Candle: The Power of the Flame
Puzzle Adventure Platformers aren’t as prevalent as they once were, but Teku Studios, the developer of Candle: The Power of the Flame, has not only created an enticing and challenging take on the genre that they’ve ported to the Nintendo Switch after making the PC and console rounds. In conjunction with the publisher Merge Games, Candle tells a tale of magic and mischief as you uncover the secrets that are essential to making your way across the dangerous countryside. Does Candle bring to light any new changes to the Switch version? This is our Candle: The Power of the Flame Review.
Teku the Light-Bringer
Candle follows the main character Teku as he seeks to find his tribes Shaman who was taken after the evil Wakcha raided his village and razed it to the ground. Armed with a magical candle, Teku is thrown right into a series of puzzles that are as captivating as they are perplexing. As with most adventure platformers, failure is necessary, and Teku Studios makes it easy to fail, as in most cases you start close enough to where you died that you don’t really lose a lot of time getting back into things. Just within the first hour, I died from being eaten by multiple frogs, a giant head crushed me over a dozen times, and every single enemy from the Wakcha tribe I met wanted nothing more than to pummel me into the ground, which they did, repeatedly.
With a little perseverance and some back and forth between zones to find and collect the necessary tools, Teku can become successful in his endeavors, but not without some pangs of frustration. Candle is exceptionally illustrated through vibrant watercolor, and while it makes every scene and interaction beautiful in a unique way, it also makes situations where an item you need to collect may not be as visible. There are at least a dozen examples of this, but one that immediately springs to mind is finding a dart that had punctured a sign board. I must have passed it a half-dozen times running back and forth between the different scenes until I finally found it by accident. In most of my experiences where I became frustrated with not being able to find my way, if I did happen to find my way in the end, it was due to sheer luck by me doing things I thought I wasn’t supposed to be doing.
Curiouser and Curiouser
In some cases, Teku will be asked to play what I would consider, puzzle minigames, which could have been somewhat easier to manage using touch controls rather than the Switches controller, but they are a fun departure from the more obscure puzzles of the open world. Candle is a little more than just a puzzler. While it will be necessary to find and collect items, there will be times where your jumping and timing prowess will be required for you to get to the next echelon of mystery. Because of that, Candle may not be a great game for those that are strictly puzzle oriented players, as you may find that in the grand scheme of adventure puzzlers, this one isn’t a mind-boggling point and click experience.
