Icebound

Icebound is a short game made for the IGMC 2017. It was made within a month, and games had to be below an hour long. But you probably already knew all that.

This is a game that I was excited to play. I've never played any games by the developer (formerly Luchino), but I have heard great things. Besides, the screenshots looked quite cool (pun intended). Having played it, I would like to say I was neither disappointed nor impressed.

Icebound, for a game made in (presumably less than) a month, is pretty decent. However, I am also sad to say that it presents a few flaws and doesn't have much to make it stand out.

The biggest positive of the game would easily be the visuals. The environment was very immersive. I throughly enjoyed exploring the snowy, vast island. It's not particularly big, but it still offered enough to make me satisfied.

Another positive would be the story. It was not amazing, I will say, but it was still pretty good. The little touch of humour was definetly nice, and there were a few scenes that managed to make me smile. Sadly, I had a few problems with it which I will get to in a bit.

The music was also quite nice. It really added a solitudional feel to the island, and accompanied the visuals really well.

The game was also very minimalistic. There wasn't much gameplay at all, not even a menu, which the game page clearly states. Personally, I found that to be a good thing. I was so immeresed by the environments (and the story a little bit, I guess) that I enjoyed exploring more than anything else in the game, and the lack of gameplay let me do so easily without breaking the immersion at all... mostly. And that's where the flaws start.



The battles were easily the biggest problem I had with the game. I understand that our friend Luchi- sorry, polar, wanted to add some sort of gameplay in there, but they felt completely unnecessary. I enjoyed the exploration a lot, as I said, but running into enemies (that were very hard to spot, by the way) and having to spend time on a snooze fest battle was definetly no fun.

There's also some nitpicks I want to add about the items (they were too much to just add as a caption to the image above), particularly that I had no idea what most of them even did and they did not feel necessary. Granted, they're only available during sell sequences and battles, I think, but they were generally completely useless anyway. There are healing skills anyway, which were already rarely necessary, so a healing item, while not bad to have, was kind of unnecessary, but I feel like having just gone with the ein orbs (which were really fun to search for, I should add) would have been enough if you ask me.



The only other negative aspect of the game for me was the narrative. This is also just a slight nitpick, but the characters felt very lifeless and the dialogue felt so... slow, for some reason. For a game that aims to be mostly about the story, the narrative felt meh, even though a good base story was in place. Of course, there isn't much you can accomplish in 30 minutes, but more humour or something would have definetly helped these characters feel more real.

In conclusion, Icebound is a decent game, a little average, but worth spending 30 minutes on. The narrative was kind of weak despite having a good story, and the battles did break the immersion a bit, but the atmosphere and the exploration definetly made it enjoyable.



I give the game three ein stones out of five.