If you are a fan of winter/ice/cold and Norse legend, then this game is for you. Insane Cold: Back to the Ice Age is a hidden object adventure game. You play as Jacob who was sitting in a pub, waiting for his girlfriend Helen to celebrate their anniversary while looking at mysterious amulet in his hands. The moment he saw his wife, the amulet activated and a creature showed up behind her. It all happened in a few seconds, Helen was kidnapped and the whole area turned into an icy land. Learning that this artifact is the one behind this disaster, the man who sold you the amulet revealed the solution, you'll need (to save) seventeen brave souls in order to break the amulet and save your wife.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1453350158

The story is decent, not bad but it was dragging in the middle. You'll learn the story behind each soul you save, it is all written in the journal +80 entries which I found really good and adds to the story. The game has no voice over as it is quite dated, same going for the animation cutscenes, you can tell the game is old from those, however, the artwork of the locations are really good.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1479531618

Hidden objects scenes are good, you'll visit each one twice and sadly the items you picked before are presented the second time you visit the scene, the second issue of the HO is when you pick an item, sometimes you need to click twice in order for the game to register you actually clicked it. Another thing I disliked is the lack of map and fast traveling, there is some backtracking and you'll need to memorize where to go, sometimes walking around aimlessly to find an active hidden object scene waiting for you. Puzzles are fun, some of them are difficult to solve.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1479531765

Pros:
+Nice artwork.
+Fitting music.
+Decent story.
+Variety of puzzles.
+Useful journal.

Cons:
-No voice overs.
-No map. (Some backtracking required)
-Slow game.
-No steam achievements.

It is not a bad game if you are a HOG lover or enjoy puzzles games.

𝐹𝑜𝑟 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑤𝑠 𝑐𝘩𝑒𝑐𝑘 𝑚𝑦 𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑜𝑟 𝑝𝑎𝑔𝑒 𝐹𝑒𝑒𝑛𝑎'𝑠 𝐶𝘩𝑜𝑖𝑐𝑒

Language was a bit of a problem ie. Tube was actually supposed to be a smoking pipe. Butterfly turned out to be a bow. etc. I am glad it wasn't a timed game or had a miss click penalty!! Some of the mini puzzle instructions were not clear or missing entirely. On the plus side, it had an interesting story line.

hidden object game with a winter theme - you are saving the earth from an eternal cold.
beautiful visual design, video intro, tutor, everything that should be present in a game of this genre.
pretty good price for a game - usually they are more expensive.

My biggest problem was, that I had to start three times because 1. I was missing a soul even though I had clicked on every one of them and 2. I clicked too fast and so I didn't got the item I was missing.
Even though the game is quite cheep I don't think that it is quite worth it if you have to start three times. I don't know if this is a problem in general but it got on my nerves that I had to start again and again. And the penetrating music and weird sounds were so annyoing after a while that I had to turn them off.
They wanted to be cool by copying GoT (game of thrones) but weren't successful with it.

It is a descent HOG and an ok story. Some minor translation isssues.
Sadly no achievements.

Even at a deep discount, I cannot recommend buying it.

The art and graphics are beyond "dated", they are just low quality. Better quality grahics to be found on some of the advert heavy, but F2P games online. I can forgive "dated" graphics. But, the pixelation and cursor blinking that occurs in this game makes the HOS just difficult and unenjoyable to play.

The puzzles are trite, overdone, and no challenge.

The "minor" translation issues others mention are actually quite significant ones if you are from the US, and not from Europe or Eastern Europe. It is somewhat obvious a poor quality online translator was used, no attempt to have anyone fluent in a different language than the developer's native language was even attemtped.

The story is shallow, and makes little sense, especially how the secnes are connected by seemingly unrelated story bits. It just goes too far beyond suspension of disbelief, which is really difficult to do in a HOG/HOPA game.

The game advertises Trading Cards, yet there are multiple people reporting that cards do not drop, and there are NONE on the Community Market at the time of this review. So, for people buying just for Selling or Trading... you may be very unhappy once you pass refund time, and have no cards, badge, background or emotes. I have had card drops at all. Fine, if the game was actually decently enjoyable, and worth playing without them. No achievements, with the developer making some claim that they cannot add them becuase "Unfortunately we can't add achievements to this game, because we don't have access to code source files"... http://steamcommunity.com/app/764010/discussions/0/2549465882926392078/


The number of rapid changes to Store tags, and from "Single-player" to "Single-player, Steam Trading Cards", leading up to the Steam Winter Sale, especially just prior to it, makes it seem like either the developer or publisher has no idea what they are doing, or is fully aware and was trying to add tags and make it seem like the game had TC's, to get more views in Discovery Queues. and to boost sales numbers during the Winter Sale. https://steamdb.info/app/764010/history/

This game first was sold on Big Fish Games and Wild Tangent, both for PC, and mobile, possibly mobile first? I am sorry, but it never should have been allowed to be re-published on Steam. At least not without someone who knew how to do a good port behind the wheel.
https://www.bigfishgames.com/games/8320/insane-cold/
https://www.wildtangent.com/games/insane-cold

I paid 59¢ USD. I overpaid. It was just that disappointing for a HOG/HOPA games fan.

