Video Game / Candy box!

"You have 5 candies."

Candy box! is a free online game. The premise is simple: You have a handful of candies, and you gain one additional piece of candy every second. You have two options: You can either eat all the candies you're currently holding, or throw ten of them on the ground (provided you have 10 to spare). That's it. That's really all there is to it. Honest. There certainly isn't a Candy Merchant who will eventually come along to sell you more kinds of candy, and even if there was, there isn't anything you could do with it.

Upon the huge success of the game, Aniwey announced that he would work on a sequel. The sequel, Candy Box 2 came out on October 24th, 2013.

See also A Dark Room, which this game directly inspired.

Warning: By necessity, this page will be absolutely chock-full of spoilers. Half the fun of the game comes from discovering what will happen next. It's recommended that you play at least some of the game for yourself before reading this trope page, lest all of its surprises be spoiled for you.

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This game contains examples of:

• Absurdly High Level Cap:
  • Nothing is really capped, other than by the limitations of integer storage. Late in the game, it's quite easy to acquire 10^80 or so HP and sword power, which is numerous zeros beyond the point at which most of the game's enemies become laughably harmless.
  • Averted in the Hard Mode. Your maximum health doesn't increase at all, and your sword can only get up to 5 levels maximum.
• ASCII Art: It's the most that the game gets, graphics-wise, yet it does not hamper the premise.
• Ambiguous Syntax: The key to The Frog's last riddle.
• Animorphism: The Turtle Potion.
• Anti-Frustration Feature: In Hard Mode where your health is capped at 100, the Developer's Computer quest removes the four most difficult/painful Bugs (Fireball, Dragon, Demon, and Devil)
• Anti Poop-Socking: You need candy to get through the game, and the only way to get candy is simply to wait. You'll have to leave the window open in another tab and just ignore it for a while to build the resources needed to progress.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Your questing avatar utterly refuses to stop running forwards and beating on things. The only way to manually stop moving is to plant a tree in his path, forcing him to stop and hack away at it for a while.
• The Beastmaster: One of the possible classes for the PC, if you choose the summoning sword.
• Chest Monster: The castle keep contains monsters disguised as doors. You can easily see them coming because they make the room appear to have multiple doors, which is never actually possible.
• Degraded Boss: In a sense. In Normal Mode, some of the Bugs in the Developer's Computer may have the same attacks as those of the Dragon and Devil.
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • "The Swampy Swamp is the swampiest swamp you've ever seen."
  • "A wood pony! It's in the woods!"
• Does Thisremind You Of Anything: The Healing Sword looks kind of phallic.
• Easy Level Trick:
  • The Cow Level in Hard Mode, where your HP is capped at 100. Use an Earthquake Scroll to render the regular cows to 0 HP (but still alive), which allows you to kill them without taking any damage. A potion during the Cow King fight helps too.
  • You don't have to pay all those lollipops to overcome yourself. You just need to use a Fire Scroll when your foe's health is below 35, which defeats him without having you take any extra damage.
• Escape Rope: The Escape Potion will let you leave a quest with no cooldown period, but you don't get to keep your items. The Get Me Out Of Here potion transports you to a different location out of your current quest, which is usually much safer.
• Exact Words:
  • The frog's final question. Now, just type the answer to that question and I'll give you a very special present : what is the only thing to go beyond the limits of our universe?
  • The ability to "overcome yourself." Its sole purpose is to allow you to beat the "Yourself" level, where you fight...yourself.
  • The Ghost's description: "A Ghost. It halves the life of human beings." Imps and summoned stuff don't count as human beings, so they're unaffected.
• Export Save: The game is saved as a 2KB+ .cs file that you save and load directly from the file manager. Be careful, as it's made in such a way that just looking at it will spoil most upgrades and secrets.
• Flaming Sword: One of the three enchantments you can get. It has a 33% chance of doing much more damage than normal.
• Flunky Boss: The necromancer in the castle's stairwell.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Enemy encounters go by rather quickly, but those with swift eyes will discover that some of the enemies have amusing descriptions. "This is a unicorn! It has no kidneys."
• Glass Cannon: Eels in the Underwater Cave. 3 hit points (and will probably die in a hit), but it does 11 damage to you.
• Global Currency: Candy, natch.
• Invincibility Power-Up: The Invincibility Potion. You'll need it for the dragon, Devil, Chuck Norris, Gnomes and the Developper
• Item Crafting: The cauldron, which can be found later in the game, allows for potion crafting.
• Kill It with Fire: The fire scroll, which can become a fire sword if you choose.
• Level Ate: Considering that the world's currencies are all candy, lollipops literally grow on trees, and the most powerful swords are made of chocolate, we can make some assumptions—even if the graphics are all ASCII.
