LG / game / LIGHTS OUT
REVIEW
Lights Out on LG webOS is a faithful port of a thirty-year-old puzzle.
Valeriy Skachko's webOS build of the 1995 Tiger Electronics handheld classic — toggle a tile, flip its neighbors, turn every light off. Free, ad-free as far as the listing shows, and small enough to feel like a coffee-break.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 2 MIN READ
Lights Out is one of those rare puzzles that is more interesting the second time you solve it, once you have stopped guessing and started counting. The original 1995 Tiger Electronics handheld sold on the strength of a single, clean rule — toggle a tile, flip its four neighbors, turn every light off — and three decades of ports, web versions, and academic papers later, the rule still works. Valeriy Skachko’s LG webOS build is one of those ports, free on the LG Content Store, faithful to the source, and almost entirely undecorated.
That last part is the editorial question. A puzzle this old has been reimplemented hundreds of times — what does a 2025 TV-app version of it owe a player? In this case, not much beyond the puzzle itself. There is a grid, there is a cursor, there is a remote, and there is the small, specific satisfaction of watching the last light go out. The features expected of a modern puzzle app — daily challenges, leaderboards, hint systems, progression — are not here. For the price they probably do not need to be, but their absence shapes how long the app stays installed.
For LG TV owners who already know Lights Out and want a clean implementation on the big screen, this delivers exactly that. For anyone meeting the puzzle for the first time, the learning curve is gentler than it looks, and the moment the parity logic clicks is genuinely fun. The webOS implementation does not add to the puzzle; it does not take anything away from it either.
Lights Out is one of those rare puzzles that is more interesting the second time you solve it, once you have stopped guessing and started counting.
FEATURES
Lights Out is the classic 5x5 toggle-grid puzzle from Tiger Electronics' 1995 handheld, rebuilt for the LG webOS TV remote. Press any tile and it flips state — light to dark or dark to light — along with its four orthogonal neighbors. The goal is to turn every light off from a randomized starting pattern. The math underneath is linear algebra over GF(2); the play feels like sliding-block intuition until you notice the parity rules.
Valeriy Skachko's webOS implementation uses the standard webOS arrow-key navigation: directional pad to move the cursor, OK to toggle. The Magic Remote pointing layer works too if you prefer to click tiles directly. Levels appear to be procedurally generated rather than curated, which keeps the supply of puzzles effectively infinite at the cost of any difficulty ramp.
No accounts, no leaderboards, no online sync. The listing is silent on advertising, in-app purchases, or developer telemetry, and the app is a small download — this is a single-screen puzzle with no live infrastructure behind it.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The puzzle itself is the win, and the puzzle is forty years old in spirit and excellent. Lights Out rewards pattern recognition the same way Picross or Minesweeper do — there is a real solving technique under the surface (the "chase the lights" method, plus a small lookup table for the top-row residue), and the moment a player figures that out is the moment the app stops being a curiosity and starts being a habit.
For the price — free — this is a perfectly reasonable thing to keep on an LG TV. It loads instantly, plays cleanly with the standard remote, and asks nothing of the player beyond a few minutes of attention.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The package is bare. No daily challenge, no curated puzzle pack, no difficulty selector beyond grid randomization, no move counter or best-time tracking that persists between sessions in any visible way. A small leaderboard or a 6x6 / 7x7 variant would lift the replay value considerably without changing the spirit of the game.
TV remotes are also a slightly awkward fit for a grid puzzle that benefits from quick, confident input — Magic Remote pointing helps, but stepping a cursor through twenty-five tiles with the directional pad gets tedious on harder boards. A "solve" hint button for stuck players would be a kindness.
CONCLUSION
Worth installing on an LG TV if the idea of a free, single-purpose puzzle on the home screen sounds restful rather than tedious. Pair it with a longer-form app for evenings when the TV is on but the attention is elsewhere. Anyone hoping for a fleshed-out puzzle suite with progression and metagame should look at one of the larger logic-puzzle compilations instead.