Most action games hand you two inputs — move and aim, or move and shoot. Wick gives you exactly one. Mouse Y, mapped to a flame's height. Everything else falls out of that single dial: how much of the screen you can reach, how big a target you make for rain, and how cleanly you can chain a combo.

Sparks float across at varying heights. Raindrops fall straight down — the ones in the candle column will extinguish you if the flame is in their way. Three lives, density ramps as the run lengthens.

The twist

The flame's height is your input, your hitbox, your weapon, and your score multiplier — all on the same dial. Raise it and you reach more sparks; raise it and you also intercept more rain. There is no decoupling. Every move trades one against the other.

That collapse of capability and vulnerability into a single axis is the thing I wanted to feel in a small game. Most arcade designs go the other way — they hand you more buttons as difficulty climbs, so skill expression accretes. Wick subtracts: the same dial means more, the longer you play.

The shape of a run

The early seconds are almost meditative. One spark drifts in, you raise to meet it, drop back down. Around 10 seconds the rain starts. By 30 you are reading two-spark patterns and remembering the column. By 60 you are losing a life every time you get greedy — chasing a high spark while a raindrop is one frame from the wick.

The combo cap is ten, which feels generous until you realize a single missed spark resets it. Missing isn't from raindrops alone — letting a spark drift through the candle column at a height your flame didn't reach also breaks the chain. That was the only progression knob that surprised me in playtesting: "I'm safe, but my combo just collapsed because I was watching the rain."

What I'm not sure about

Whether the rain spawn bias toward the candle column is the right call. With pure-uniform rain, the field is busier but only a sliver of it actually threatens you, and reading the screen becomes a column-attention exercise. With the current 45% column bias, the threats are more legible but the screen feels less wild. I went with the legible version. I might be wrong.