Call of Cthulhu: Prisoner of Ice

Let me say right off that I am glad I have this game for my collection for these reasons: the art is very very well done, the animated scenes are perfect and well drawn, lovely at times. The sound track is also very good and atmospheric, the closing scene with the rock blaring is like watching an action movie. The adventuring is decent and on par for a point click adventure as well. Why the 3 stars? bah, numerous timed deaths detract from the immersion and ruin pacing. Often you are just reloading a save to try the next attempt, die, rinse repeat. Due to the sheer numbers of deaths and reloading it is also very easy to accidentally delete or overwrite a save, which I did twice. Thank god the devs instituted an autosave at most of the timed deaths so you can resort to that reload. Now to address the pixel hunting. At a few points I was totally stumped, trecking back and forth over and over only to resort to a walk thru and find out that there was a teeny tiny hotspot that I had missed. Also some of the puzzles were bizarre (needle on a displayed map im looking at you) and unless you just cycled thru inventory and mindlessly applied them to every hotspot there was no progress, so not very fun game play there. For those reasons I wont be playing this game again unless to watch the animated sequences which are beautifully drawn, and I recommend to those playing this the 1st time to have a walk thru near by in order to keep the pacing and fun of the game. but i repeat, for the reasons stated at the beginning im very very glad to have this charmer in my collection.

It gets 2 stars because I made it to the end without rage-quitting, but overall it's not very good. You'll probably want to play with a walkthrough. The puzzles / interactions needed to proceed aren't complete moon logic, but just have to be done in precise ways with no real hints. You'll get stuck a lot, and have to try every combination of interactions until one succeeds. The story is really disconnected and doesn't make much sense. There were so many NPCs with limited dialog options, and interesting bits of scenery with minimal descriptions... It's like they were actually avoiding every opportunity to add some flavor to the game world and characters.

As a fan of Cthulhu mythos, I loved Shadow of the Comet (the prequel to this game) and wanted to play Prisoner of Ice for ages. I have to say, Prisoner was very disappointing. The first segment is okay, even though there is some lack of logic and pixel-hunting involved (which is kind of expected of classic adventure games). But from second chapter on, the gameplay goes downhill FAST. A certain segment plays like a bad Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis rip-off, some puzzles, while not actually hard, are so badly implemented gameplay-wise, that it's nearly impossible to solve them unless you make a lucky click or consult a walkthrough. The worst thing is, the game completely lacks the Lovecraftian atmosphere SotC had. Come to think of it, it lacks any kind of atmosphere at all - it tries to be everything at once and fails. If you're a die-hard fa of the genre, you'll sit through this. If you're a SotC or Cthulhu mythos fan, you'll be very disappointed.

This loose sequel to Shadow of the Comet does few things better than it's infamous predecessor but overall looks shallow in comparison. You can say that developers listened to all the critique of SotC and tried really hard to not make the same mistakes. First of all there finally is proper point&click interface which works very well and is pretty much identical as in Beneath the Steel Sky (or most modern P&C's). Second, the gameplay is much more forgiving. This time you won't make to the final stages of the game just to realize that you can't win because missed some item in previous locations. Scripts just won't let progress without doing key things. There are also no cheap deaths and while it's still possible to die occasionally, game always kindly perform autosave before such section. Finally, it's quite hard to get stuck here. Puzzles are very basic and unoriginal and there are always very few locations available to explore at a time with not many items and interactive hot spots which combined with all above makes this game rather easy, especially for adventure game from that era. So it's almost like polar opposite of SotC in that regard. The only moments that might give player a hard time are occasional pixel hunting and timed events when things need to be done quickly. Those can be quite annoying. But other than that PoI lacks pretty much everything that made SotC good. Graphics might be more advanced but lacks charm and IMHO aged worse than pixel art from SotC. Story looks promising on paper but doesn't work well in game. It's just not engaging enough, kinda messy, with Cthulhu mythos and ties to previous title that seems out of place. Music is dull and forgettable compared to magnificent SotC soundtrack. Overall this game just lacks atmosphere and good storytelling to be something more than average adventure of which main selling point is connection with Lovecraft's works. And it's very short, about 4 hours, which isn't necessarily bad thing in this case.

Prisoner of Ice is a big improvement over its predecessor Shadow of the Comet in terms of gameplay, but still a bit of a disappointment for a Lovecraft game. Pros: The annoying, unresponsive controls are gone, replaced with a simple point and click interface. The backgrounds look good and are highly detailed. The pseudo-3D characters less so, but for the time they're not too bad. The plot moves along at a brisk pace, there's quite a bit of action and suspense, and you'll rarely find yourself wondering what you're even supposed to be doing, unlike Shadow of the Comet. The plot starts off rather dull, but soon takes some unexpected turns. Some of the plot twists are pretty clever and cool. Some of the puzzles make sense without being too easy. I never got stuck for long, though I may have gotten lucky. Cons: There's barely any characterization for anyone. More than in the first game, but still bare bones. Ryan and Diane begin to show hints of personality while solving puzzles together, but it's over all too quickly. A lot of puzzles require you to do random things with no indication of why, especially towards the end. The lack of hints or logic for some events just feels lazy. Other puzzles require pixel-hunting. The game is quite short, and leaves you wanting more. While enjoyable, the game does a pretty poor job of capturing the feel of a Lovecraft story. The mood is more like a cross between a spy movie and a sci-fi B movie, instead of cosmic horror. You get the feeling they weren't taking this very seriously right from the opening credits, where everything is prefaced with "Prisoners of" (Prisoners of Script, Prisoners of Graphics, etc.) Yeah. Hi-larious, guys. Truly the height of wit. This might be just me, but there were several graphics and sound bugs. Again, still fewer than the first game. All in all, a huge improvement over Shadow of the Comet, but awfully lame compared to what was yet to come, like CoC: Dark Corners of the Earth or Eternal Darkness.