In an era where a lot of the AAA industry aims to make games more graphically advanced – more features, more levels, and more playtime – sometimes it makes games feel bloated. Candylands Journey takes us back to simpler times with cute pixel art, simplistic gameplay, and an experience that the average gamer can complete in a couple of hours. It is a nostalgic experience, but are rose-tinted glasses a required piece of equipment to enjoy Candylands Journey? Read on as Cubed3 picks up its magical wand and heads out on this new adventure!
More is a massive keyword of the current era in the mainstream of gaming. Everything has to be an enormous sandbox with impressive graphics that might no longer be noticeable if there are further advancements. Everything has to push the hardware to its limits, which demands massive teams and a considerable budget.
In this world, a game like Candylands Journey feels like a breath of fresh air. With a tiny team of three people, and a style that would look right at home on the SNES, it manages to scratch that nostalgic itch from the old times – the times when a game was allowed to be something to play over a weekend for a quick rush of fun.
The gameplay also feels like a massive blast to the past. The primary spell the cute little witch protagonist uses involves bubbles. And yes, the bubbles do work similarly to the fun bubbles from the classic Bubble Bobble. It is an enjoyable mechanic that works remarkably well in a classic styled 2D platformer as it gives the player a lot of creative freedom in how to tackle the game’s simple, yet playful level design.
Bubbles alone would be enough to make anyone’s retro heart beat a little faster, but there is more! Many of the enemies drop hats when defeated with different abilities that the cute witch can put on. Does this mechanic sound familiar? And this is just what the player starts with. Throughout the game, new spells can be bought that can spawn wild animals to fight enemies, fireballs, ice balls, and a couple of beam-based spells.
The level design is also good, with secret areas and puzzle pieces that the beloved witch must collect to fight the final boss. In theory, this sounds fun. However, here we see one of the game’s design flaws. First of all, every single puzzle piece exists in plain sight. It is more challenging to find the emeralds and keys required to actually beat the level than it is to find these secrets. It is pretty evident that this is a game made with the youngest of gamers in mind.
That said, games do not need to be cryptic or challenging to be enjoyable, something Kirby’s Adventure proved back in 1993. The actual problem is that to reach these, some of the unlockable spells are required, and yes, even on the first stage, which is before it is even possible to unlock these spells. That’s right, there is a need for backtracking and replaying entire levels to fight the final boss.
For a game designed for kids, this is quite a weird choice – One thing children are not well-known for is their infinite patience. It can be confusing to be at the end of the first level and see an uncollectable collectable right there, taunting the player with its existence. There is really no way at this point to know that it is actually impossible to reach it, yet.
If this were the only confusing thing in Candylands Journey, it would still have been a fantastic game. Now it is time to talk about the real elephant in the room. The graphical style is beautiful and stylistic, and at times almost every single frame looks gorgeous. However, this beauty comes at the cost of playability. It is, at first, nearly impossible to tell the difference between what is and what isn’t a wall and what parts of the level can be interacted with without taking damage.
Spikes in gaming usually mean damage or death. Still, in some levels of Candylands Journey, there are background objects far in the forefront that are very VERY spiky, making it look like a path is blocked off, and many of the walls look like background objects. It causes a lot of confusion about where the player can go and where they can’t until they memorise what is and isn’t intangible.
In addition to this, the backgrounds also often cause enemies to be quite tricky to spot, especially at the start of the game, where some characters clearly resemble NPCs (more so than many enemies) and are impossible to interact with. All of this makes this beautiful and creative platformer feel like a mess to play.
It is painful. The game design is spot on, and the art is beautiful. Everything is there for an excellent short retro-style game to spend a couple of hours with, or as a nice gift for a child. It is just so confusing due to the complete disregard of how the very detailed levels would affect gameplay in practice. All of this is just an extra round of playtesting away from being fixed – what could have been an excellent game becomes a quite mediocre mess. The team behind this game are clearly good at what they are doing, and it will be interesting to see what they do in the future. However, sadly, it is impossible to recommend Candylands Journey as most of the challenge in the game is deciding what is and isn’t a wall.
