Candle: The Power of the Flame

I went in expecting a gentle indie platformer dressed up in pretty watercolours, and Candle: The Power of the Flame spent the next several hours quietly proving me wrong in the best possible way. Developed by Spanish indie outfit Teku Studios and published by Merge Games, this is a 2D side-scrolling puzzle-platformer built around Teku, a young shaman's apprentice whose village is attacked by the rival Wakcha tribe. His shaman is kidnapped, and Teku - armed with little more than a candle flame on his hand - has to get him back. That setup is simple. What the game does with it is considerably less so. The core loop sits somewhere between old LucasArts point-and-click adventure design and a Limbo-style physics platformer. You collect items into an inventory, interact with eye symbols scattered around the world to trigger voiced narration that serves as lore and hints, and use Teku's candle to light torches, scare off enemies, and activate environmental mechanisms. The catch is that the flame cannot stay lit indefinitely - you need to locate a fire source to relight it, and the game builds real tension around that limitation. Puzzle solutions are layered across different areas, which means a lot of backtracking to connect dots. Anyone who played Monkey Island and liked the slow burn of figuring out why a rubber chicken matters three screens later will feel right at home. What works exceptionally well is the art. The hand-painted visuals are genuinely striking - the kind of detailed, colour-saturated world you stop to look at rather than sprint through. The voice narration adds atmosphere and the story, while not complex, carries enough tribal mythology and moral weight to stay interesting. The puzzles themselves, when they click, deliver exactly the kind of "oh, THAT'S how it works" satisfaction that makes the genre worth the effort. Reviewers across the board flagged those moments as the real hook, and they're right. What does not work is Teku's responsiveness. Controls feel slightly delayed, and a handful of platforming-heavy sections - a notorious geyser sequence in particular - expose that sluggishness in the worst way. There is no hint system, which is a genuine design gap rather than a stylistic choice; some puzzle solutions are buried well enough that "obscure" barely covers it. The game also wraps up without much incentive to replay, so this is a one-run experience. If you bounce off a puzzle and reach for a guide, the game loses a meaningful chunk of its appeal. On Xbox, the experience translates cleanly from its PC origins. This is best suited to players who want a slow, methodical challenge with a strong visual identity - people who treat puzzle solutions as events worth earning rather than obstacles worth skipping. Genre tourists after action or tight platforming should look elsewhere. But if a hand-crafted world, inventory puzzles, and the satisfaction of cracking something genuinely difficult sounds like your kind of evening, Candle earns your time.

Alex · Scout Team

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