'Colored Candles' Takes Trippy Puzzle Games to a Literal Level

Sometimes, we call games "trippy," or "psychedelic," meaning they have colorful, weird, fanciful aesthetics. There's usually nothing to suggest an actual trip, just a certain look and feel. Proteus is trippy. Luxuria Superbia is trippy.

Colored Candles, (made by Jack Perkins and Dang Olsen) suggests an actual drug trip. It uses high life iconography and the fuzzy logic of an addled brain to take the player on a magical, occasionally terrifying journey through the thought process of someone who is super, super high. And while it looks like something you may have played on flash portals in the early 2000s, with its FMV-lite and tiny photographs of drug paraphernalia slipping around neon landscapes, there's something deeper going on here.

When I started playing it, I just sort of laughed, thinking this was a cute little one-note ode to good times. There's a scary muppet guy, there are floating happy faces. There are random folding chairs. Clicking on different art assets brings you to different "rooms" with a new set of bizarre imagery.

But some elements of those rooms are interactive. You can collect happy faces. You can lose "happiness" for hitting the wrong triggers. There's a logic here, weird, but consistent, and it intrigued me.

There are codes hidden in the dreamscapes. Things you can do to shift the events and visuals of a given room. Ways to poke and prod that lead you toward the famed colored candles of the title.

So this little oddity I had intended to stream for a few minutes, mainly because it looked like, pardon my french, "fucked up acid muppets," kept me going for far longer. It's like a science experiment.

Colored Candles conjured in me a rudimentary version of the same thing that kept me banging my head against The Witness for dozens of hours: a deep, earnest desire to fully understand what the hell the designer was thinking.

Honestly, I probably had more fun with this.

I played Colored Candles because I was able to grab it as part of The Good Bundle, but you can also play it for free, or pay what you want to the developer.