• Luck-Based Mission: You can only beat the final boss by pressing a specific, random key on your keyboard while fighting him. All you can do is use an invincibility potion and mash keys like crazy hoping you hit the right one. Getting past his minions also requires a lot of luck.
• Memetic Badass: In-Universe, Chuck Norris. Yes, really.
• Metal Slime: The Wood Poney [sic] in the peaceful forest. It's even rarer than treasure chests, but doesn't give as much.
• Mirror Match: One of the questing locations is "yourself." Even if you glitch the fight to have HP remaining at the end, you can't win without asking the Sorceress for help. Or you can just use a Fire Scroll when your opponent's health gets low (<35). It'll kill him, and you won't need to see the sorceress at all.
• Mook Bouncer: The dragon's fire at the castle entrance sends you to the beginning of the stage if it touches you, so you need to reach the door before that time.
• Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups: The sword enchantments. You can only get one, and you can only do this once.
• Opening the Sandbox: Once the Candy Merchant arrives and you buy your first sword, things start opening up to you. And they keep on opening wider and wider. By the end, No Fourth Wall is taken to its ultimate extreme; you can modify or randomize every variable in the game.
• Percent Damage Attack:
  • The ghosts that the necromancer summons will hit you for half your current health.
  • The Developer attacks you for (1/4 your max HP + 5) damage each hit, ensuring that he kills you in four attacks unless you're invincible.
• Permanently Missable Content: The three upgraded sword types (life-gain, fire, and summoning) are all mutually exclusive; you can only choose one per playthrough. Until you reach the hacking stage, that is, where you can randomize your sword or acquire the Sword of Liflamesummoning.
• Powerup Food: Eating your candy increases your HP.
• Psycho Electric Eel: The eels in the underwater cave. Very low health, but hurts a lot with their electrical attacks.
• Random Effect Spell: The Get Me Out Of Here potion transports you to a random location.
• Randomly Drops: There are a number of useful random drops obtainable from enemies, such as the unicorn horn.
• Rare Candy: But of course. Specifically, the chocolate bar. This also makes people assume that it's Too Awesome to Use.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty:
  • The Hell level is the hardest by far; there are several much easier ones after it. The Developper final level mainly just requires numerous retries.
  • Hell itself is like this. The first wave where you face off a massive rush of very painful demons is very tough. The last two waves are much easier as they contain ghosts that cannot hurt a summoned imp. Then you get to the Devil...
• Shaped Like Itself: The Candy Merchant can sell you lollipop-flavoured lollipops.
• Shout-Out:
  • The lollipop merchant looks a lot like Tom Baker's Doctor.
  • The Cow Level, accessible only by using the Get Me Out Of Here potion, is one to Diablo.
  • "This is a unicorn! It has no kidneys."
  • The Developer is hinted to be a My Little Pony fan, with a number of references to ponies in the game (Wood Pony, a Pony Bug, the fake tab bug spawning "Pony" and "mlp is great" tabs).
• Stock Puzzle: The frog in the swamp spews out a few stock riddles.
• Sturdy and Steady Turtles: The Turtle potion turns you into a turtle that has much more defense at the cost of slow speed.
• Tastes Like Purple: The lollipops the Candy Merchant sells. Some of them are ordinary flavors like cherry and grape, but some of them are abstract flavors like "causality" and "love."
• Too Awesome to Use: You only get a limited amount of Berserk Potions (from the frog, and from the Wishing Well if you so choose) and you are not able to create any more.
  • Subverted with the Chocolate Bar. You only get one before the post-game, and its one and only use is to coat your sword in chocolate.
• Useless Useful Spell: The Candy Coverter turms your candy into lollipops in 1:1 ratio. But by the time you acquire it, your lollipop farm production will far outnumber your candy income. You can have maxed out lollipop production before even taking on the Castle Enterance and the converter is in the level beyond it. In there you also get the cauldron to brew potions. Now brew enough G.M.O.O.H. potions to enter the Cow Level at least once (and beat it) and the acquired Horn of Plenty will triple your lollipop farm production. That means getting 300 lollipops every second, while only getting about 5 or 8 candies per second, depending on how much you paid the Sorceress. Your candy income is hardly ever going to surpass your lollipop income, rendering the converter pretty useless.
• Wake-Up Call Boss:
  • The Whale. You face it after a level that wears down most of your health, and its 100 HP and 8 damage is nothing to laugh at when you first face it. Use a Fire Scroll to make things easier.
  • The Dragon would be this for those who found the whale moderate- if you want to win, you'll need three types of consumables (at least 4-5 of each), and two of them must be created by the player.
• World Tree: Mentioned in the recipe for the Seed. A giant, unnamed tree that exists somewhere in the universe which provides infinite candies. There's also a rare chance that you summon a 10000 HP Yggdrasil when planting a Seed.
• Your Money Is No Good Here: The sorceress who lives in the forest only accepts lollipops as payment. Vast quantities of lollipops.

