February 2, 2014 7:30 PM | Lena LeRay
We have another Candy Jam entry for you, this time from Martin Zackrisson. His game, Crush the Candy King Saga, is essentially a metaphor for the whole trademark situation. In it, the king is the enemy, and he's developed such a love for "playing a game he himself had 'come up with'," that the people of his kingdom (represented by the player) are fighting back by attempting to sabotage the king's game.
Mechanically, this is a block drop game which is being played by the AI. A fat little king walks across the top of the stage, dropping candies in an attempt to group three or more of the same candy together. The player's goal is to make the board fill up with candies so the king gets a game over as fast as possible. To do so, the player can click candies to remove them or press a button that forces the king to play faster.
It would be interesting enough as a reversal of common block drop gameplay, but the context turns every element of the game into pointed satire. The king is very obviously meant to represent publisher King and is painted as someone who loves to make people who just want to do their own thing suffer, loves candy, and is strongly implied to have cloned the game he likes to play. In the pursuit of playing the game as much as he wants, the king tramples on the lives of his subjects. By making the player representative of the oppressed subjects trying to fight back against the king, Zackrisson is putting the player, who is likely sympathetic to those indie developers hurt by King's trademark claims, in their own shoes. The primary tool with which the player can fight back is deleting candies to prevent the king from making groups, which is a direct jab at the large number of matches ruined in Candy Crush Saga by unlucky cascades.
The game was made in Unity, and has Windows, Mac, and Linux distributions in addition to being playable in browser with the Unity plugin.