Candleman: The Complete Journey Reviews
The sound design and relaxing gameplay are easily the game’s greatest strengths. There are some lazy side-objectives tacked onto the experience, but they can easily be skipped.
In its final third, Candleman pulled me into the story, gameplay, and setting all at once. It was finally a full fledged, dynamic, puzzle-platformer rather than a simplistic maze. While the story's end left some questions on the table, I thought the overall message was an important and beautiful one: sometimes what you think is your light/salvation is actually your darkness/demise. And sometimes, the light we seek has always been inside us. At first, playing Candleman will be an unsatisfying, slow-paced act of just going through the motions, but if you stick around, you'll discover some magic by the end.
Candleman: The Complete Journey is an average puzzler that seems to show off everything it has early on, leading to a flat experience overall.
Candleman: The Complete Journey is a charming and interesting platformer that you should certainly check out
When Candleman first released as an Xbox One exclusive in January of 2017, it ended suddenly and without warning on a seriously depressing note entirely at odds with the whimsical tone it had maintained up to that point. You can still find comments about this in reviews of the time. Flash forward ten months and it received a free expansion called "Lost Light" that not only added several more levels, but also continued the story so that it ended on a much more uplifting note. Having now played through the "Complete Journey" version for PC that includes both the base game and Lost Light's content, I can't help but suspect that the original ending was the result of the developer or publisher rushing the game out to meet a deadline. It's incredibly difficult to imagine the Lost Light expansion not being an originally planned part of the game given how much more naturally it ends the story, but if it truly was something tacked on to address concerns about the bleakness of the original ending, then its quality is laudable in its own right.