The sequel contains examples of:

• Achilles' Heel: The Giant Nougat Monster hits for an incredible amount of damage (3000 or so) once it wakes up. However, it's unable to get off the ground, meaning that the player can simply use the Rocket Boots to keep in the air and avoid its attack completely.
• Airborne Mook: The desert birds that fly high above you. You can actually kill them and get their feathers
• Anti-Magic: The "Erase Magic" spell, which erases all magic spells on the screen.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Averted this time around: once you get the Boots of Introspection, you can actually stand still! Enemies, however, continue to play this straight.
• Barbarian Tribe: The "lost tribe warriors."
• Bat Out of Hell: Well, technically a bat in Hell. The Mayan bat god Camazotz will harass you by dropping tons of minions on you as you fight the Devil.
• Bullet Hell:
  • After traveling quite a distance Under the Sea, you soon face sharks and sea serpents, the latter of which spray multitudes of painful bullets forwards. This trope comes into play as you progress further and they become more common, eventually having multiple serpents on the screen.
  • There's also the fight against the Devil where he spams painful sprays of fireballs.
• But Thou Must!: You have to attempt every possible means of opening the candy box, none of which work, before the game lets you give up and put it in your inventory.
• Call-Back: The rats in the cellar are shown as "rat" instead of the ASCII graphics of the other enemies, as a nod to the prequel.
• Chekhov's Gun: The candy box, which can be found in a far away house, can't be opened until the end of the game when you have collected all of the PLAY stones, and a sentient piece of candy comes up and unlocks it for you.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: The giant tea kettle in the desert fortress. It doesn't attack, it simply tests your patience with its ludicrous amount of HP.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: The Black Demons spell summons a wave of invisible demons that do massive damage to everything on the screen, including you and your summoned allies. With good armor, though, the damage to you is manageable, and it becomes something of a Disc-One Nuke.
• Department of Redundancy Department: "Some spikes killed you with its spikes."
• Early-Bird Boss:
  • The Troll in hard mode. You face it with 100 HP, and probably a silver sword and enchanted pink or red gloves at best, as you don't get spells or potions until you beat it. You have to hope your red glove's fireballs manage to do enough damage for you to kill it. Once you get spells, you can easily beat it by casting two fireballs or using some potions.
  • Both the monkey magician and the octopus king. You face them in the second dungeon of the game, and if you fight them at your level, you'll get wasted. Thankfully, both of them are optional and are meant to be fought later on.
• Easy Level Trick:
  • The Xinopherydon can be fought safely by taking the bottom path by the help of rocket boots, and using the (Enchanted) Monkey Wizard's staff and Black Demons spell to indirectly attack it.
  • The Giant Nougat Monster. It hits for an incredible amount of damage- on hard, when your maximum health is capped, it will one-shot you even with the enchanted armor. If you have the rocket boots, you can fly over it and spam it with spells until you win, avoiding its lethal attack completely since it cannot get off the floor.
• Endless Game:
  • The sea. After the initial waves of fish/jellyfish and seahorses, you'll encounter sharks and sea serpents that will come at you in increasing frequency until you either die or escape.
  • The "Super RPG" and "Galactic Wars" games in the arcade. You keep going until you run out of health.
• Exact Words: The squirrel says you have to get three-in-a-row to beat him at Tic-Tac-Toe. He doesn't say you have to put your X-es inside the grid...
