The beginning of the game is set on the shore of the South Pole in January 1937 where the character you play is Ryan, an American Secret Service agent assigned to serve with the Royal Navy. The Nazis have discovered an ancestral threat trapped inside the ice of the South Pole that could help them in their plans to conquer the world at the eve of World War II. Your mission will be to prevent the creatures called the Prisoners of Ice from spreading across the world, and therefore preventing the Great Old Ones from returning to Earth.
You start your mission by being assigned second in command on the Royal Navy submarine H.M.S. Victoria. The british submarine has just picked up two mysterious crates and Bjorn Hamsun, the scientific community's most brilliant anthropologist, who just escaped a secret Nazi military base. With the help of a Royal Navy commando member O'Leary, Hamsun managed to steal three wooden boxes marked with the german inscription "Streng Geheim" which means "Top Secret". The german fighter plane that was pursuing the two men caused one of the boxes to fall down on the ice during the raid. After the gunner on the submarine had destroyed the plane, O'Leary in an attempt of recovering the box is savagely attacked by a tentacled creature which brought him into the ice...
Prisoner of Ice is one of the only adventure games to offer two different resolutions with VGA and SVGA versions featured on the same CD-ROM. The only requirements changing from one version to another are for the graphics (but is it really needful to say?) and the memory switching from 4Mb for the VGA version to 8MB for high-resolution graphics. Both versions feature spectacular graphics for the introduction and other cinematic scenes with 3D rendered animations of an outstanding realism. All settings of the game have been made from acrylic paints, then scanned and retouched for the two versions. Character animations have been helped by new techniques such as motion picture to faithfully reproduce the movements of the human body. An impressive number of 50,000 sprites were necessary for the animations of the 40 characters in Prisoner of Ice. The results of this incredible work is a sterling game with nothing wrong to point out about graphics and animations.
The game's interface is simple and easy to use. The left button will let you interact with the surrounding world. You can left click on an object to activate it or to take it and on a character to talk to them. The right button will let you examine objects or places like inside cupboards, drawers, etc... Your inventory will only appear if you move the mouse cursor to the upper part of the screen. From there you can click on an item to use it. It can be on another object to assemble them together, it can be with an element of the room such as a mechanism, a screen, etc... or simply with another character if you want to give anything to someone. For the dialogues, the same simplicity has been used. When you click on a character, a window will appear with one or several key words inside which you can select.
The same quality that has been given to the graphics is present in the the soundtrack of Prisoner of Ice. Over 40 minutes of music is included in the game with a partition that matches perfectly the mystical atmosphere of Prisoner of Ice.
Prisoner of Ice features an automatic saving that prevents you to worry about saving your game when you feel your character is in danger. Whenever the situation may lead your character to death, the game will save your current position with the name JOKER, and believe me, you will use it more than once as there are many ways to die in the game.
Prisoner of Ice litterally drew me into my computer for two straight days with an interesting and action packed scenario. It belongs to the category of games which I recommend to anyone who likes adventure games to buy for an intense experience in the Lovecraft's mysterious world. A must buy!
486 DX-33 MHz or higher,
Min 4Mb memory,
MS-DOS 5.0 or later,
Hard drive required,
Double speed CD-ROM drive or faster,
256-color VGA video graphic card (for VGA version),
SVGA video graphic card (for SVGA version),
Microsoft mouse and 100% compatibles.
Creative Labs Sound Blaster, Pro, 16 and AWE32; Adlib Gold; Gravis UltraSound;
MediaVision Pro Audio Spectrum supported.
I-Motion,
1333 Ocean Ave., Suite J.,
Santa Monica, CA 90401.
In Europe:
In UK:
Infogrames Ltd.,
14 Smedley Street, Clapham,
London SW4 6PF.
Technical Support: +44-(0)171-738-8199
Hint line: +44-(0)891-244-444
In France:
See developers
Overall: 94%
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