Oh, My Candy!

When I was young, I regularly brought hamsters home from school. My Grade 6 homeroom class sported a bunch of the little buggers, and they had to go with SOMEONE for weekends and holidays.

Not once, while taking care of them, did any hamster request a candy. Nor did their emotionless little eyes ever show untoward desire for sweets I may have eaten in their presence. Thus it must be that the main star of Oh, My Candy!, a voracious (and possibly diabetic) hamster, is a freak amongst his kind.He's certainly something of an outcast in the puzzling genre.

Concept

Oh, My Candy! is a feeding-frenzy of teensy proportions. The hamster wants candy, he NEEDs candy, and you've gotta get it to him by guiding giant-sized sweeties into his gullet. You do this with three tools:

- A tiny, guidable paw item, which allows you to push objects
- The aforementioned objects, which can be knocked about or otherwise used to create paths for the candies
- Your brainpower

Simple enough. Get the candies to the hamster without losing any to the game's copious bottomless pits. Sounds simple, generally is.

Controls

The majority of Oh, My Candy! relies on mouse-manipulation. Once you've touched the tiny paw item present in every stage, you can move it about with the mouse to manipulate the environment. This kinda works, though the paw tends to get caught on blockades. It also flies wildly out of control if you dare to go even slightly beyond the edge of the Flash window.

Don't go beyond the edge of the Flash window.

Graphics

The visuals are probably Oh, My Candy!'s strongest suit. It's a very pretty game, sporting the same level of polish as any paid-for mobile adventure. The hamster could use more personality beyond gleefully happy and heartbroken, but it's a short enough experience that this won't matter much. Overall, highly satisfying.

Sound

For such a short game, Oh, My Candy! has a surprising number of tracks, which tend to alternate from level to level. None of 'em are compelling or memorable, but not being stuck with the same tune for every stage is good.

Challenge Rating

Here's where Oh, My Candy! starts to fall apart. Puzzle games, even the beginner ones, should be challenging. Oh, My Candy!... is not.

Like, at all.

There are a few levels that could be considered road bumps, a few brain-teasers that require a bit more effort than the norm. On average, though, Oh, My Candy! is WAY too easy. The last level of the game is almost a joke, considering it's much easier than, say, the five or six levels that preceded it.

That's not the big problem here, though. No, the BIG problem is the cheating factor. It's usually simple to bypass a level's intended solution by simply balancing the candies on top of your paw tool. Get one nice and even, then slowly float it to the hamster for consumption. No need for all the little mind-benders in the way. Why bother with roadblocks for stopping the paw tool when they're not effective?

Conclusion?

At twenty-five levels long... which I completed in just over ten minutes, yeesh... Oh, My Candy! is not that satisfying a game. Only absolute beginners in the puzzling realm will find it challenging. It's worth playing, but it'll probably be forgotten in a hurry.

PLAY OH, MY CANDY!