LG / game / 2048 MANIAC
REVIEW
2048 Maniac is a competent webOS take on a twelve-year-old puzzle.
Retinmount's free 2048 clone for LG TVs is faithful, remote-friendly, and entirely uninterested in surprising anyone who has already played the original.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 2 MIN READ
The original 2048 was a weekend project — Gabriele Cirulli’s open-source 2014 web puzzle that spawned, by conservative estimate, several thousand forks across every platform that runs code. 2048 Maniac on LG webOS is one of those forks, ported to a television by Czech developer Retinmount s.r.o. and updated as recently as April 2026. It is, accurately, what it appears to be: a faithful, free, single-mode tile-merge that asks nothing of the player and offers nothing they haven’t seen before.
That isn’t a complaint so much as a calibration. The 2048 puzzle works because it is small, hard, and clean — slide, merge, double, repeat, with the difficulty curve emerging from the player’s own decisions rather than from the game’s machinery. A TV implementation either preserves that or it doesn’t. 2048 Maniac preserves it. The Magic Remote’s directional pad maps cleanly to the four moves, the grid renders large enough to read from a sofa, and the response is quick enough that a session feels like playing rather than waiting.
What’s missing is everything the better mobile and web forks have spent the last decade adding — alternative grid sizes, daily seeds, undo stacks, themes, statistics. The webOS build sits at the minimum-viable end of the 2048 design space. For a free TV app, that’s a defensible position, but it caps the upside.
2048 Maniac doesn't reinvent the tile-merge — it just gets out of its own way on a remote-and-screen interface.
FEATURES
2048 Maniac is a free LG webOS implementation of the 2048 tile-merge puzzle popularised by Gabriele Cirulli's 2014 open-source release. Slide tiles on a 4x4 grid with the Magic Remote directional input — matching pairs combine, doubling each time, with 2048 as the nominal target and higher tiles available to players who keep going.
The webOS build sticks to the basics. One mode, one grid size, a persistent best-score counter, and an undo of the last move. There is no online leaderboard, no account, no daily challenge, no animated theme pack — features that distinguish the more elaborate mobile 2048 forks. Developer Retinmount s.r.o. last updated the app in April 2026, suggesting the build still gets occasional attention rather than being abandonware.
The app is free and, as far as the webOS store metadata goes, carries no in-app purchases or ad framework. That alone separates it from the bulk of free-to-play TV puzzle apps.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The directional input maps to the puzzle the way it should — up, down, left, right on the Magic Remote do exactly what fingers do on a phone, and the response latency is short enough that the game feels live rather than queued. For a puzzle whose entire appeal rests on tactile rhythm, that's the bar to clear.
The visual presentation is restrained and high-contrast on OLED panels, which matters more than it sounds — many TV puzzle apps render with overscan issues or fight the display's colour gamut. 2048 Maniac doesn't, and the score reads cleanly from a sofa.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The webOS build inherits all of 2048's structural limits and adds none of the quality-of-life features that the better mobile forks have shipped in the decade since. No statistics view, no move history beyond a single undo, no choice of grid size, no themes, no cloud sync of best scores between TVs. A 4x5 or 5x5 variant alone would meaningfully extend replay.
The store listing lacks a written description, which is a minor signal that marketing isn't a priority — fine for the developer, less fine for prospective installers who want to know what they're getting before the download.
CONCLUSION
2048 Maniac does the thing it set out to do — put 2048 on an LG TV in a form that works with a remote, costs nothing, and runs cleanly. It will not convert anyone who already finds the puzzle dull, and it doesn't try. For LG owners who want a low-stakes solo game to fill a few minutes between shows, this is a reasonable install. Anyone hoping for variant modes or progression should look elsewhere.