• Export Save: Much like the first game, this one allows you to export save files worth about 8kB.
• Forbidden Fruit: The instructions warn you to never put any candies in the cauldron while brewing berserk potions. This is absolutely not the means of producing cloning potions.
• Foregone Victory: You can never lose to the rats at the start of the game since they deal very low damage, take 1-2 hits to die, and you'll kill them all with ease before they can even lower your health to zero. Makes sense since this is a tutorial of sorts to introduce you to combat.
• Funny Spoon: The Giant Spoon of Doom combines this trope with Doomy Dooms of Doom.
• Game Within a Game: The house to the right of the shop has a game console, with a dungeoning game (full of references to the original Candy box!), and some obnoxiously difficult "Copter" type of thing.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The easiest way to kill the Developer is to cast one of the spells that makes him drop a black hole on you while you're standing next to him. If you're in turtle mode, wearing the enchanted armor, squeeze to shrink your hitbox, and have over 1500 health, you'll survive and his black hole will kill him.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: Subverted with the dragon. His impenetrably high HP is displayed as "so much hp / so much hp." But after a bit of futile attacking, he turns out to be friendly, and becomes a Quest Giver. Furthermore, an Interface Spoiler during the battle (a lack of spell/potion/action buttons) will also tip the player off that something's not as it seems.
• Human Ladder: One of the ways to obtain the Rocket Boots is to equip the Summoning Tribal staff and use the summoned tribals to form a platform staircase to get to the top. You can also do this with the Octopus King summoned by the Octopus King's Crown With Obsidian.
• Improvised Platform: One method of obtaining the Rocket Boots is to use the summoned tribals from the Summoning Tribal staff or the Octopus King from the Octopus King's Crown with Obsidian as a Human Ladder.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The scythe, which the blacksmith sells when you reach a certain point in the game. It swings crazily fast and makes a decent amount of damage per swing. It is usually preferred by players over the Giant Spoon of Doom.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The Giant Spoon of Doom. It's attack speed is slower than a snail with rheumatism, but it does enough damage to kill almost any mook in a single swing.
• Interface Spoiler: You know that something's up when you don't see any spell, potion or action buttons when you fight the dragon.
• Invincible Minor Minion: The sea serpents in the ocean.
• Incredible Shrinking Man: The magic sponge lets you "squeeze yourself just like a sponge," making you smaller.
• Jet Pack: The rocket boots. Inexplicably, they only work if you have a pogo stick (though it's pretty difficult to get the boots without one).
• The Key Is Behind the Lock: Obtaining the Rocket Boots requires you to reach a high outcropping, which would have been extremely easy... if you had the Rocket Boots. As such, you'll need to use other innovative ways to approach this one.
• Lethal Joke Item: The Giant Spoon is upgradeable into the Giant Spoon of Doom, a crazily overpowered bludgeon capable of one-shotting most enemies.
• Marathon Boss / Zero-Effort Boss: The teapot. It has no attacks, but ludicrous amounts of health. All you can really do is leave the game running for hours while your fireball-spewing armor picks away at it.
• Mighty Glacier:
  • Using the Giant Spoon or the Giant Spoon of Doom. You deal ridiculous damge per hit. You also have an insanely long interval time between attacks.
  • The Giant Nougat Monster is also this. It takes a long pause before it attacks... but if it does hit you in hard mode where your health is capped, you're going down.
