You Must Become A Lich

You Must Become A Lich opens with an oddly specific fantasy: instead of becoming a lich through forbidden ritual magic or ancient tomes, you get there through a coin pusher. The store page leans into the joke fully — you "cast a spell to summon the gold necessary to appease the demons below," then get down to the actual business of feeding coins into a machine and watching physics do the rest. It's a genuinely uncommon pairing for a Steam release: a coin-pusher arcade game, the kind normally found bolted to the floor of a seaside amusement hall, wrapped around a small RPG about building a monstrous army and sieging territory. That combination is the whole appeal, and whether it works for you likely depends on which half of the hybrid you came for.

Six tables, one demonic curator, and a launch that almost didn't happen

The game's structural hook is straightforward: six meticulously themed pusher tables — the promotional screenshots show a torch-lit dungeon hall, a mossy forest clearing with tree obstacles, and a farmland table with harvest-crate scoring zones — each ending in a boss fight, with coins earning chests that supply the parts for a growing undead army. It's a real production, not a reskin of a single table, and the presentation is more distinctive than the concept's novelty-item framing might suggest.

Its path to release is worth knowing about on its own terms. Steam's news feed for this app includes a 21 September 2023 post titled "Production Halted Indefinitely Due to Recent Unity Decisions" — a direct reference to Unity's short-lived per-install runtime fee announcement that briefly threw much of the indie development world into crisis that month. A follow-up post a week later, "Production Resumed - Next Fest Demo!", confirms development picked back up once Unity walked the policy back, and the game shipped a little over a month after that, on 4 November 2023. It's a small, concrete data point in the wider history of that controversy: at least one real, near-complete solo project was paused mid-development because of it.

A pusher that's fun, an RPG layer that several reviewers call thin

The coin-pushing itself draws little complaint — reviewers who dislike the game tend to say the physics-based pushing is "ok" or better, and the frustration sits with what surrounds it. A Japanese-language review from launch week lays out the core tension precisely: describing it as "a game where coin-pushing and an RPG merge," the reviewer argues that written down that sounds appealing, but in practice both halves feel underdeveloped — minions summoned from chests have fixed HP and attack stats and simply grind down the enemy in a straight damage race, with no healing and no meaningful choice once they're deployed, since a defeated minion is simply gone. The coin-pusher boss fights fare similarly in that account: even missing the time limit doesn't cost you progress, since boss HP carries over between attempts, softening any real sense of stakes.

An English-language review from May 2024 makes a related but distinct complaint about pacing rather than depth: they completed the entire game in 118 minutes and describe making "absolutely zero meaningful choices" along the way, arguing the experience would play out identically on autoplay. That's a much harsher read than most of the corpus, but it converges with the Japanese review's core point from six months earlier — across two independent languages, the recurring criticism is that neither the coin-pushing nor the RPG layer individually offers much strategic depth, and stacking them together doesn't create depth so much as alternate between two shallow loops.

The performance complaint — and a direct answer to it, four days before this review

A more concrete, testable complaint runs through several 2023-2024 reviews: unusually heavy GPU load for what's visually a modest arcade game. One reviewer reports 300 watts of power draw and 99% utilisation on an RTX 4090; another reports 85% usage on an RTX 2080. Those are specific, plausible-sounding technical claims rather than vague performance grumbling, and the likely underlying cause — an uncapped frame rate letting the GPU render as many frames as it physically can — is a common, well-understood issue in small Unity projects that don't ship a frame-limiter by default.

What makes this worth reporting in detail is that the developer has now directly addressed it. An 8 August 2026 patch note, titled "V1.2 Long Term Support & Appreciation Patch" and posted just four days before this review, states plainly: "Unlocked the FPS Cap and added a setting in the pause menu to allow the player to choose if they want unlimited or not," alongside broader engine work — an upgrade to Unity 6.4, a switch from the Mono scripting backend to IL2CPP, and shader optimisation aimed at reducing GPU impact. That's a precise, verifiable match to the specific complaint reviewers raised nearly three years earlier, and it's a stronger signal of ongoing developer care than most games at this price point ever demonstrate.

An allegation worth naming carefully

One negative review, from May 2024, states that the developer banned them from a support channel after they asked whether the game was abandonware, and characterises the developer as "sensitive." This review has no way to independently verify what happened in that exchange — a Steam review corpus can't audit a moderation decision the way it can date a pattern of complaints — so it's reported here only as a claim made by one reviewer, not as an established fact about the developer's conduct. What can be said with more confidence, from the news feed itself, is that the "abandonware" framing doesn't match the game's actual support history: patches continued through 2024, and the August 2026 update is the most recent of several substantial ones since launch.

Final verdict

You Must Become A Lich is a genuinely inventive small game — a coin pusher with real stakes attached, built and shipped despite a mid-development scare from an industry-wide pricing controversy, and still receiving meaningful support nearly three years later. Its two constituent halves, taken individually, are each simpler than the premise suggests, and more than one reviewer in more than one language reaches the same conclusion about limited strategic depth and a short overall runtime. But the developer's direct, dated response to the loudest technical complaint in the game's history — unlocking the frame-rate cap in the exact patch note where reviewers described the exact problem — is a rare enough thing to see that it should weigh in the game's favour for anyone deciding whether a small, still-supported novelty is worth NZ$10.49.