A short yet unique experience with visible lack of polish and great atmosphere.
You play as a climber that has to go look for a group that got lost. After a few meters you start hearing some trouble over the radio. The rope snaps and you fall all the way down.
The first thing I noticed was that while I could move around, I couldn't use the mouse to turn my head. Until I looked at the settings and realized that the game starts with sensitivity set to zero, I assumed I had run into a bug. Once I moved the slider, everything was fine.
The key climbing technique is immediately introduced. And it's great. You can climb any ice surface and special rocks, but nothing else. Red and blue climbing picks, one for each mouse button, are the main tools for this.
You climb by pressing two buttons alternately, making sure not to run out of stamina in the process. As long as you know where to put the picks, you can go in any direction. Each pick has its own stamina, which is slowly restored when you are standing on a firm surface. You can pull yourself up once near an edge. But in order to avoid falling back down, you need to be as close as possible.
The jump button is an extremely helpful move that, when used correctly, may get you quite far. You can hop while holding onto a pick, then re-use the pick before falling into the void. You can go more quickly and conserve some stamina if you repeat this move. Thankfully, since it can only be done with a flat wall, this doesn't become an universal solution.
Monsters and puzzles are nothing special. The underground creatures are not smart, so they can be easily escaped by climbing or jumping over the edge. They don’t even look scary because the design has been seen before. The only indication of a puzzle are wooden crates that can be used to set other wooden barriers on fire.
There are advantages and disadvantages to the jagged rocks that form the landscape. The beautiful thing about traversable walls is that each one feels different; you might say they're like little platforming puzzles. Most of the time, getting to the next flat area requires navigating carefully positioned patches of ice.
The drawback is that rocks have protruding textures that can make you trip on narrow spaces, prevent you from jumping or save your life. While this may seem useful, you often find yourself in a tight spot because you are unable to scale normal walls. Throwing yourself purposefully into the pit is the only way out.
This "special" move is also helpful with everything else such as wooden boxes and climbable rocks. These rocks can only withstand a couple of hits with the pick, so you need to make every climb count. Since they don’t magically grow back once they crumble, you get stuck again. Into the pit you go.
The bigger issue arises when you slip between two rocks and are unable to move, which, to be honest, doesn't happen very often. Since you can’t kill yourself and there’s no button to restart from last checkpoint, you need to return to the main menu and continue from there. What’s more, the intro can't be skipped, which makes it even more annoying.
Saving your progress involves pressing the switches. They were evenly spaced out so I never felt as like I was losing time by having to redo things too frequently. There is no autosave, so be sure to hit the switch as soon as you see one.
The graphics are mostly rocks and walls with occasional unique object. One of them are corpses you can search for some extra story bits.
It's strange enough that the head can rotate vertically indefinitely, but it's even stranger to see two graphical "artifacts" when looking below. When you see your shadow and realize that your character is nothing more than two arms carrying picks in each, everything starts to make sense. This is visible when you stick a pick in the ice, turn around, and see an arm that isn't attached to anything and is simply hovering there.
