The best thing about Lit is that it's got an E for Everyone rating from the ESRB.
This is a game about a teenage boy being repeatedly and viciously devoured by spirits of living darkness. "Oh, sure, Timmy," I would say about this game, were I to be playing it with a hypothetical child, "there's nothing to be scared of about the dark." Then I'd miss a step and watch as Jake, Lit's hero, gets dragged down below the surface of the world again, getting ripped to shreds by jet-black demons of night. "Except that, maybe," I'd say casually, scarring the child for life.
I can only figure the ESRB guy gave it a cursory glance, saw no tits or blood, and went about his day, blissfully ignorant of what he'd just done. Lit is a game about closet monsters taking over a high school, putting just about every potential childhood trauma together in a single package.
Please give it to your children. It'll be really funny in twenty years.
Jake, the hero of Lit, wakes up one night in what looks like his high school. It's the middle of the night, no one's around, and the school is infested with some kind of monsters. If Jake gets caught in the darkness with him, they'll pull him under; if he stays in the light, they won't come near. Jake can move freely around the school as long as he finds a way to stay in direct light while he does it.
Somewhere else in the school, his girlfriend Rachael is fighting what frankly sounds like a way more interesting battle against the darkness, calling Jake via the school's security phones every so often to make plans. Jake's goal is to find Rachael and get the hell out of there.
Lit is a puzzle game, which is weird. Just when you thought all puzzle games were about Fluffy the Magic Dinosaur collecting jewels and marshmallows to save the faerie kingdom, you get this, which is like the Silent Hill version of Puzzle Fighter. You begin with Jake standing on one end of a classroom, with nothing but his flashlight. You can create paths through the room out of light, by shooting out windows, turning on TVs and lamps, or tripping motion detectors, but each room can only support so much electrical activity before you blow a circuit breaker. You also have a limited number of slingshot pellets, flares, and cherry bombs available in each room, so you need to be very careful about what you destroy, what you activate, and when.
After the first five classrooms, Lit turns up the gain and becomes extremely challenging. It's a very unforgiving game, and it's very easy to die or to back yourself into a corner. Frequent restarts and a lot of trial-and-error experimentation will generally get you through, and it wouldn't hurt to have good reflexes. Some of the later puzzles require pretty strict timing, and there's an unlockable advanced difficulty that gives every stage a time limit.
The biggest problem Lit has is that it decided it needed to have boss fights, for some reason. The first few aren't too bad, but the fourth--a dodgeball game against a twisted version of the school's gym teacher--is a real pain in the ass. Lit has a few minor control problems, like flares being hard to use, and the context-sensitive A button often getting you killed; for example, you wanted to use an item, but instead you turned off a lamp, and now you're standing in total darkness.
In ordinary stages, these usually aren't serious issues, but the fight against the gym teacher is set up like he's conducting a master class on what the controls do wrong. He also keeps throwing dodgeballs at you that can actually randomly ricochet, killing you out of nowhere. It's like a boss encounter from a completely different game somehow showed up in this one and started beating the crap out of you.
I like Lit, which is why I've found the time to go on at such length about it; I've been playing a lot of it and I like what I see. It's often genuinely creepy, especially with the phone calls from Rachael (who at one point actively proposes the idea that you and she are dead and in hell), and the puzzles are challenging without being incredibly frustrating. For 800 Wii Points, you could do a whole hell of a lot worse. My only real problem with it is the god damned gym teacher fight, and it's a pretty big problem.
