The Shell of Permafrost

The Shell of Permafrost

released on Dec 09, 2018

The Shell of Permafrost

released on Dec 09, 2018

A girl, draped in mystery and chased by an evil fate, escapes from a frozen land. Now, a year later, with her memory gradually returning, she is forced to make an important decision.


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Good premise but the game doesn't add anything to it, the puzzles are random small tasks, some of them are really arbitrary.
Some parts are well written, but the game feels incomplete.
It's just 1 hour long if you want to try it
4/10

Uhhhhhhhhhhhh-huh. I just found this game while randomly browsing Steam and I really don't have that much to say about it. It's a short story in the form of a RPG Maker experience that just feels incomplete.

You wander around a house completing small tasks, sometimes whisked away into short memories where you may have to complete another task? Tasks have you perform a series of button presses under a time limit (ultimate classic RPG Maker minigame) and you're ranked on doing it at the end for some reason? There is one puzzle in the game just kinda thrown in there towards the end and its the most basic version of "some of us are telling the truth, some of us are lying" possible? You collect a series of 7 clues just kinda as you go? There's a system to combine clues together to get new clues, but it feels incredibly arbitrary what the clues combined end up doing and you only use the system twice and as far as I can tell the game never brings up the clue combining system at all?????

All of these weird, disparate elements circle in to complete a story I do understand, and there is some neat elements to this story. The moment-to-moment writing is really well done and there's one scene at the beginning of the game where you discover a barrier that slices nature in two and coats everything behind it in permafrost, the image that captured my interest going into it. But the story as a whole isn't that interesting--much less that the way the game struts itself in an almost avant-garde fashion. It's a 1000 word kinda-neat-I-guess short story told in a structure and a medium that feel like they add nothing but a (very thin, the game is only 45 minutes long after all) layer of tedium.

But hey at least it's not Wadanohara LOL

Visually charming but otherwise doesn't do anything to differentiate itself from the hundreds of RPGmaker games with overly-vague emotional stories and little to no gameplay beyond interacting with environment objects.