Another day, another short iOS game knocked off the backlog.

Lili (the “Child of Geos” subtitle seems to have been added for the PC release) is a surprisingly well-crafted iOS adventure game, especially when you consider that it can be had for a quite reasonable 3 dollars.

The gist of the story is, you’re a student of magical vegetation – stay with me – who needs to finish her final project by going to a deserted island and picking flowers.  It turns out that the deserted island ISN’T deserted (are they ever?) and is instead populated by two different groups of magical entities:

First, the Constructs:

Constructs are friendly wooden golem sorts of things who are happy to see you show up and generally nice to you.  Some of them get a little …weird… sometimes…

…but, by and large, they’re good folks.  Sadly, they are both the creations of and the slaves of Spirits, who are a little less good.

Well, let’s just put it right out there: They’re jerks.  They bully the constructs around, dismantle them if they get uppity, that sort of thing.

Naturally, you get caught up in the whole thing when you meet a construct who offers to train you and asks if you wouldn’t mind  defeating the Spirits and freeing the Constructs in the process.

As for HOW you defeat the Spirits, well…

…

…well, OK then.  I certainly have more than a few games involving deflowering spirits, but I wasn’t expecting to get one from the app store.

As you might expect, the Spirits are more than a little upset about this:

…well, MOSTLY upset:

…

OK, OK.  I’ve milked the gag long enough.

The Spirits have flowers growing out of their backs, and you defeat them by jumping on to them, riding them like a bucking bronco, and pulling the flowers out.  There are, of course, certain hindrances – some of the flowers are thorns, the Spirits are trying to shake you off the whole time, and they occasionally break out in bombs.

Spirit biology seems like a very complex thing.

There are a bunch of side quests you can take from the Constructs, there are little hidden things everywhere to uncover, the Construct/Spirit Village is a neat place to run around in general, and the entire affair is just generally a fun way to spend a few hours.

There are some iAPs, mostly cosmetic, but some which give you quite a bit of power.  I didn’t need to use any of them to finish the story on “Normal” difficulty, so I think they’re only for the most impatient players.

I don’t know if the PC version has the same iAPs.