Ice Palace

Ice Palace was designed by Paul Norris and published for the Commodore 64 by Creative Sparks in 1985. It is a top-down arcade adventure that combines two things which rarely met at the time — action and object-based puzzle solving.

The story is a fairy tale. Your goal is to recover your dead father's crown, because only with it can you destroy the evil Ice Queen and lift the eternal darkness from your land. The crown is split into seven pieces, scattered across seven levels of the Queen's Ice Palace.

The most interesting element is the control structure. The game works with two screens: an Action Screen and an Adventure Screen. On the first you move, dodge and fight; on the second you work out what to do with the objects you have collected and how to use them to unlock the next route. Switching between the two is the core of the game, and in 1985 it offered a depth that pure action titles did not have.

The weaknesses are period-typical and noticeable. Progress is slow, the puzzles frequently demand trial and error, and the game gives almost no indication of what is expected of you. Without paper and patience you will not get far.

One warning: several games share this title. Ice Palace from K-Tel International appeared on the Commodore 64 back in 1984 and is a different game; nor is this related to 1988's Beyond Ice Palace. So if you come across a recommendation somewhere, check which one it refers to.

Today Ice Palace is chiefly a sample of how the British scene in the mid-eighties mixed genres, because no rules yet existed to stop it.