(edited to correct typos, no text was changed, just misspellings corrected)

No steam trade cards !!!

Badly made, UI is off. Unable to click on all items in the inventory, since some of them are hidden behind the UI. No scroll bars. UI also hides part of the HO scenes and part of the written words for the HO scenes. Items also not centered in their inventory "boxes". Makes them hard to select.

Story-wise: Does not work for people who don't believe in "souls" being there to collect in artifacts. It's just weird. Played games where suspension of disbelieve is easy. This one, not.

"Insane Cold: Back to the Ice Age" is a Hidden Object puzzle game, the type you normally see on mobile app stores or even as browser apps. There's literally hundreds of these on Steam, mostly published by Artifex Mundi, many of them free on mobile app stores, but this one will cost you money on Steam. There's a ice age/frost theme to the game, but this is a just a veneer over a tired and overdone set of hidden object minigames and Adobe Flash tier puzzles, wrapped together with a bunch of static screens that you "move" through by tapping your finger on your iPhone screen.

While these kinds of games are popular amongst casual gamers, it's difficult to argue this is a great value proposition as a PC game, especially considering the price of this compared to the hundreds of free HOGs on the mobile app stores.

On the upside, the game does feature customisable controls and resolution, so at least some of the basic, minimum requirements have been met. Unfortunately there's a number of other technical defects and shortcomings which contribute to the game being difficult to recommend to gamers.

This looks and feels like a mobile app, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the app stores. It's unclear why this was put on Steam instead of the app stores it seems to have been designed for. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all).

Regardless, for all intents and purposes "Insane Cold: Back to the Ice Age" might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

Warning: Review Manipulation![www.forbes.com]

This game features a number of fake positive reviews from accounts known to be in the business of review manipulation/paid reviews. They're all written in either Russian or broken English, appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the game launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the game, and the accounts are used consistently to write fake reviews for asset flips and other cash grabs/scams. The "Positive" review score on this game should be disregarded due to this blatant, unethical review manipulation. This is done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

"Insane Cold: Back to the Ice Age" is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

In a nutshell:
Tedious gameplay, unclear objectives/course of action, weird item usage, agonizing music, no map, lots of backtracking, no VOs, dumb flavor text, confusing puzzles...shall I go on? Please, for the love of sanity avoid this one, despite such a low price. I wouldn't recommend it even if it was free.

The Long Version:
It took me days to finish this game. Not because it was particularly difficult, but because I kept taking breaks to get away from it. I didn't even finish it before starting to write this review, partly to procrastinate because I didn't want to go back to it. That should already give you a good idea of the experience you can expect. I did complete it for the sake of this review, but that was a stupidly masochistic choice on my part.

No fast travel or even a map. I'll repeat that: NO MAP. And there's quite a bit of required backtracking and running in circles, because many objectives, hotspots, or next steps are so unclear. I can't count how many times I had to grudgingly use the hint button because of that. Thankfully there are no achievements to screw up.

Flavor text and P&C items were sometimes ridiculous. Another reviewer mentioned the 'spear' comment. Based on the bus map, the game takes place in modern New York City, so why the heck would someone's first thought be "I need a spear for that!" Moon logic everywhere. And while I like the idea of the soul-collecting amulet, the descriptions of people you use it on are a bit over the top. Especially the guy who looked like he was hiding in the fridge.

I think I'm going to avoid any HOPAs involving winter/ice storylines for a long time, because if I read one more friggin variation of "I have to find a way to melt this!" my brain is going to implode and leak out of my ears. Yes, it's an ice-related plotline, so melting lots of stuff is par for the course, but come on. There IS such a thing as overdoing a plot device.

The inventory auto-collapses, and there's no way to lock it. So have fun playing hide and seek with your items.

HOGs...I dunno. Not awful, but below average. Art is ok, but there are mislabelled items and combination/2-step items that are not obvious choices, making it more of a chore than necessary.

Puzzles were hit and miss. Some painfully easy, others so impossible that I rage-skipped them, which I rarely ever do. There's one in particular where you have to swap fighters to the opposite side of a board, but they can't be on the same line as the opposing color, so movement is severely limited. tableflip.gif

2D background/item art is ok. Typical ("pretty but boring") for the genre. The 3D characters are animated a lot better than most mixed style games, though.

I experienced frequent screen-tearing when changing locations. I didn't even think that could be an issue in a primarily 2D game, but it happened almost every time I moved. My computer settings were no different from when I played any other game of this type, including much older ones.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you do play this game, for whatever masochistic reason, do your brain a favor and turn the music off from the get-go. Trust me. Seriously. Listen to Pandora or something instead. Because once you get those five godawful repeating notes stuck in your head, you're done. Good luck trying to get them out again. I'd say you'd thank me, but hopefully you won't have to find out what I'm trying to spare you from in the first place.

No VOs to comment on.

To sum up:
No. Just no.