Dark, quasi-medieval games make for some of the best types of games. Just look back at classics like Castlevania and Dark Souls. Culturally, we’re drawn to that era of heroes (and villains) in armor, fighting to conquer or save the people. There are innumerable games featuring medieval themes and they always tend to pull a second look from players, regardless of the genre.
Today we’re looking at Candle Knight, a medieval-styled 2.5D platformer from Dracma Studios, a new developer out of Mexico. Published by JanduSoft, Candle Knight features a knight whose head is a candle, exploring a surreal landscape. It’s a bit of a weird concept made more so by the thin narrative and rather vague dialogue of the game. Don’t expect a lot in terms of details as you play through either. The reasons you’re doing things and what’s actually going on are clear as mud.
As the candle knight, you wander through what appear to be various rooms of a castle. However, you’re about the size of an actual candle as well so your surroundings are huge and can be daunting and oddly mysterious. While some people have compared Candle Knight to a Souls-like, there’s absolutely no similarity aside from that most of the castle is pretty dark. This is a straightforward puzzle/platformer through and through and almost all your time in it is going to be jumping about and figuring out how to proceed with the occasional enemy fight thrown in.
Levels in Candle Knight are fairly linear with some hidden areas and divergent paths reminiscent of old SNES games. You never get particularly far off course but there are some areas that you can come back to and unlock hidden items. For the most part, you’ll just be travelling ever- forward until you eventually encounter a boss, slowly finding items that build up your health bar and money that you can improve weapons and shields with. There’s not a lot revolutionary about the basic design here.
The mechanics of Candle Knight’s combat system are a bit different however. You’re a living candle and that means you burn. Sadly, there are no clever fire attacks to start out, but the more candles you light, the hotter you burn and as you get hotter, you get stronger, allowing you to tackle tougher enemies with ease. Think of it kind of like a slow-burning combo system where each combo improves your strength. Unfortunately, as you get stronger, your armor gets weaker due to the heat so as you max out, you can die much more easily, making combat challenging. Standing still or failing to hit enemies and objects lowers your heat level and raises your armor level, balancing things back out. Saving at a chalice also lowers your heat level to zero. It’s an odd system that takes some getting used to.
Sadly, the rather interesting combat system is sorely underutilized as you can essentially skip most enemy combat. It is literally possible to jump over and avoid most enemies and they don’t chase you so if you find a tough enemy, you can just bypass them. That’s good because the actual combat itself is clunky and awkward. Candle Knight responds slowly and his swings are typically met with multiple hits by faster enemies. You’ve got a shield, but blocking lowers your heat level and most enemies can be defeated without blocks once you learn their patterns and how to dodge. There are only a handful of enemies strewn throughout levels too, so you won’t have to worry too much about it.
Instead of fighting, you’ll end up jumping all over the place in Candle Knight. This is a platformer after all and the focus is clearly on exploring. Levels are designed so that each new skill you attain such as wall jumping and dashing nets you access to new areas and sections of levels. There are treasure chests hidden everywhere full of secret items with no uses, gold, and zodiac tablets. It’s honestly more profitable to just hunt treasure than it is to fight enemies (who drop gold) if you want to upgrade. Early on, enemies are almost worthless for gold and there’s really no purpose to fighting them. Get the hang of the platforming and you’ll have more than enough cash though.
Candle Knight is full of puzzles but they typically aren’t very difficult. Jump into a painting and find your way through. Ride down something and jump off of it or keep jumping and dashing until you get to the other side. There’s nothing really complex or challenging other than learning the timing and patterns here and even the most remarkably average player should eventually be able to proceed. It’s all about the ambience in Candle Knight with excellent textures and neat designs. The game feels like actual gameplay is secondary to the look in many ways and the design work and visuals are excellent overall. This is a pretty game, no doubt about it.
Unfortunately that beauty accompanies a lack of focus in many other design areas. Camera angles are weird and difficult, bringing back visions of old PS1 games like Pandemonium and Klonoa, only not as well-done. Often, you cannot tell where you’re jumping in Candle Knight as the camera zooms in and hides the area around you. Come back to the same area via a different route and the camera is zoomed out to make you and everything around you so miniscule that combat is difficult. You’re either losing the forest for the trees or the trees for the forest constantly and it can be really irritating to not know what perspective to expect next. Here and there, the game even zooms out to a top down mode but you can barely see your knight at all, massively reducing the impact of the perspective shift.
