Hot Wax looks like Tetris, but its focus on creating piles of candles that you need to carefully melt creates its own brain-busting puzzles.
Honestly, the Tetris-like appearance had me scratching my head for a bit as I tried to understand this game. I kept trying to make neat piles of weirdly-shaped blocks, but that’s not what you’re after in this clever (and arguably much harder) puzzle game. That’s not how you need to think of this game, though. The goal is to create chain reactions of melting candles. You create these chain reactions by looking at where the wicks will meet when you put a piece in place, then placing the periodic flames that drop in such a way that it will melt towards another wick. If you melt a long, straight candle, the flame will travel down its length and light any wick on the way that will touch it.
This took a great deal of getting used to as I forced my brain to discard the rules of the game it kept insisting I was playing, instead focusing on setting up candle wicks so that they would touch another candle in some useful way. There are thankfully wicks on both ends so you don’t have to worry too much about placing the puzzle pieces perfectly correctly or making it hard for yourself, but I did find that I had to really think about my placements for the first few rounds while I got the hang of it. It’s not terribly complicated to set up great chain reactions since so many pieces can connect to one another, and once you do, you’ll start racking up points fairly quickly. That being said, candles don’t burn instantly, instead taking a little while as they melt. You need to factor in that time as you play. If you don’t, you’ll end the game by choking the screen despite your neat candle tower.
Hot Wax is a sharp, clever puzzle game that had me reconsidering these familiar pieces and how to place them. And it’s definitely the most excited I’ve ever been for a melting candle before.
Hot Wax is available now on itch.io.
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