Before I write anything else, I want to commend the developer of Lith (Free) on their courage. Making an entire game around a gameplay concept that is likely most famously remembered as “the puzzley bits that everyone hates in middling JRPGs" takes some guts. Lith is a puzzle game made up entirely of those puzzles where you have to slide across icy surfaces to reach an exit. Once you’ve stepped onto the ice, you can’t stop or change direction until you reach a tile with some sort of traction or bump into a wall.

The good news is that these puzzles are a lot more palatable when you aren’t getting jumped by enemy fodder every ten seconds or so. The bad, or I suppose neutral, news is that although Lith has a few tricks up its sleeve, it’s not going to win you over if you never liked that type of puzzle to begin with. The worse news is that there are some elements in the monetization that threaten to spoil the whole broth.

Lith offers up 150 puzzles over six different worlds, each with their own visual theme and gameplay twists. The core of each stage remains the same, no matter what gimmicks are introduced. You start from a set point and you have to reach an exit door in as few moves as possible. In doing so, you’ll unlock the next stage and be awarded some star coins, which can be used to buy new characters to play as. There are some cute, unofficial semi-cameos in the character list, and unlocking things is always fun. The initial download offers you the first 28 stages for free, which is basically the first world. After that, if you’d like to continue, you can buy an unlock IAP for $1.99. You can also buy star coins and level skips via IAP, if you like.

Initially, the puzzles are almost trivially simple, especially if you’ve encountered this style of challenge in other games before. Soon, the stages increase in size and the complications begin to arrive, initially in the form of that old gaming stand-by, the pushable crate. The chances are good you’ll find yourself getting stumped even before the free levels are up, and it only gets crazier from there. If you like this kind of puzzle, rest assured, Lith has got you covered and then some. The controls are easy and functional, since all you can do is move in the four cardinal directions. You simply swipe in the direction you want the character to move in. If something needs to be pushed, you just swipe in its direction. It’s sometimes a bit too easy to make your character move, and bumping up against a wall costs you a move, but generally, as long as you keep from getting over-zealous, you won’t have any troubles here.

The aesthetics are really pleasant, too. The graphics are made up of simple sprites for the most part, but the use of colors is very nice, creating very warm or relaxing environments by using somewhat muted tones. The music matches, with mellow tunes clearly intended to relax you in case of frustrations from not being able to solve a puzzle. It’s not a show-off piece by any means, but for what amounts to a variation on Sokoban, it’s at least got a good, consistent feel to it. Rounding out the presentation, you get a leaderboard for the game’s survival mode, and a nice set of achievements that even have a fun Easter egg included. It’s been a while since I played that old ocarina.

All that said, there are a lot of things I don’t like about Lith. The biggest thing is that some of the features it includes as a free game feel a whole lot less welcome after you’ve paid for the full game unlock. The biggest issue is with skips. In Lith, you can only move on to the next level by beating the current one. You don’t have to beat it well, but you do have to beat it. That said, if you’re really stumped, you can skip the stage to move on to the next one. The game gives you five of these skips to start with, but once they’re gone, the only way to get more is to buy a $0.99 IAP for five more skips. If you use those, back to the piggy bank again. It’s a very unfriendly system, and while I can see its place in a free game, it seems a bit mean-spirited for people who have unlocked the full game to have to pay more to access stages, simply because they’re stuck on a single puzzle.

I also really dislike the fact that being able to play while zoomed out is something you have to unlock. You’ll probably be nearly a third of the way through the game before you have enough star coins to unlock that vital feature, and that’s if you don’t spend any coins on anything else. With the levels increasing in size fairly early on, forcing players to zoom out, get their bearings, zoom in, move, and then do the whole process over again is aggravating. I suppose, however, that one could just pay for a star coin pack to unlock that useful feature right away. As I said, I like unlockables, but I’ll never fully understand the thinking behind locking a feature that makes your game work better on a fundamental level. To add to this, the frustration of the dark levels becomes very suspect in light of there being an expensive unlockable to allow you to see better.

Lith is a decent game for patient puzzle fans. By focusing on a particular type of puzzle and building around it, you get some truly cool stage setups, and the game’s presentation is stylish and welcoming. I’m not really happy with the way it opts to monetize itself beyond the full game unlock IAP, as it makes me very suspicious of the intentions behind some of the stage designs. Lith is surely worth the $1.99, but my problem is that it feels like it continues asking for more, especially if you have the misfortune of getting well and truly stuck on some of the stages. At least give me a couple stages to work on in case I run into a wall or something. Still, with a hefty chunk of stages available for free, there’s no reason not to check it out and see if its way of doing things clicks with you.