The music in Candle Knight is similarly weak. It’s not that it’s bad. Instead it’s just very adequate and doesn’t grab the attention. Soft music playing in the background that ramps up only during a boss fight and feels like you’re in an elevator doesn’t really grab the player and while it’s perfectly serviceable music, it simply doesn’t seem to enhance the gameplay much. Sound effects are similarly decent. Nothing out of the ordinary there and many of the sounds just fade into the game without noticing. The sound certainly doesn’t compete with the visuals, as inconsistent as those are.
Once you get to a certain point, you’ll unlock The Hub, a place where the Merchant can sell you things and you can access additional modes in the game including combat challenges, platforming challenges, a music jukebox, and displays of all the random items you find plumbing the depths of the castle. You can travel to the Hub when talking with the Merchant or by using the “Wanderlust” option from the save chalices which allows you to revisit any level in the game. Wanderlust shows up completely at random about halfway through the game so if there’s something you can’t get to, make a note of it because you can return later.
If this were everything there were to say about Candle Knight, that would be fine. However, there are some pretty major flaws with the game as well. Let’s start with the little stuff. Occasionally enemies will just flat out become paralyzed for no reason, unable to attack you and you can kill them at your leisure. This happens inconsistently and while irritating, isn’t a big deal because you’ll need that gold for better swords. When you transition from scene to scene, sometimes none of the textures load, leaving the game a blurry mess for 5-10 seconds before everything abruptly sharpens into focus. Again, irritating, but not incapacitating. Then things get more irritating. On the Xbox, Candle Knight can abruptly fatally crash at random. The entire game just freezes and boots you to the home screen. This happened twice during the course of this review. That’s rather more irritating, even though you can just return to your most recent save and you’ll save a lot.
The worst is that your abilities will occasionally just stop working. A jump will fall short for no reason, your sword doesn’t swing when you hit a button, or your dash doesn’t dash properly. Enemies will hit you…after you’ve killed them because their swing animation didn’t end properly. This inconsistency makes the game feel almost like a beta some of the time but it would still be playable except for The Hub. On the Xbox version of Candle Knight, you enter The Hub in the third major area. The Merchant explains that it’s a safe space where you can talk to denizens and buy equipment. At this point in the game you have a wall climb and a dash and you can jump down through the areas of The Hub to look around. Unfortunately, wall climb doesn’t work in The Hub, leaving you trapped with no way to climb back up and escape. There are no exit portals, no ladders, no platforms, nothing. You’re trapped. You can reload your last save, but that leaves you unable to access Hub functions.
Once Wanderlust opened up and the knight had enough cash, travelling back to The Hub landed our intrepid burning knight below the Merchant. He could get to the challenges but was unable to climb back up to the top of the area and talk to the Merchant to exit The Hub. Reloading the game, it turns out that there was an autosave upon entering, permanently locking Candle Knight in The Hub and effectively forcing a restart of the game, hours and hours in. This is an absolutely spectacular design failure. Combined with the myriad of other smaller issues, at this point Candle Knight feels more like a beta than a finished product, as you never know if you’ll have to start over at random, simply by using the game’s normal functions.
There’s really not much more to say about Candle Knight. It’s a serviceable 2.5D platformer with dark but excellent design work, slow, unresponsive combat, and a focus on platforming. The game is moderately engaging but feels empty overall due to the lack of enemies and odd camera choices, and the entire experience is marred by technical glitches and potential major issues with gameplay. The flame-based combat strength is a neat gimmick for sure, but it doesn’t compensate for the major issues with the game and the story is paper thin at best. At this point, it’s hard to recommend Candle Knight to anyone, at least not until some major patch work is done.
This review is based on a digital copy of Candle Knight provided by the publisher. It was played on an Xbox Series X using a 55” 1080p Sony TV. Candle Knight is also available for Playstation 5 and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.
