Candy Box!

Candy Box! starts as an almost empty white page with a single button for collecting candy, and this apparent emptiness is part of the joke – within minutes of playing, new mechanics, shops, a sword, a map, and eventually a whole text RPG with combat and an inventory gradually appear, none of which the player had any idea about at the start. It was created in 2013 by a French developer going by the name aniwey, and the game quickly spread across the internet precisely because of this surprising, gradual unveiling of content that players kept telling each other about.

The controls are purely text-based and click-driven – no graphics, just links and buttons that the player uses to work deeper into the system and unlock further layers of the game – which was a refreshing contrast to the visually richer Flash games of that time in 2013. Combat is resolved through simple menu-based action choices, similar to text adventures from the early days of home computers, just in a modern web outfit. Candy Box! became one of the first viral examples of the so-called "minute zero," where a game deliberately pretends to be simple so it can surprise all the more strongly with hidden depth, and it inspired a number of later experimental text games, including the idle game genre as a whole.

Today Candy Box! is more of a historical curiosity than an actively played game, but its influence on the genre of minimalist, unfolding games is undeniable, and it is still referenced as a pioneering title that also influenced later independent projects built on a similar principle of hidden surprise.

Why play it: For players interested in the history of independent web games and in the experience of gradual discovery, which today's games rarely offer so purely.