Prisoner
of Ice is a game based on the mythology created by H.P. Lovecraft. I’ve often
wondered what the likes of Lovecraft, or Poe for that matter, would have thought
of the lucrative licencing rights that would have been available to him had he
been alive in the last portion of the twentieth century. This also makes me wonder
a bit in a sort of chicken-or-the-egg kind of musing in relation to knock-off
projects based on the works of these sorts of authors. Is their stuff repeatedly
used because of the fact that these belles-lettres are brilliant classics, or
because there are no fees to pay rights-wise, and no one to complain about the
rewrites? One of the great mysteries of the universe, I suppose. But I digress.
Prisoner does an excellent job of taking the basics of the Lovecraft Cthulhu
mythos and weaving an entertaining and engrossing story, on top of an all-around
well-put-together and fun game. What more could a gamer ask?

The story
in a nutshell: You are Lieutenant Ryan, a young officer working for the US Secret
Service, assigned to serve with the Royal Navy on the eve of World War II. A powerful
European adversary has discovered an ancient threat held trapped inside the ice
of the South Pole. Your mission is to prevent the Prisoners of Ice from spreading
across the world. And if you fail, the Old Ones will return to Earth.

Graphics
are fairly run-of-the-mill, mid-90s, third-person style. The cool thing about
Prisoner that gives it a really different look (separating the men from
the boys, so to speak) are the paintings dispensed as graphics to accompany backstory
bits given out by various characters. These are some wonderfully creepy paintings
that anyone who has spent any time buried in the old horror comics of the 60s
and earlier, ala Creepy, EC’s Vault of Horror, and the venerable pre-Code Crypt
of Terror, is going to recognize, as well as the correlative relationship between
the use of that style and the mythos of Lovecraft’s world (albeit sans the Mad
Arab in this instance).

The music is of an amazingly high quality for a
game. This isn’t to say that there’s not plenty of good game music around, I’ve
often found things I truly love in a number of games. It’s just that the music
here is not only ambient, it has a fuller, more noirish quality that heightens
the tension considerably, and gives the player the feeling that she’s got to hurry
up right now, or she may get jumped on.

The puzzles are everything
an adventure gamer could ask for. They fit into and forward the story. Things
make sense and are not a leap to understand. In other words, if there’s a fire
in the wastebasket, here you put it out with a fire extinguisher, not a fish.
They are purely, with one exception, inventory-based.

There are some really
nice, smooth design elements as well. There is an automatic save feature built
into the game, and dang it if that sucker did not come in delightfully handy multiple
times for me. It saves just before any critical scenes occur. It also has a satisfying
endgame sequence, and two endings, both of which are made available to the player
by way of the auto save feature. Additionally, inventory no longer needed is automatically
removed.

This game is an excellent example of all the things that are good
about the adventure genre when a game has been built correctly. There’s an engrossing
story, puzzles that are rational and keep the player immersed in the story, not
setting it aside to solve them, and music and graphics that do the job of tying
it together in a cohesive package. This is a classic–pick it up play it if you’d
like a game that gives you a good, old-fashioned, third-person, story-driven injection.

Final
Grade: B+

System Requirements:

Mac:
68020
CPU minimum
256 colors
6000K free RAM
2X or faster ROM drive
System
7.0 or higher
Sound Manager 3.1 or higher

PC:
486
DX 33 minimum
MS-DOS 5.0 or higher
Double speed CD-ROM drive
256 VGA
graphics card
Sound Blaster and 100% compatibles