The Horrifying Truth of Candy Crush Saga

Would you all like to know a secret? Be sure that you really want to know the answer before you say, “yes.” This secret will change the way you see yourself and the rest of the universe.

Ready?

Here goes:

Candy Crush is not a game.

Did I just blow your mind? It blew mine the moment I realized it. As I sat there, clicking on little blobs of virtual sugar and wondering why it is I suck so horribly at this one thing, it came to me. I realized that everyone agreed, no matter how far they had gotten, that they also sucked at it, and I suddenly knew why.

It is impossible to be good at Candy Crush. They “game” isn’t designed to let you be good at it. It is actually rigged against you. The entire thing is a Vegas Slot Machine, sucking quarters from your pocket, giving you an occasional payout that couldn’t possibly make up for the hours you’ve spent feeding the monkey.

Although this is more clever, more ingenious than that. Candy Crush is designed to make you think you can be good at it. There are websites out there dedicated to showing you how to be good at it. These are created by people that are convinced they can can bring strategy to the game.

But they can’t because the game only has one meaningful factor in victory:

Luck.

Unlike Bejeweled, the game that was cannibalized to form the basis of Candy Crush, there is a Move Limit instead of a Time Limit. This might seem like it is an arbitrary difference, but it is the one that means everything to how successful you can be while playing the game.

See, with a time limit, the rather minor skill of pattern recognition and mouse-eye-coordination can ultimately overcome any scenario. If you get fast enough and clever enough at following the 3 color-lines, you will beat any situation.

The Move Limit eliminates that ability. It doesn’t matter how good you are at spotting the patterns, if none of them will let the fruit drop out of the bottom, you won’t win, ever. There is literally nothing in your power that will allow you to be victorious… unless you buy the poweru-ps.

Spend a little money and get that one extra move you need to finish the board. Drop the cash to buy the Coconut wheel, that’ll help out a lot! Make sure you buy the charms, they’re just a one time fee.

The farther and farther into the game you go, the more and more likely you are to need to drop the cash to get the win. The game decides how far you are allowed to get without spending money.

You can do nothing about it.

There is no skill to it. You only have 1 of the 10 tools the game was designed to be played with, how can you master the game?

You can’t, and you never will. Because that’s what micro-transaction games are for, and there has never been one as clever as Candy Crush…

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m sure if I spend another 5 hours playing this level, I can get the final cherry to the bottom of the screen…