Icebound Machines
Travel to a frozen wasteland, recover the remains of a missing person, and return them to the sacrament river for rebirth. This is a perfectly routine mission in your line of work. You expect no difficulties.
You're looking at version 1.1.1, which contains many bug fixes and some audio-visual enhancements over the original jam version.
The game is best played on desktop, using a a downloadable version. However, it will work in your browser - and even on your smartphone, if you're ready to accept some glitches.
[ ABOUT ]
ICEBOUND MACHINES is a short sci-fi adventure game. It has a selection of quirky characters, and deals with themes of community, loss, healing, and living in your own head too much. Note that this includes some (discussed/implied) loss and self-harm.
For a list of credits and assets used, please see credits.txt or the in-game credits screen.
[ BASIC CONTROLS ]
This information is also available in-game.
The game is controlled mostly via mouse. LEFT-CLICK to walk or interact, RIGHT-CLICK to examine things. You can also press TAB on your keyboard to show interactable objects.
[ KNOWN ISSUES ]
You may notice the cursor jumping around in cutscenes and in level transitions. This is part of a workaround for an engine bug. (https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/4162) Likewise, the mouse cursor might not always visibly react when over hotspots. In that case, just wave the mouse around a bit, you'll get there. Sorry!
[ CREDITS ]
This game uses, remixes or adapts a lot of CC-licensed graphics. The assets are listed below in no particular order, and can be found on OpenGameArt.org. If something isn't listed, it's probably by me. Also, some graphics were generated using a GAN, via the AI Art Machine notebook by Hillel Wayne, based on work by Katherine Crowson and @advadnoun.
Here's the assets:
- Audio stuff
- Godot voice generator by TNTC-Lab
- "42 Snow and Gravel Footsteps" by corsica_s
- "CarEngine.wav" by prometheus888
- "Sound Effects Pack" by OwlishMedia
- "Doors, glass door, frame door, open, close, reverb, door creaking.wav" by SFX_AFRIK
- "Heavy grass step" by Mixkit
- Visual stuff
- "pH64 Pixel Pack - 100s of Sideview Assets" by PurpleHeart
- "Trees: Mega Pack" by rrexy
- "Winter Birds" by refuzzle
- "Christmas Village Asset Pack" by HaywardMorihara
- "Overworld Objects" by Kevin Shadewing
- "(12x12) City Tiles - Top Down" by FisherG
- "Magnifying glass" by Angrycheese
- "Softmilk 32 Palette" by MortMort
- "Gears and Wrench" by n4
- "16x16 boxes, crates, chests" by Kutejnikov
- "2D Pixel Office Supplies 32x32" by Natural_Privateer
- "Weapon Inventory Graphics" by ashmoses
- "Glasstown NBP" font
- "small_pixel.ttf" font
- "GodotRetro" shaders by Ahopness
- Music
- Shodé Non - Crisis
- Soft and Furious - Violet Son
- Loyalty Freak Music - One Cool Minute
- Loyalty Freak Music - Once more with you
- Loyalty Freak Music - Waiting TTTT
- Daniel Birch - Say It Again, I'm Listening
- krackatoa - Mongo Bongo
- Jelsonic - Darkling Skies
- Jelsonic - Another Brilliant Age
- Computer Music All-stars - Albatross v2.0
- P C III - P.C.G.C.P
- Various asset packs from kenney.nl
Download
Install instructions
Download and unpack the appropriate ZIP file. No external dependencies.
Development log
- Version 1.1 is out!Jan 10, 2022
Comments
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Cool! I usually don't like visual novels, however this one played so smooth and fascinatingly. Actually I didn't even noticed it was a visual novel xd
Anyway, I like it a lot :3
Thank you! I'm glad you had a good time with it.
It's not quite a traditional visual novel, but it doesn't really have the puzzles you'd expect from a point-and-click adventure game. It's something in between.
Wheres the torpor mechanic
!Spoiler alert!
loved this game. the concepts were as good as always, and the story telling was pronominal. also, is it just me or does the "vehicle remind anyone else of this creator's previous title? (it might just be reused assets but I like to think it is just one HUGE universe and this is in the far future of the far future. )
This was great. The story was a bit confusing tho. Also that spaceship looks quite familiar.
This game is great! Just finished, and the biggest drawback is that it ended so soon. I liked the setting, the style, the dialogues were nice, there was nothing particularly bad.
I'm not entirely sure if this is intentional, but those different, like "thoughts" that the protagonist had, that spoke to him like characters and were presented with abstract colorful images, reminded me of very similar things from Disco Elysium. I know it might sound rude that someone is comparing your game to other games, but that is not my intention. I just wanted to say that I love this concept and it was amazing to see it in your game and it was one of the main details that I loved. Although I haven't seen any clarification about these "thoughts" in the game, so I'm not entirely sure if I understood their meaning correctly.
Also, just one bug that I noticed: some text lines in the computer, towards the end of the game, went off-screen. I don't know if this is due to the screen resolution things or it's just a small oversight, but I wanted to point it out anyway.
In short, now I want a continuation or spin-off in the same universe. I'm going to replay the game for different endings now, thanks for the interesting experience
Hey, thank you so much for the review! I'm especially glad you liked the setting, since I do plan to make more things in the same universe. That's part of why there's so much background worldbuilding, haha. I'm happy it worked for you.
The abstract images used for the protagonist's inner monologue do represent different moods and strands of thought, yeah. I'm glad you were able to interpret them, since I think they ended up a little too abstract. If I do something like that again, I'll probably make that a bit clearer.
The bit with the text going off-screen was a bug, yeah. Thanks for the report! I've published an update which enforces pixel-perfect scaling, so that shouldn't happen anymore.