I-Motion (known as Infogrames overseas) first caught the attention of the computer game world three years ago with Alone in the Dark, a fast-moving occult adventure set firmly in H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhian universe. When Alone in the Dark II was released, the Lovecraft element had been "phased out," but a new series of games was being developed with Chaosium, Inc, the makers of the popular Call of Cthulhu paper-and-pencil role playing game. Unfortunately, the first installment, Shadow of the Comet, was quite a disappointment for players who had grown accustomed to the innovations of the Alone in the Dark games. The graphics were primitive, gameplay was bug-filled and awkward, and the hero remained almost completely passive for much of the story.
Prisoner of Ice is the second of this Cthulhian series, based on Lovecraft's novel Mountains of Madness, and things just don't seem to be getting that much better. Yes, the graphics have improved a great deal, and the main character is a much more active participant from the beginning, but this is still bound to be a letdown for Call of Cthulhu players and Lovecraft fans.
In 1937, a couple of years before the onset of World War II, the Royal Navy is involved in a rescue operation to recover a famous anthropologist and his son, kidnapped by the Nazis. The anthropologist is rescued from a secret Nazi base at the South Pole, but his son is suddenly dragged under the ice by a tentacled creature that emerges from a Nazi-owned crate marked Top Secret. The two remaining crates are both brought aboard the British submarine Victoria for closer examination.
The player takes the part of Lieutenant Ryan, an American intelligence agent on board the Victoria. When a German sub attacks the British sub with depth charges, it starts a fire, which melts the ice around one of the crates and releases one of the dangerous creatures. Members of the crew start dropping right and left and you find yourself in a race for your life! And that's just the beginning!
While the plot is more than a little interesting, it is implemented very badly. There is no sense of pacing in this game. Everything seems to happen all at once or not at all. Perhaps the eerie background music is meant to heighten the tension, but when it plays absolutely all the time, all it does is get on your nerves.
The puzzles in Prisoner of Ice don't take much time to think through, but you may find yourself stuck for hours trying to figure out how to do what you know you need to do, or hunting for something to interact with. While the lovely backgrounds by comic-book artist Joel Mouclier are just crawling with interesting details, it seems to have no impact on what you can actually look at or touch. There are numerous items you can see that would be very useful in a given situation, but they aren't really "there" in any useful sense. The reverse is also true - that is, there may be a labeled hot spot in a given room ("a hole" or "a button"), but you won't see these things in the actual picture. You have to take the program's word for it.
Overall, the visuals are really quite nice, partly due to Mouclier's backgrounds, and partly thanks to some really smooth character animations. A few of the actions were recorded with motion-capture techniques from a live actor, then imprinted on the sprites. Yet given the possibilities of this technology and the morphing that they had available, much of the design is remarkably unimaginative, especially for a horror game. One of the characters actually gets eaten by a monster in what should be a truly revolting and scary scene. He's swallowed whole in less than two seconds, and there's no evidence he was ever there. Talk about an anticlimax.
The only parts of Prisoner of Ice that are copied to your hard drive are the saved games. Now this is good news and bad news. You don't have to sit through a lengthy installation process, and there's not much memory taken up. Unfortunately, it also means that every scene and action has to be accessed from the CD, which can take forever and completely destroy whatever vestige of spookiness might have survived.
In short, Prisoner of Ice is yet another disappointment from a company that can't seem to do anything worthwhile except Alone in the Dark sequels these days. A strong and complicated Lovecraft story is translated to the PC in a thoroughly ineffective and frustrating way. Maybe you should just read the book!
