Ice Nosfe (PC)

Thank You Ferluox Studios for submitting this game through our Steam Curator!

I’ve played about two of Ferulox Studios’ games through Steam Curator. The developer has been making many entries that are based on classic arcade and old-school titles such as Galaga, Donkey Kong, and Pac-Man. His latest entry, Ice Nosfe, seems to take inspiration from such titles as Snow Bros and Bubble Bobble.

Klaus and Waldo Van Helsing—brothers that are tasked with vanquishing Nosfe and his various minions in Transylvania. Armed with a freeze gun and vacuum pack, they suck up the minions to fire back at the boss as ice cubes. Ten levels in all with five unique boss fights and different enemies on each stage will test a player’s skills to overcome the creatures of the night.

Like many of Ferulox Studios’ other games, this has a 2D arcade style to it. All ten stages must be beaten in order and losing all of your hit points means you have to start over from the very beginning. Each level has multiple layers in which you use the ladders located on the sides or throughout to climb up and down, avoiding enemies and the boss. The boss is immune to your freeze gun, but the smaller enemies aren’t. You hit the smaller enemies enough times and they will be frozen in place. You can collect them in your backpack by walking into them, up to three times indicated by the blue and white of your back, and shoot them while aiming in six directions. Three layers have the biggest ice block, bounce the most times, and do the most damage but are also the riskiest to go after. After a while, you will run out of water so you need to collect it to refill your freeze gun.

Now the idea of Ice Nosfe is fine—it’s the execution of it all that when the problems arise. Standard enemies seem to take anywhere from five to seven shots of your freeze gun to freeze. I found this aspect to be annoying because I never knew when I would freeze an enemy so I could plan ahead. Because of the random and inconsistent nature of freezing enemies, I would either waste shots or end up getting damaged because they took one or two more hits extra. The enemy’s erratic movements wouldn't help either as they would climb up and down at random intervals, even changing direction in an instant. Since you can only hit enemies horizontally and they climb ladders often, there’s a lot of downtime between damaging the boss and gathering ice blocks.

I’m fine with difficult games, but with Ice Nosfe the difficulty can feel unfair at times. With arcade games, a game either is meant to be a learning experience or learn some kind of pattern recognition. Yet, Ice Nosfe has neither. A game over for me never felt like I learned something from it, and the unpredictable movements made me feel like I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. I can’t even get past level four despite going at it for hours. Stages also go on for way too long as they’ll take on average 6 minutes to complete each, due to all the running around and the boss taking a lot of punishment.

The number of moral warnings is few and far between. The most noticeable one is the fact that all the enemies in the game are based on supernatural creatures such as mummies, vampires, cyclopes, and werewolves. As stated above, you freeze enemies to shoot back at them and they vanish in a puff of smoke.

I feel Ice Nosfe deviated way too far from the games that inspired it. With Ferulox Studios’ other works I can see the clear inspiration, with them adding enough unique properties that I can imagine playing them over the classic counterpart. While those games are also difficult, the feedback from them also made me want to continue playing. I couldn’t feel that from Ice Nosfe because the feel is too slow, too inconsistent, and lacks engagement. While it functions and controls well, and has decent sprite work, I would recommend Ferulox Studios' other works or even the entries that inspired Ice Nosfe (Bubble Bobble, Snow Bros, Tumblepop) way before I would recommend this to people.