singapore MRT. One hidden Pontianak — the most feared hantu in Malay folklore — rides the network invisibly. Five TransCom Officers have 24 moves to hunt her down. You choose which side to play; the AI takes the other.

The hidden-movement tradition, rerouted through Singapore

If you have ever played Scotland Yard, Fury of Dracula, or Letters from Whitechapel, you know the shape of a hidden-movement game: one player moves secretly across a shared map, everyone else deduces their position from the trail they cannot help but leave. It is one of tabletop's great inventions — a genre where the tension comes entirely from information, not dice.

Hantu Line takes that tradition somewhere it has never been: the real Singapore MRT network, drawn in official LTA line colours — green East–West Line, red North–South Line, purple North East Line, orange Circle Line, blue Downtown Line, and brown Thomson–East Coast Line — plus express bus routes and the ghost's own secret paths.

And instead of a Mr. X in a top hat, the hidden piece is a Pontianak. In Malay folklore she is the ghost you do not want to meet on an empty road at night — white gown, long hair, announced by frangipani on the air. In Hantu Line she is loose on the last train, and TransCom knows she is on the network. They just don't know where.

How a hunt plays out

Every game of Hantu Line is 24 moves. The Pontianak wins by surviving all of them; the officers win by landing on her station — or cornering her with nowhere left to run — before the clock runs out.

The officers never see her line or her direction. What they see is the kind of ticket she spends each turn, logged move by move. From that trail, the map shades every station she could possibly be hiding on, and every officer move narrows the cloud further. It is deduction, not luck: read the log well and the shaded region collapses to a handful of stations; read it badly and she slips through the gap you left open.

The squad is pure Singapore: five TransCom Officers codenamed Kopi, Teh, Milo, Bandung, and Horlicks. They only win as a unit — spread the drinks stall too thin and the ghost walks straight through.

Every move is a ticket

Movement is currency. Each turn is paid for with a travel ticket, and the type of ticket is the information the whole game turns on:

Then comes the twist that gives Hantu Line its engine: every travel ticket an officer spends is handed straight to the Pontianak. The hunters' urgency literally fuels her escape. Run the squad dry chasing shadows and she rides free on your fare. Every hunt becomes a race between deduction and depletion.

Cameras, calls, and blackouts

The information war has weapons on both sides. Each officer starts with one CCTV card — spend it at the right moment and a camera hit pins her exact station into the deduction log. The city itself fights back too: on set rounds a report drags her into the light — an SGSecure tip, a 999 call, a station master's radio, a viral platform photo. A brief flash on the map, a permanent pin in the log.

Playing her side, you fight the surveillance state directly. The Pontianak holds three Blackout cards: play one and the feed dies — signal lost, nothing recorded — while you drift another stop into the dark. Add Black Tickets, Double Moves, and her secret Hantu Routes — night boats, street walks, and a construction tunnel that officers cannot follow — and a well-played ghost is genuinely frightening to chase.

Two sides, three difficulties

Hantu Line is single-player, and the AI plays whichever pieces you don't. Take the badge and run the whole squad, control just one or two officers alongside AI partners, or take the gown and vanish. Three difficulty levels — Rookie, Regular, and Inspector — set how sharply the machine reads the board.

Because her route, your reads, and the tickets in hand shift every game, no two chases play out the same way. It is not a puzzle with one answer; it is a haunting that reinvents itself each time you press start.

Offline, private, one purchase

Hantu Line follows the same rules as every ARRcade app. It plays fully offline, collects no data, requires no account, and asks for no permissions. There are no ads, no in-app purchases, and no third-party SDKs — the whole game runs on your device.

The price is $4.99, once. That buys the entire game: both sides, all difficulties, the full map. It requires iOS 17 or later and runs on iPhone and iPad.

Frequently asked questions