• No Fair Cheating: Using any of the stronger spells against the Developer (which would have made him a lot easier) will cause him to drop a black hole on you that pretty much kills you near-instantly.
• Non-Standard Character Design: The rats in the basement are the only enemies in the game that are shown in actual letters ("rat"), similar to the first game's enemies. All the other enemies are drawn in ASCII art.
• Not Completely Useless: The un-upgraded octopus king crown, though generally pointless, is actually useful for one thing. Wearing it allows you to defeat Yourself. Because... it makes you confident, apparently.
• Pixel Hunt: The pogo stick, one of the most useful items, is acquired by clicking an asterisk hidden in the mountains on the world map.
• Rare Candy: The Chocolate Bars. Unlike the first game, there are more than one of these.
• Rat Stomp: The first quest has you clear rats from a villager's cellar.
• Reverse Psychology: Found in the instructions for brewing the Berserk potion.
• Savage Wolves: The forest is filled with them, and they keep coming at you in a near-endless stream.
• Secret Level: The "fight yourself" level, reached by drinking an X potion.
• Sheathe Your Sword: You can now switch back to old equipment between quests, even back to fighting barehanded, which minimizes the effect of Attack! Attack! Attack! and allows you to pass the unkillable ceiling monster that crushes you in retaliation for breaking any of its eggs.
• Shout-Out: The middle room in the castle is called A Dark Room, and the player can light a fire.
• Spikes of Doom: They'll kill you with their spikes!
  • The fan-submitted stage "The Hardcore Platformer" is filled with these on the floor and the ceiling (so you can't use Rocket Boots). And you can't cheat via anti-gravity potions- they don't work. The last stretch is a fake except for the final spike.
• Stalked by the Bell: Stay too long in the forest via the Boots of Introspection and you'll eventually start getting assaulted by a never-ending stream of forest mosquitoes from behind.
• Stone Wall:
  • The enchanted knight armor reduces all damage you take by 80% (!!), but it halves your damage output. Pretty much essential when facing the Devil or fighting the sharks in Hard mode.
  • The giant tea kettle in the desert fortress doesn't move or attack at all, but it has a metric kiloton of health that you'll need to whittle down to beat it.
• Sturdy and Steady Turtles: Like in the first game, the Turtle potion turns you into a turtle that has much more defense at the cost of slow speed. This is handy for surviving some of the more lethal attacks.
• Tactical Suicide Boss: The developer; see Hoist by His Own Petard. If he didn't try to nuke you with black holes, he'd be much harder to defeat.
• Time-Limit Boss: The Developer. If you somehow manage to survive his first and second attacks and haven't managed to finish him off, his third attack will destroy you.
• Threatening Shark: Get far enough in the sea and you'll start fighting them. Some of them have different-coloured fins which grant special abilities if you kill them and collect their fins.
• Title Drop: This version has an actual candy box, but you can't open it until the end.
• Under the Sea: "Jump into the sea." No scuba gear required! Becomes an endless Marathon Level, with an ever-increasing onslaught of giant sharks and invincible missile-spewing snakes. If you survive long enough, some of the sharks drop magic fins. The last fin, which appears when the sharks are spawning so quickly there's barely enough room for them all, gives you a deadly black hole spell.
• Video Game Remake: Most of the same basic elements and levels are there, but in a larger format with better graphics. There are also several new levels, puzzles, and items.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: The troll. If you don't have a silver sword or enchanted glove, it's going to be quite hard to take down.
• Weapons-Grade Vocabulary: The Developer's main form of attack.

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