Ratings and Reviews by Emily Short

This is an oddity -- not made with any of the standard systems, and entered in an experimental gameplay competition that asks how much a player can do in 10 seconds. The author of Cold As Death doubled that limit, but the player is required to do a warming-up action (running, jumping in place) every 20 seconds, or else freeze to death and lose the game.

That mechanic might just conceivably have worked out under the right circumstances -- perhaps with very stripped prose and easy-to-grok puzzles. Cold As Death makes some of the necessary concessions, for instance by sticking to a very small list of actions, so that there are only so many things you could possibly try to do at a given time.

Unfortunately, the environment is fairly surreal and sensible actions are badly hinted. To make matters worse, the anxiety about keeping warm keeps the player from having time to read the text in a leisurely way. The parser is extremely finicky, too: you must type every object name in full, including the adjective and noun in the order given, or the object will not be recognized. I did eventually win, after several tries, and it was gratifying in an odd way, but I can't claim it was a great IF experience.

Still, it's interesting that someone tried something like this.

I had a lot of fun with this, and got stuck enough to check the walkthrough only once. It's a nearly pure-puzzle work, in which you play a soul moving towards the afterlife after a ceremonial Egyptian burial. The setting combines plausible historical detail with some surreal mechanisms and imagery; the writing at times feels a bit zarfian. The first few moves and environments are not actually the game's strongest and may feel somewhat underdeveloped, but the setting becomes more interesting later on.

The puzzles are neat set pieces, self-contained and linear; they are mostly not terribly hard. Early puzzles may seem almost *too* easy, but they teach needed techniques to solve the later ones, and should possibly be regarded as something of a tutorial.

There were one or two solutions that I thought could have been better clued or could have accommodated a larger range of vocabulary. Most are really rather elegantly imagined, however, and most suggest some kind of metaphorical or spiritual progression of the soul as well as the manipulation of physical objects.

I also noticed that there were some scenery objects that were unimplemented. However, when I played, Ka was undergoing some upgrades and polishing to make up for some remaining awkward bits, which may resolve my other objections.

Overall, Ka is an enjoyable lunchtime-sized puzzle fest with a coherent concept and some memorable details and imagery.