Candy Box 2

About the game

Candy Box 2 opens on an almost empty page. A line says that you have some candies, the number goes up by one every second, and there is a button to eat them all. That is the whole game, for a minute. Then you can throw candies on the ground, then save, then look at a map, and it slowly becomes clear that the empty page was hiding a whole adventure, all of it drawn with letters, dashes and slashes.

The map leads to a village with a candy merchant, a forge and houses you can peek into, and from there to a desert, a forest, a cave, a lighthouse, a castle and stranger places. Candies are the currency for almost everything: you buy a wooden sword, a hat, lollipops, and you spend them to unlock new features. Quests play out as little side-scrolling scenes in ASCII art where your character walks forward on its own and fights whatever stands in the way; you help by choosing equipment beforehand and by clicking spells and potions at the right moment. Along the way there is a cauldron for brewing potions, a lollipop farm that turns into a small economy, a few puzzles and many jokes.

Candy Box 2 was made by aniwey in 2013 as the sequel to his surprise hit Candy Box, with ASCII art by Tobias Nordqvist, GodsTurf, dixsept, Dani "Deinol" Gómez and aniwey himself. It takes several hours to finish, and much of the fun is in finding out what each new thing does, so this page does not give more away.

Playing it here

Click Play. The game page is shrunk or enlarged to fit the width of the player, and it scrolls up and down inside it on the tall screens. The game does not save by itself: once the SAVE tab appears, use it to save in one of five slots in this browser, or turn on saving every ten minutes. The same tab can give the whole game as text, to copy somewhere safe or to carry to another computer. To load a slot, click its link on the SAVE tab; it opens the game in a new tab. In the CFG tab you can switch the game to another language, Brazilian Portuguese included; the translations were made by players, and the original English text stays next to them.

This build is compiled by FredyGames from the author's own repository, with the save links pointing to this site, without the PayPal button and with the game data kept apart from the other games on the site. The game itself is unchanged.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Be patient at first. Candies come in by themselves, and new things appear as you use the ones you already have. Try every button.

Save often. Until you save on the SAVE tab, closing the page loses everything; the ten-minute autosave is worth turning on.

Check the equipment. The inventory decides how quests go: a better weapon or some armour often turns a lost fight into an easy one.

Look everywhere. Many places have something to click that is easy to miss, and some items only show their use much later.

Credits and licence

Candy Box 2 was created by aniwey, with ASCII art by Tobias Nordqvist, GodsTurf, dixsept, Dani "Deinol" Gómez and aniwey. The code is released under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later, and the ASCII art under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licence. The game uses jQuery (MIT). The licence texts and the full source code of this build are linked from this page.