Apskeppet released the Icy Tower remake on Steam on November 10, 2026, for Windows and macOS. Johan Peitz and Anders Svensson, the pair who made the 2001 original, built it. It costs $9.99, and a launch discount takes it to $8.49 until November 17.
That leaves the question every paid remake of a free game has to answer: what does the money buy?
The original came from Free Lunch Design in Sweden and went out as a free Windows download on December 22, 2001. Peitz designed it and Svensson wrote the music. You climb an endless tower of floors while the screen scrolls faster and faster, and if you drop off the bottom, the run is over. Jumping several floors at once builds a combo, and the combo is where the score lives. It spread through download sites for years, and the announcement counts more than 40 million players since 2001.
What $9.99 buys over the free version
Going by the Steam page, the jump has not changed. Everything around it has. The tower now runs through themed stretches, including temples, libraries and volcanoes. There are Daily Challenges, adjustable difficulty, a cast of characters and live-recorded music.
The old online score tables are now Steam leaderboards, and replays come with them, so you can watch runs from friends and from the top players. The 2001 game saved replays too, and score sites could ask for one as proof (a replay was the receipt). The remake gives that old habit a proper home.
It is single-player only. The competition stays the kind you have with a stranger's score at two in the morning, which is how Icy Tower was played in 2001 too.
The free 2001 game is still the purest version of the idea, and nothing on the store page says the remake improves the jump. It does not need to. The $9.99 buys a reason to come back tomorrow, in a fresh Daily Challenge and a leaderboard full of people you know. For a game built on one more try, that is the right thing to charge for.
In October I said I would be back short of floor 300 by November 11. The remake came out on November 10, which only gives me an extra day to fall short.
