I’ve had a very long relationship with candy crush. If I remember correctly, I started playing the game in 2013 sometime, back when life was simpler, my thumbs were innocent, and match-three games hadn’t yet wrapped themselves around my soul like a clingy situationship.

From the beginning, ours was a classic love-hate relationship: I loved the colours and dopamine, and the game hated my dignity, sleep cycle, and sanity.

Back in those days, there were limited levels. Once I completed 500 levels, I had to wait for the new levels to be released. New candies, new combinations, new challenges; the game kept on getting more and more difficult, often making me give up. My Obsession With Candy Crush Comes to An End

The love-hate relationship continued: Candy Crush Rocks!

I often felt that it was impossible to win some levels without boosters. I loved the UFO and party booster but they were also so expensive, 29 gold bars, and gold bars don’t come easy.

For years, I followed The One Sacred Rule of Gaming:

Spend a ton of hours — but never a single rupee.

Mature. Responsible. Principled. A woman of restraint.

And then came May 2025.

The month I fell. The month the mighty crumbled. The month I looked at my past self and said, “LOL, cute.”

I succumbed to temptation and spent… wait for it…

Twenty rupees.

Yes. Just ₹20. The kind of amount you don’t even bend to pick up from the floor.

And what did I get?

A glorious 24-hour life boost. Unlimited lives. Endless plays. Infinite opportunities to destroy candies and whatever was left of my self-control.

So, like any rational human being with questionable priorities, I played for hours straight — because if you don’t maximise a 24-hour booster, are you even middle-class at heart?

But then the game did what Candy Crush always does when you start doing well: It stopped giving boosters. Like a toxic ex who senses happiness and immediately ruins it. Fine, I thought. If you won’t give me boosters, I won’t play.

Cue dramatic exit.

Except… apparently you can’t walk away from a decade-old habit like a Bollywood hero walking away in slow motion.

So yes, I succumbed again, obviously! This time, I upgraded my logic.

“I earn so much. I can spend a little on this. It’s harmless.”

Oh, the confidence. The delusion. The financial optimism. I learned, the hard way, to cheat the clock so I could refill energy faster. My screen time went from a perfectly respectable 1.5 hours to… 6 hours a day.

Six. Hours. A day.

I was timing my breaks around event cycles. I’d wait like a stock trader for the “Express Train with Party Booster,” as if I was managing a candy-based investment portfolio.

Every gold bar purchase burned out quicker than the last. Even the “easy” levels suddenly demanded boosters — like they’d unionised. Somewhere between “This is harmless fun” and “Why am I calculating gold-bars-to-cash ratios at 2 a.m.?”, I neared ₹4,000.

₹4,000.

On a mobile game. A game where cartoon candies explode and a voice says Divine! At some point, I snapped. I’d had enough.  This was my villain origin story, except instead of building an empire, I was uninstalling a game.

Well… uninstalling it from the device where I could make purchases.

I still play. Of course I still play. Don’t be ridiculous. But now I play it like an 18th-century monk: No purchases. No boosters. No swipes of weakness.

I have been stuck on the same level for over a month, staring at it like it’s a karmic punishment for my past decisions — watching other players zoom past while the game whispers,

“Wouldn’t this be easier if you just… bought something?”

No. Not this time.

This year is my line in the sand — the beginning of the end of Candy Crush purchases.

May my wallet rest in peace. My thumbs, however, remain… employed.

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Shabana Mukhtar