What are Culture Apps?

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Culture Apps are mobile applications that promote unique lands, people and perspectives. In some instances, Culture Apps serve as a useful tool for encouraging exploration of things that are typically misunderstood or brand-spanking new! The latest Culture App that has everyone excited is Candy Rasta:

Avery W. Krouse (on Twitter @averywkrouse)

What do you do when your bredda can’t beat his sweet tooth? In Candy Rasta, you take dat candy away and you help your bredrin, yah!

About the Game
In Candy Rasta, you play as an avatar tasked with helping your friend, the titular “Candy Rasta,” from succumbing to his craving for candy. He is trying to keep ital, or keeping the food he eats whole, unprocessed, and unartificial, and candy will certainly not mesh well with his lifestyle of body purity.

The game is heavily influenced by Jamaican and Rastafarian culture, from the Rasta patois sprinkled throughout all of its dialogue and on-screen text, to the decidedly Reggae and Reggaeton music that powers its soundtrack, to the bright and colorful avatars of its characters. Even the backdrops of the levels are cartoony versions of familiar island sights.

Gameplay Basics
Candy Rasta is a simple game that combines swipe to collect mechanics with an avoidance concept, all to fun effect. You start out by selecting an avatar from a collection of Rasta personas. Once you begin the game, you swipe to move the head of that avatar around the screen collecting the candies that fall from the sky. Each level has a target number of candies for you to collect within a set amount of time which increases as the game goes on, and surplus candies you collect after reaching your target simply increases your point total which carries from level to level. There are also healthy foods like fruits and vegetables that will fly in from either side of the screen that you can catch for bonus points.

While you’re swiping to catch the candies and healthy foods, you will also be trying to avoid the touch of the Duppy, a ghost figure which sometimes randomly floats around the screen and sometimes directly tries to chase your avatar. Touching the Duppy or failing to collect enough points by time out will result in losing a life, and losing three lives spells game over.

I found the gameplay very easy to catch onto, but I found myself frustrated by the appearance of the Duppy, especially as more than once he floated off the edge of the screen only to pop back on practically underneath my finger and tag me. The game might benefit from an easy mode which consists of just candy catching and a “nuh easy” mode which adds the Duppy.

Aside from that one simple frustration, the game was actually quite fun to play. There was enough variety in the music, the candy targets, and the level settings to hold my interest for a good long while, and who doesn’t like jamming out to Reggae now and then? I recommend Candy Rasta to anyone with an interest in the culture or just an interest in easy to pick up and play games.

www.candyrasta.com