Fire ‘n Ice (NES)
Fire ‘n Ice, also known as Solomon’s Key 2 since this game serves as a prequel to it, stars Dana the amateur wizard whose only magical spells feel a poor fit for saving a kingdom. He can place an ice block down and to the right or down and to the left, and with a wave of his wand, he can make these diagonally placed ice blocks disappear again. Such humble skills don’t sound impressive, but when you’re in a puzzle game with a creative design team behind it, it can prove to be enough to provide over 100 levels of surprisingly engaging problem solving.
Dana’s adventure in Fire ‘n Ice is a story told by an old woman to her grandchildren, a tale of Coolmint Island and the winter fairies who once lived there in peace. The wizard Druidle saw the icy island as an easy land to conquer though, spreading his magical flames across the island to melt it as he captures the Queen of the Fairies’s daughters. Dana is an unassuming choice for the hero of the land, but it seems his skills gel with a gift from the Queen to produce ice blocks that can snuff out the living flames. This plot mostly provides the bookends of Fire ‘n Ice as well as contextualizing its title screen, the grandmother continuing to tell the tale lining up with the times you turn off the system and then resume by way of password. One of Druidle’s minions also serves as an amusing recurring boss, but otherwise, Fire ‘n Ice focuses in on the quest to clear its 100 levels, a task that sound daunting but is handled remarkably well despite its size.
When starting a regular level in this NES puzzle platformer, everything you need to see about a level is immediately apparent. The single screen puzzles are focused on clearing out every fireball, and despite the flames having faces, they’ll sit in place unless you’re the one to move them by removing the ground beneath them. To clear out a fireball, you must either drop an ice block on it from above or push the ice into the living fire, the level ending once all off the flames are snuffed out. The amateur wizard you are playing as is quite limited though, not even able to jump, so he must also use the ice to cross gaps or reach higher areas. The ice blocks aren’t just glorified boxes though. If you place one next to a wall, it will freeze to it, making it into a temporary platform until you wave your wand on it again. If you’re able to place an ice cube in an open spot, then Dana can freely kick it as far as it will travel. However, since you sometimes need to climb up and down through the level, you need to start strategizing the ice platforms you leave behind. You can’t climb an isolated cube, but if it’s pressed up against something you can, so you need to consider how to balance your own maneuverability with the positioning of the flames so you can eliminate them all instead of getting trapped with no way to climb higher.
Fire ‘n Ice is very smart when it comes to mixing up how a level is structured to play into these fundamentals. When you’re in a small level, sometimes the cramped spaces mean each ice block you place lessens the available space, so you must be smart in what you add and what you remove as you go. In larger levels, tackling the fireballs in the proper order is key since you may have to seal off routes to reach others, but generally Fire ‘n Ice also doesn’t expect you to plan too far into the future. Those large levels usually can be tackled in smaller sections, the game rarely asking you to think absurdly far ahead to be able to complete a stage. When the level is a bit complicated though, working out how to place everything to properly weave around all the barriers and clear out the fires can be a very satisfying process, especially since technically every level can be solved in your head before you’ve even started moving pieces around. It is important the game’s scope didn’t get out of control too, since some puzzles can become impossible to solve with even a minor slip-up. Fall down a level with no way back up or eliminate an ice block you needed and you have no choice but to retry the stage, but Fire ‘n Ice won’t hold failures against you at all. You’re free to retry as often as you need, and while being able to dial back the previous action would be nice, retrying a level usually will go pretty quickly so long as you knew what you were doing before that flub.
At first, it is pure level layout excellence that keeps Fire ‘n Ice an engaging puzzle challenge. Since your ice blocks are platforming tools but limited to being placed only to the bottom left and bottom right, you’re wielding both a powerful tool for reshaping your options in a stage and one with hard limits that require more thought to utilize than if the blocks could appear right in front of you. Fire ‘n Ice does eventually introduce some new elements to the puzzles though, but these don’t overly complicate the process and slot in nicely when it comes to a puzzle game focused so much on your limited movement tools. Pipes let you travel from one part of the level to another, but of course you need to be able to reach their entrances to utilize them so you need to be careful not to block them off. Lanterns normally are harmless platforms, but if you drop a fireball onto them, the lanterns will be deadly to the touch, a level requiring a restart if you touch them or the living flames. This requires you to consider how to move your targets around safely, because while placing a fireball on a lantern sometimes sets them up for an easy kill, it then leaves a danger you can’t remove from play. The last major variable is actually a new form of block, a simple stone square similar to your ice blocks in a way as you can move it around, but normally it moves one spot at a time when you kick it unless it is slides out across a cold surface. The stones can snuff out flames too, but since your wand can’t remove them from play like it can ice, you need to be careful where you move it so it doesn’t end up obstructing your work.
