In the same way that I have too many daily puzzle games, I also have too many other puzzle games to play. I’m just always throwing little tinkery things into my Steam library, and then every time I boot up my PC I’m faced with far too many options. Yesterday I added to that pile the demo for the upcoming Aerial_Knight’s MrFreezy, a game that strikes just the right balance between being gory and light.
MrFreezy casts you as a serial killer known across Detroit for kidnapping and beheading men. You get a hint of this narrative in the demo, but mostly you play through a tutorial and a few levels of the game’s core puzzle. Various heads sit on various bodies, and you have to move the heads around to align enough to decapitate them, racking up a certain number of points in under a certain number of moves.
Portrayed in grainy black and white, the whole thing is more cerebral (sorry!) than violent, which goes a long way in not making the whole idea feel crass. Different kinds of heads have different properties: Regular heads cause the ones next to them to move, while some heads only move themselves and others can’t be moved at all. Others still cost double the amount of moves or count as double the amount of points when decapitated.
Nothing I encountered in the demo was too tricky–I always had plenty of moves left when I met a level’s goals–but I was definitely very, very low on the game’s leaderboards, given my puzzle game strategy of tending to try things out instead of thinking my moves through. The game is good at highlighting which heads will be affected by your choices, which helps you know what will happen as a result of a move and (if you aren’t me) plan out your strategy. Even in the brief demo, there’s a lot of replayability if you want to be the most efficient serial killer you can be.
In my time with it, MrFreezy was a fun little thing to fiddle with, though the developer says the full game will get more complex. They also write that there will be more story, and I’m curious to see how that pans out with the game’s semi-comedic vibe. Games that cast you as the killer often get pretty dark, but Aerial_Knight calls the game a “weird little horror world” that I assume means things won’t turn into anything too brutal.
I found that the puzzle-solving aspect offset the creepiness, while said creepiness gave the puzzles a unique and intriguing feel. The full game comes out September 1, but for us horror weenies out there, the demo is a nice way to get a sense of whether you’ll get on with MrFreezy’s vibe.
