Don’t Eat the Candy

Don't Eat The Candy: Slot Overview

It's coming up on that time of the year, players, when the youth (and their guardians) wander the streets dressed in costumes, knocking on strangers' doors and asking them for candy in exchange for not throwing toilet paper over their homes or other such dastardly tricks. At least, they do this in North America during Halloween, although trick-or-treating is apparently on the rise in other countries as well. It appears to be on the rise in the online gambling space, too, and here's another one trying to spook your shirt off or, if you get lucky, maybe filling your sack with sugary goodies or, better yet, cash.

It comes from NetEnt and is titled Don't Eat The Candy, which is probably good advice since candy possesses little in the way of nutritional value despite being fun to snack on in moderation. Anyway, enough about eating, on with the gaming, which takes place on a 5-reel expandable grid housed in a rickety old cart, home to a black cat, some pumpkins, and a noose, which is pretty dark. The rest of the view is pretty dark, too. NetEnt has made copious use of greys and blacks to craft a graveyard environment of tombstones, ghosts, and twisty trees. It's all in fun, though. You know these Halloween-themed slots, they're more about cute 'spookiness' rather than actual horror.

Don't Eat The Candy is a highly volatile online slot built around a Sticky Win mechanic. How it works is when 3 or more pay symbols form a win or 3 scatters land anywhere, the winning symbols lock in place, triggering the Sticky Win. All other positions respin, and if the respin gives new line matching symbols, they are also locked white the remaining symbols respin again. When the screen is filled with winning symbols or no new winning symbols hit, a payout is made. When 3 rows of symbols are active, 25 paylines are in play; when the grid expands to 4 rows, the number of paylines is increased to 75. How this happens is covered in the next section. Before then, know that Don't Eat The Candy has a return to player value of 96.13% and takes bets of 10 p/c to $/€20 per spin.

Regular symbols on the paytable are divided between low-pay candies and high-pay spooky items. More specifically, five sweety objects are the low pays, awarding 0.3 to 1.2 times the bet for a line of 5 of them, rising to 2.4 to 8 times the bet for a 5 symbol winning line of wormed apples, potion bottles, dolls, or skulls. Landing on reels 2, 3, and 4 is Don't Eat The Candy's wild symbol, substituting for all regular pay symbols.

Don't Eat The Candy: Slot Features

The scatter symbol shows a trio of ghosts and is used to trigger the free spins phase of play. As well as free spins, another symbol to be aware of is the Pumpkin, which executes one of three modifying features.

Pumpkin Features

The Pumpkin symbol may land anywhere, and when it does, it awards a multiplier or expands the reels, or symbols are replaced. In the main game, Pumpkin modifiers are randomly awarded and are active for the spin they were triggered.

• Multiplier – a global multiplier that is always x2.
• Reels Expand – the grid expands from 5x3 to 5x4.
• Replace Symbols – low win symbols are replaced by higher win symbols.

Free Spins

Winning 10 free spins, plus a payout of 3x the bet, is achieved when 5 scatter symbols land in view. Each extra scatter symbol present on the triggering spin awards an additional 3 free spins. In free spins, Pumpkin features execute in a set order and remain active until the free spins round ends. The first time the Pumpkin lands, the x2 multiplier is awarded, then the reels will expand on the next trigger. From then on, for each Pumpkin landing, the low win symbols are replaced by the next low win symbol, one by one by type. Free spins cannot be retriggered.

Don't Eat The Candy: Slot Verdict

Don't Eat The Candy is a NetEnt game that might have been charming back in the day, but feels a bit antiquated by contemporary measures. The studio helped shine the spotlight on sticky winning pay systems when it dropped Jack Hammer back in 2011 – 12 years before Don't Eat The Candy, which feels a tad mind-bending. As well as seeing the release of Jack Hammer, 2011 was the year Operation Neptune Spear took out Osama Bin Laden, the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, causing the Fukushima disaster, the Occupy movement kickstarted, South Sudan got independence, and for gamers, Minecraft was released. Does time fly or what?

Does it mean in 2035, another slot will sneak forth from the NetEnt office, packing a Sticky Win pay mechanic? Maybe, maybe, it's a mechanic that can be entertaining when enough of the desired symbols stick to build an impressive result. Results may be boosted in Don't Eat The Candy when the Pumpkin symbol lands to help them along. The more, the merrier, as they say, meaning the x2 multiplier, along with expanded reels and all those extra paylines the additional row brings, are what you want. Symbol upgrades don't hurt either, and since Pumpkin modifiers stack in free spins, that's where a player's best chance of cracking Don't Eat The Candy's max win of 3,110.6x the bet resides. It's not a massive total in what isn't NetEnt's most massive game.

Don't Eat The Candy sits comfortably in a mid-ish tier Halloween position, with a few tricks up its sleeve, though not a huge sack of candy. To call in a Halloween metaphor, if Don't Eat The Candy was dressing up for the occasion, it'd be closer to throwing on a sheet and going as a ghost rather than going all-out freaky cosplay.