Candle Route

Genre: Top-Down Puzzle

Players: 1

.

Review:

Candle Route is a family-friendly Top-Down Puzzle game released on mobile devices in 2009 and ported to PC in 2016, and in the time in between, it was brought over to the Nintendo DSi via the DSiWare service in 2012, and later grandfathered into the Nintendo 3DS eShop when the Nintendo 3DS released. In this game, players guide a walking flame through a maze, collecting matchsticks and using those matchsticks to light candles.

The presentation in Candle Route is odd. This game uses 2D art that seems as if it was sketched using crayons, backed by a light piano tune. That’s not the odd part, that’s actually reasonably endearing. The odd part is that this relatively placid presentation is punctuated by the bizarre high-pitched squeals of the anthropomorphized flame as he follows the course you guide him on. It’s a bit jarring, and the strange and alien nature of the noise doesn’t fit with the rest of the game’s kid-friendly presentation.

The game has players trying to chart the best path to follow to collect the matchsticks and light the candles in as few turns as possible. Unfortunately, the rules that govern the flame’s movement are not self-evident, and the game seems to go out of its way to try to defy what the player wants when they draw a path, opting to go around key points rather than through them. The game never explains why it does this.

As a result, Candle Route is a Puzzle games whose puzzles operate on rules the player can only guess at. In my opinion, that simply is not fun, and this combined with the odd presentation make for a game that has some potential to be interesting, but is largely just frustrating and off-putting.

tl;dr – Candle Route is a Top-Down Puzzle game where player draw paths to guide a flame to matchsticks and then to a candle. It’s not a bad setup for a Puzzle game, but the game frequently seems to want to make it difficult to follow the path you designate, and the odd presentation can be off-putting.

Grade: C-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Andy Miller, Exlene, Johannes, Homer Simpin, Ilya Zverev, Eli Goodman, Kristoffer Wulff, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Francis Obst, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}