Wake

Wake by 1550 is a short puzzle game where you and your family watch over a relative due for a funeral tomorrow, but must survive a night full of minigames to see the light of the next day.

Each round involves a different puzzle, but all of them involve the mechanic of keeping the candles lit, as shown below:


Until it immediately goes out again, that is.

And here is where the first mechanic screws you over if you play "by the book"...

If you follow the instructions above and try to keep the candle constantly lit, your game will end prematurely. I don't say game over because there is no game over screen in this game, it's pretty subtle when your game ends. Don't forget to save.

When the candles are lit, there seems to be a timer for when it goes out again. If you try to keep them lit, you will likely end up in my first playthru where the candle goes out JUST AS the timer hits zero, resulting in a loss. No, what you should do instead, is ignore the book's advice and the candles entirely, until around 0:02 then immediately light the candle. This ensures the candles won't go out when the timer zeroes. Of course, this might be challenging later on when you have to do other puzzles simultaneously, and your walking speed DRASTICALLY DECREASES as the game progresses, for no apparent reason other than difficulty ramp up. Maybe I'm really dense, but at the end of the game I had no idea what happened, or why. Maybe everyone else failed the minigames, which isn't surprising since I needed over 3 tries to get to the ending.

Overall, an extremely short timed puzzle game, where following instructions is sometimes a bad idea and you must figure out the game's mechanics to succeed. I suppose that is a puzzle in and of itself.