Fire ‘n Ice already showed it can make its standard design work consistently, and when it brings in the new elements to complicate puzzles a bit more, it applies a deft touch so it never gets overly complicated. Perhaps level 7-3 pushes it a bit with the level being almost made entirely out of ice with the single fireball at the very top while you’re at the bottom, the game expecting more forward planning than usual in what is essentially a gimmick stage. Many worlds do have catchy music that will get stuck in your head as you plan your moves, and even ones that can seem rather tough might just have a little area in them where the right ice placement will simplify what looked like a daunting prospect. If you do truly find yourself stuck on a level though, you don’t need to worry too much. Fire ‘n Ice will let you play most of its levels in any order, meaning you can go try other stages and then come back to the problem stages with fresh eyes. To beat the game though and unlock some additional bonus worlds, you will need to clear out every stage eventually as that is the only way to make boss stages available. With each of the 10 main worlds featuring one, these fortresses require you to first clear out all the levels in that world, and interestingly, the boss battles feature a few new rules that make some of these fortresses highlights of the entire adventure.
The boss fortresses in Fire ‘n Ice break the standard rule that the fireballs will happily wait in place to be destroyed, and in fact, sometimes the creatures you face aren’t even fireballs at all. While you almost never actually attack the boss themself, you are dropped into a challenge where you must eliminate moving monsters, sometimes with an additional pressure beyond just bumping into the mobile foes. Some boss fights feature a moving floor of fire, the player needing to keep clambering up blocks to avoid being roasted while still seeing to the usual ice-based eliminations. This is where an otherwise unneeded feature comes in, the pause screen not blocking the play field from view and more importantly, despite the fires of your foes still crackling while the action is paused, any actual movements do immediately halt. This means you can immediately pause even the most dangerous boss fights to plan out your actions, and while some of these fortresses do break from the norm of having all information on screen since they’ll scroll a bit, the free and easy retries mean you can start to account for that without experiencing a puzzle-solving panic.
In a nice extra touch, Fire ‘n Ice even includes a level creator. The reliable fundamental mechanics can be iterated upon even further through your own creations, although like many an NES game with this feature, there’s no real way to share it beyond perhaps taking a picture so others can duplicate it through their own use of Edit Mode. Considering the game is already pushing 150 stages once you count the bonus unlockables for clearing the main adventure, Edit Mode feels more like a cherry on top than something that exists in place of actual content.
THE VERDICT: You may be a wizard with odd limits on where he can cast his ice block spells, but Fire ‘n Ice provides such a well-designed set of stages that your unassuming abilities are put to excellent use. Its single screen stages are satisfying to solve since they can be difficult without becoming overcomplicated. Fire ‘n Ice keeps presenting neat little twists on its standard play, knows how to delicately apply new mechanics, and even lets you tackle most of the levels in any order so you don’t get the frustrating feeling of being stuck. It would be nice if there was someway to undo an action since many puzzles can be ruined by a slip-up, but the level sizes mean it’s also fairly feasible to quickly retry and get right back to where you were without issue, keeping this large collection of well-designed puzzles accessible on top of entertaining.
And so, I give Fire ‘n Ice for the Nintendo Entertainment System…
A GREAT rating. The idea of an undo option is certainly more of a modern thought than the kind of thing an NES might even be capable of pulling off, but Fire ‘n Ice is otherwise so tightly designed and smart about its level layouts that critiquing it leaves you reaching for small stumbles like how level 7-3 starts to veer a bit too far towards needing to have most every action planned in advance. When it does get more complicated like the moving levels of the boss fortresses, Fire ‘n Ice still usually keeps things clear and manageable. You know what you’re up against, Dana’s abilities rely on similar set-ups so you can try to start spotting available areas for ice creation, and yet the layout of the platforms still shakes things up remarkably well. Since such a big focus is on being able to not only have the space to create but also ensuring you have the proper means to travel between layers, shifting around block placement even in subtle ways can change the feeling of a level quite easily. It can feel so tight that you struggle to find a way to place blocks without boxing yourself in or there may be multiple paths where it’s key to figure out the order of operations since ending up trapped might be the only way you can snuff out the final flame. Perhaps the smartest touch though is Fire ‘n Ice not being too concerned with how the player tackles the adventure. You can dive right into world 9’s levels if you like, although you would be missing stages that help ease you into special mechanics like the stones and pipes and would even bypass teaching levels that make you consider ideas like dropping long ice platforms from above instead of singular ice blocks. While it’s still best to start with 1-1 and work up from there, you also aren’t forced to commit to a level you can’t figure out and aren’t punished for setting it aside to seek fun elsewhere.
Fire ‘n Ice’s box bears a comedic warning, a claim the game is highly addictive in its design, and considering the box otherwise just shows flames and ice cubes, something that better hinted at its puzzle-solving nature was a wise inclusion despite this hyperbolic statement. On the other hand, it isn’t exactly wrong about the game either. Fire ‘n Ice made it easy to try out most any level, it has stages that are gratifying to solve because they find a snug difficulty level to stick to, and each stage cleared also helps towards unlocking those boss fortresses that can provide some of the most rewarding challenges to tackle. Most of all though, Fire ‘n Ice shows that a strong understanding of how to design around your puzzle format can lead to a consistently engaging game, the designers here able to make a puzzle platformer that can still thrill over 40 years after its release.