Fire 'n Ice

Although it’s technically a prequel to Solomon’s Key, Fire ’n Ice dispenses with that title’s action-oriented approach in favor of a tile-based Sokoban platformer, much like Catrap. Fire ’n Ice is slightly less raw than the latter, however. While the goal is identical – to eliminate all enemies on-screen – said enemies are fire spirits and must be snuffed out by contacting an ice block. Luckily, protagonist Dana can summon or dispel ice from above any tile directly diagonal to him (either down-right or down-left). Creating ice next to a wall fuses it to the surface horizontally, but one can extend it by another tile and then erase the initial tile, leaving a free-standing ice block for the player to manipulate as they please. However, the player can’t move these blocks tile-by-tile; they slide across the floor until they hit a wall, fall off a ledge, or contact fire and melt. As the game progresses, the player must learn to craft elaborate structures that will allow an individual ice block to eliminate a spirit in an awkward location, often while preserving access to another spirits in the stage.

The game gets much more juice when it ignores the latter condition. Across 100 levels,¹ Fire ’n Ice never quite figures out how to make full puzzle-box stages, where every action fundamentally alters the playfield and enemies aid the solution just as often as they hinder it, closer to what Catrap fiendishly masters in its second half. Instead, multi-enemy rooms tend to progress as multiple individual puzzles in a larger area or connected by hallways, loosely tied by the need to avoid blocking one puzzle off when solving another. This has its merits, but it also has the tendency to dampen the quality of the mini-puzzles within, making one or more of them solvable at a glance and purely busy work in the player’s devised procedure. Dana’s limitations accentuate the latter point by restricting free block creation to a few key level-design idioms: he needs a ledge one tile higher than where he’s standing, and he needs a runway of at least three blocks to keep the middle block from attaching to a wall. Once the player internalizes this, they can scan levels quickly and know exactly where block creation works best, revealing how relatively restrictive the possibility space is.

Although the pipes disorient the player initially, extinguishing each spirit is rather simple, and the only puzzle is sequencing their deaths, which comes naturally just by checking what pipes/routes are available at any given time. [src]

Of course, Dana’s power also opens up opportunities to make his own block creation points, but this ultimately exposes another issue: despite his limitations, he’s still extremely powerful. The ability for gravity to disrupt Dana’s movement falters when he can make bridges and staircases out of ice with only sparse pre-existing blocks to aid him. The latter manifests as tight vertical shafts with staggered one-tile nooks on either side ascending up, where Dana can climb into a nook, form ice behind him, and cross it to reach the next nook. While the game occasionally uses these as one-way valves, since scaling one will simultaneously seal it, just as often it uses a slightly wider variation with the intent that the player undo their work as they ascend, adding even more busy work just to reuse the path later on. At its worst, the game will form full puzzles out of these climb-and-undo segments, stacking the entire field with ice block formations that fall as Dana slowly carves his way up. With all of this in mind, Fire ’n Ice shines most when it locks Dana down in a tight area and makes the player create their own block-creation area in an unorthodox way.²

Part of the reason the design doesn’t quite push the engine like it could are the many gimmicks that dilute the difficulty curve, although some of these actually aid the primary mechanics quite a bit. The best may be the black blocks, which kill enemies without melting and move one tile at a time, except when sliding on ice. This latter mechanic gives them interesting flavor, as careful preliminary block placement by the designers can restrict where the black blocks can actually move without assistance, and solving how to drop one in a certain spot vexes Dana more than regular ice, since he can neither dispel nor create them. They also interface well with ice blocks when placed alongside one another, since Dana scales blocks he cannot push, making back-to-back block configurations an important step in certain puzzles, as the player may need to place a block to get around another without moving it. Other gimmicks tend to funnel the design towards weaker ends: the pipes, for instance, sometimes veer towards silly mazes divorced from the ice mechanics at all. The boss areas, meanwhile, reincorporate real-time enemy movement without unlocking Dana from the tile grid, leaving him awkwardly waiting to hit enemies within generous windows. Alternatively, some levels scroll and wrap vertically, with fire on the bottom waiting to consume Dana. While the shifting playfield adds a soft time limit and hides solutions on a first glance, they turn into tedious autoscrollers upon retries once most of the solution has been determined.