Dandy Or a Brief Glimpse Into the Life of the Candy Alchemist

For all intents and purposes, this game is named Dandy. I'm not going to use its full name which, like other titles that try to be clever in this way, attempts to crib off the format that Dr. Strangelove used when it was released more than 50 years ago. Dandy flat out tries to frustrate you, and it succeeds in more ways than just its gameplay.

Remember Cuphead? That was a great game. Difficult, but immensely interesting, well designed, and uniquely gorgeous. Now imagine a game just like Cuphead, but only the flying levels, and with an experience that falls just short in all the categories that made Cuphead what it is. That's basically Dandy.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with Dandy, it's got rogue-lite elements like procedurally generated levels and permadeath. It has a good-looking art style, a lot of different enemies, and a wide selection of powerups (or health restore) that you can choose from between sections. Different powerups give the titular Dandy a different outfit, and then you fly through a level on your magical lollipop and shoot baddies as they fly towards you. It all feels very by-the-book as far as sidescrolling shoot em ups (or as the cool kids call them: shmups) go.

Or it would anyway, if the game didn't inexplicably leave out important parts of the shmup experience. For example, normally you'd be able to fly around the entire screen. Here you can only fly up and down as you stick to the left side, making enemy hits feel cheaper than they should. Or the fact that in most games like this, you're able to destroy special enemies to get powerups mid-level, but here you have to wait for the end of a section, which reduces the sense of variety. While a game can often be made better by judicious use of limitations, it is not the case here.

I'm typically in favor of less hand-holding in most games, but not to the point where things are not explained at all. I had to dig through guides (not that there are many) to understand what some of the powerups did, since the game tries to be all cute by telling you in vague and jokey terms. Trying to tackle stages while also trying to figure out how my powerup was going to be most effective isn't exactly the best use of one's time when you're navigating bullet hell scenarios. It's just annoying.

Similarly annoying is the fact that after each section, you don't get your hearts back. You can choose to refill your hearts at the expense of forgoing a powerup, but then if you aren't that good at a section (which are procedurally generated so it's not like you can learn them), by the end you're low on hearts and so you feel obligated to refill them. Considering one of the draws of the game is this concept of stackable powerups, the game sure does its best to make sure you don't take advantage.

Another issue with the procedural generation is the fact that sometimes you will encounter parts of a level where there are just too many enemies thrown at you for no reason, or the enemy types that are chosen are combinations that make them particularly difficult to kill. It would be one thing if I felt I had made it far enough for this kind of difficulty spike to occur, but no, it happens anywhere at any time, making each run a toss up.

It's certainly possible that Dandy just isn't my cup of tea, even though Cuphead was and that's an incredibly difficult game. Difficult rogue-lites with stylish graphics are nothing new these days, and Dandy is nothing if not easily lost in a mix of better titles. This is unfortunate because it genuinely feels like there is something there that has potential, if it weren't deliberately stripped down for no reason at all.