There are additional complications. There is a step counter that increments with each movement your character takes. If the player manages to complete the level within a given number of steps, a particular prize is awarded. Functionally, it makes no difference, but it is something you'll keep in the back of your head as you play.

There are also free-roaming enemies in later levels. If the player collides with one of these enemies, 10 steps are added to the step counter. Again, this is not a deal-breaker, but if you're playing this game in the spirit in which you're meant to be, then each step counts.

Some of these levels are more than one screen wide and tall, which means that you can't see the whole field at once, which might be essential to generating a strategy to beating the level. Enter the Map screen, which provides an overview of the level as it stands. Clicking on the Map button while looking at the overview gives a Solution Map, which shows what the true solution to the level should be. Sometimes that helps, being able to see the correct placement of each boulder and the path to the cottage opened up, but more often it's just tantalizing enough to be really frustrating.

The demo comes with the first 10 levels, which are used as tutorials. While each steps up by adding a new element, the nature of the puzzles becomes evident around level 5 or 6, as you're shown a number of 4 talismans, each cloistered within its own dead-end niche, blocked by either a pool of water or an impassable bush. At first, it seems simple enough: push each of the available four boulders into their respective areas to gather the talismans and complete the level. But it becomes plain that the straightforward approach doesn't apply to this particular puzzle.

There are a metric ton of puzzle games out there in the digital wilderness, and many of them are simply carbon copies of an ur-game that began the trend. That doesn't mean that they're not worth playing. Rather, it's a sign that our appetite as a game-playing audience will always return to gameplay that it has enjoyed in the past, and that there is always going to be a market for these games, no matter how often reiterated. While at first Majestic Forest may not seem to be for you, give the demo (Mac and PC) a try and see if it scratches that itch for you -- or even better, that it causes an itch where once there was none.