Candle Prick

Stab your enemies to form extensions of yourself and extinguish every candle.

Buy from:

Steam

Candle Prick is a grid-based sokoban puzzle game about poking candles in a pixelated dungeon. As a candle knight, you need to cleverly use spears to push, stab and move enemies to pierce the candle in each level. Candle Prick offers a simple and fun experience that will particularly appeal to puzzle gamers who like their sokoban with moderate difficulty.

Candle Prick has a limited set of mechanics, everything revolves around spears and enemies. Unused spears can be attached to your character, and the direction an attached spear faces never changes. For example, if you hit a spear from the left, it will always point to the right. This leads to tricky situations in which the lack of room becomes problematic and exercising spatial visualization is necessary. However spears can be detached when blocked by an obstacle.

Attaching spears is the base of Candle Prick, but they are not always sufficient on their own; when the candle is impossible to reach, you also need to manipulate enemies. Enemies can be used in two different ways: they form bridges when pushed into a hole, and they can be stabbed. Stabbing an enemy lets you freely move it, allowing you to use them as an extension of yourself as they can also attach spears. Additionally, enemies can stab other enemies and form long clusters.

Candle Prick has a branching world map that lets you choose several paths of different difficulties. The puzzles are rated from 1 to 5 stars and, while the 4 and 5-star levels are usually locked at the end of a path with easier levels, it is possible to tackle some of them right from the beginning. The game also provides a hint system, but completing everything is not required anyway, since you can reach the end by solving only 30 puzzles.

The puzzles sometimes feature an optional objective to prick. These slightly harder challenges reward you with palettes that change the three colors used in the game. The rough pixel art and the constant flow of particles might be confusing for some people, but the palettes can help improve the experience.

This description was written by Andréas Andrieux.