Icemaze Cave: Skate Escape

Fun game. It only took about 3 hours to complete while making sure to 3 star and mineral every level along the way and I have the problem-solving skills of an actual chimpanzee. Could use conveyor belts to go with the ice to make the nightmares that the pokemon games never wanted to give us, but as it is we still get 100 levels of puzzles with a sane difficulty curve and a fairly low peak difficulty. There were a few puzzles which felt like they had a huge number of explicit forced moves, removing player decision-making from the puzzle, though, so some of the end puzzles were easier than early game puzzles.

Icemaze Cave is a simple "ice puzzle" game in the style of Quell and Atomix. You must navigate a grid to reach the exit, but whenever you move, you cannot stop or change directions until you hit a wall. This game has no originality in it's mechanics, but it makes up for it with a variety of polished levels. If you're just trying to complete each level, the gentle difficulty curve can make this game enjoyable if it is your first ice puzzle-type game, but getting a perfect score on each level may still pose a challenge to experienced players.

Did you miss the cave puzzles from the first three generations of the old Pokemon games? Wanna play a game that has nothing but that? Then this game is just perfect for you except you’ll get bored of the gameplay before you can say, “Refund.” A lack of complexity or varied challenges kills interest in a puzzle themed game. Balancing the difficulty is how good games are made. Not challenging the player at all would be advisable if this was a game for children. But since it isn’t then the creator didn’t want to put in the work to make good money. They want snack money which my payment of eight-four cents plus tax isn’t going to feed them anytime soon. Overpriced, and too short of a game with easy gameplay that a child would be insulted by. Not worth your time or money unless you get it on sale for toddlers. And why would you when you could do anything else with them. I suppose if you’re that desperate for a puzzle themed game to distract them from an upcoming disaster of a tantrum then go buy A good snowman is hard to build. It does the same themed concept puzzle bit with added difficulty and with better graphics to boot.

Exactly as advertised Difficulty is between easy and medium, but honestly, for a straight forward game like this without a bunch of added gimmicks to make it harder (like Quell for example) it's just right, because the only way to make it higher would be to make massive rooms and that would just make it tedious instead of challenging imo.

It feels simple yet challenging—a truly original game. Wonderfully made!

I don't know how I'm going to practice my figure skating with all these puzzles in the way!

Not too bad. It really depends on how much you're interested in this one specific type of puzzle, because that really is all there is. There's no special mechanics, nothing changes during the 100 levels aside from how big the levels are. It's just sliding around on ice with a pokemon sprite. It didn't even get especially hard (the highest the 3-star move count gets is 23) so it didn't take very long to 100%. Overall, not very ambitious, but it is what it says it is. It's hard to comment on the price because I got the game as a gift, but it's hard to imagine you couldn't find something similar for free on itch.io or, like, newgrounds. Or, y'know, pokemon. Pokemon even has blocks to push.