Candle Reviews

This game has many solutions the player would have no idea were the case. For example in one part of the first level you need to sneak past a sleeping guard. Going near him with your "candle" lit will cause the guard to instantly attack and kill you. He also has small bugs in front of him you need to carefully avoid to sneak by without making a noise of stepping on one of them. Once you sneak by, you can pull a lever that puts a drape in front of the guard for a limited amount of time. You assume you are supposed to walk by him after going back down and lighting up your "candle" again. But it seems impossible because you would have to sneak by the bugs twice, which seems like it would take way longer than the time limit. So why would you ever try it? Because if you do manage to get down there, YOU WOULD NEVER KNOW - but the bugs are afraid of fire. Would be nice if I could know that without being instantly killed by the guard so I could actually notice it! The game has too many neverending "we don't want to record dialogue so we will show you with pictures what the character is saying" like they last WAY TOO LONG The most annoying design choice in this game for me is the button setup for the candle. You hold down the "candle" button to turn it off, and press it quickly to do a "charge move" which makes no logical sense. In every game you hold and press a button to do a move that looks like you charge up a special attack. So every time I want to do it, I do that, then I accidentally turn off my candle, resulting in me needing to backtrack to get it lit up again annoyingly. Basically I would describe this game's design as annoying. You cannot run in many of the rooms as it will instantly kill you. Everything kills you if you do anything ever. The game discourages experimenting, because everything kills you always. I didn't realize you could swim in this game, because I thought "swimming? I can't even run 2 meters from an enemy without dying why would this pathetic guy be able to swim" The game is full of "gotcha" moments like "drop down to this ledge that is impossible to see and looks like you will die for sure by doing so". Just why? You have a "light burst" move with your candle in the game, but 99% of the time it is useless. So you never use it. But occasionally, for absolutely no clear reason, you need to use it to progress, and you would never think that was what you needed to do since it has no association with what you need to do, but just enables it to happen unexpectedly. Oh my god, the part where you have a mount in the final level is abysmal platforming. Your jump arc is so jank and hazards can go straight through you without killing you, as well as hit you without even being present yet. Awful but at least it was short. So in short, the game looks nice, has nice music, but has really annoying gameplay and overly obtuse puzzles. It could really be remedied by having a hint system. And no, by "hint system" I don't mean "tell me exactly what to do" system. All that really would be needed is to tell the player "go to this specific room to progress". Sometimes there are obscure items hidden in the middle of nowhere that are required to progress, like the wooden cover for the cauldron that is 50000 miles away from where you use it. A hint system like I mentioned would make it clear you need to explore somewhere you thought was already done. Another extremely confusing thing. The torch puzzle in Act 3. Once you get to the final portion, a button opens up, and this button when you press it shows a "lock" button on the bottom door. I thought this meant that the door was supposed to move, but it's locked. So I thought I needed to do something else to unlock it. What it actually meant was "this door won't move anymore so the puzzle can be solved now". This is pointlessly confusing. Yet another extremely confusing thing. On the same torch puzzle, the entire mechanism uses 2 towers with markings indicating one is for one control and one is for another. You have two controls on the right tower with markings from both towers, so you assume this controls everything. However you can actually jump across and control more. Why would you make that so hard to tell with the intentional markings on each tower???? Another thing that truly annoys me about this game is that it's constantly contradictory. It ingrains into your brain that you cannot have your candle lit near any enemy or they will instantly see you, but in the final level you have to sneak around right next to enemies with your candle lit to proceed. Why would I ever try doing that??? You made me die instantly by having my candle lit within a 1km radius of enemies on the first level! Get better game designers The god damn pillow timing puzzle in the end is 99% of the time broken. You grab the pillow perfectly, and it makes you fall down for no reason unless you match their exact arbitrary timing, making it seem like what you want to do just doesn't work in general. Who the HELL is going to figure this puzzle out unless a walkthrough told them to do it? The timing is simply too precise for it to look like an actual solution to the average player!

The artwork is very creative, but I'm so frustrated with how unwieldy the jumping is. Some of these puzzles are practically unsolvable because of how finicky the controls are. I'm going to finish it, because it's cute, but I don't know if I can really say that trying the same exact jump 100 times in a row is very fun. Edit: Things become a bit more manageable after learning that a long jump to the right requires holding down the right shift key, but I'm still leaving this a negative review because the movement is still subpar and that stupid keybinding has cost me like an hour so far.

Absolutely BEAUTIFUL game! Full of wonder, excellent storytelling and engaging gameplay. I wish they made more games like this! I especially liked the attention to details which later reveal significant to the story. The side quests/achievements are fun too! 10/10 would recommend :)