Someone on my twitter feed first mentioned eating 1,000 candies about a week ago. I was curious enough to give it a shot, but gave up about 30 seconds in.
The browser based game is text based only, and as soon as I was in a counter started ticking candies. I ate some candies, clicked save once or twice, threw some candy on the ground, and then gave up. I was definitely doing it wrong.
To tell you how to do it right would be spoiling almost everything that IS the mysterious
Candies game (otherwise known as Candy Box). You eat candy, you throw candy on
the ground. There are lollipops, lots and lots of lollipops. Have you ever wanted to
have a candy forest like in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory? Well, I feel like
Candies is probably the closest I’m ever going to get to growing that diabetes-riddled
fantasy.
How I envision Candy Box creator Aniwey
(Image sourced from asecretforest.typepad.com)
To put it bluntly, I’m addicted. In my current run of Candy Box (about 36 hours), I’ve
eaten 87,790 candies. Yeah, hour 37 somebody better bring me some insulin–stat.
Candies/Candy Box is one of those mystery wrapped in an enigma games– it showed
up out of nowhere from indie developer Aniwey within the last couple weeks. Sucking
players into questing, farming and brewing with eye popping ASCii graphics, and it’s
completely free to play casual game mentality. Aniwey states on his bare-bones
website aniwey.net that he speaks French and is learning English, and refuses to use
Facebook (including a link to resources supporting his choice)– I like him already.
Shhh! It’s a secret.
To outline the details of Candy Box, would be to divulge it’s amazing secrets– which,
according to the game’s stats, are surprisingly well preserved. As of the game’s last
update to the stats page (apparently due to server overload the updates are a bit behind), Candy box has over 383,358 saves to date as of 1:06pm on May 6,2013. Based on how many times I’ve saved my progress today, I can only assume that that means individual users/ip addresses saving continual content.
That being said, when I saved my Candy Box progress before bed, I emailed myself a copy of my unique save file URL and my save file code. Once I was settled into my office for the day, I opened up the browser based on my save file, and every few hours checked to see how many thousands of lollipops I had acquired. The idea of calculating how much time it would take to acquire 60,000 lollipops, set a reminder, and go about my daily work business in the interim– felt oh so good. For once a game I can play in the background without guilt! I interacted with Candy Box a handful of times throughout the day (while on hold, on a break, etc), and each time I was surprised with something new.
So many Easter Eggs!
With the game coming up fast on 400k downloads, some of the stats available from the
games stat page surprised me. In example, the amount of folks who’ve discovered an
Easter Egg yielding 100 free candies is a staggeringly low 62,654 (this given the world
of social media we live in), and the amount of game saves which have competed the
game: a mere 8,533. Oh yeah, because by the way– this game is a little bit hard! It’s
not all about getting diabetes guys!
A review, kind of…
As a reminder: Reviewing Candy Box in full, would be to ruin the game for everyone to
come! So, I’m giving Candy Box a review score of 9, because I haven’t finished it, and
also because I don’t even know where I could begin to score it on a traditional scale.
The real reason I’m only giving it a 9? Because I want to play it on my iPod and my
windows phone SO BAD. Although, based on that– maybe it’s for the best that I can’t.
Candy Box/Candies is completely charming, and minimalist, and great. (Addicting
seemed like the obvious choice) As a free, browser-based, text-only game, it’s amazing.
I’d say go get it, but you can’t really do anything except for click this link, and go share
your love of sugary goodness with the world! (Or the ground.)
