There’s a place where dwarves exist and they use candles as their only light source. Sounds a little primitive perhaps, but can you honestly say you’ve abandoned your life as a miner to seek treasure in dangerous castles using only a candle? Yeah, you can’t, so don’t judge (unless you’ve already played Ruggnar, then ignore me). Before fire, there were candles. Someone squeezed bees and tree trunks to form sticks with string in them in order to see while making cave paintings. Ruggnar hasn’t stopped using candles, they’re all he has in this cold and unforgiving world. Apparently, someone expected company who would want to steal their treasure that they left floating around in a 2D sidescroller environment, so they spruced up the place with some deadly decor.
In the overworld (which is insanely reminiscent of Super Mario World) you walk the map to choose a level. Once you start the course, you have to collect all the treasure in the map as fast as you can. This may or may not have been catered to speed runners (it was) and you have infinite lives. Fall down a hole, get shot with a fireball, or get perforated by a spike trap, and you start right back to the last checkpoint. Ruggnar has a helmet where he melts a candle to it as a sort of head lamp. This is ridiculous, because any sort of fast movement would put out the roaring flame that burdens the frail wick upon which it rests. These are magic candles, and you can throw them too. You can probably use them to see further away, but it’s just fun to use the aiming arc and watch the candle sprite bounce off the level geometry and lay upon solid ground. Before we go, let me notify you of the random block level, where you can generate a random map to throw candles in. It’s most likely the coolest feature until they let you use the candles to solve puzzles in the future!
Download the pre-alpha demo on itch.io.
Played it? We’d love to know what you thought about it.
