Toward The Ice

A princess, a kidnapped prince, and a classic dungeon-crawling premise

Toward The Ice opens with a deliberately simple setup: a princess out hunting alone hears her younger brother's screams as a band of trolls drags him off toward their mountain cave, hauling him through Dwarven lands on the way. She can track them but can't take them alone, so she needs a party of heroes to finish the job before time runs out. It's functional fantasy-adventure scaffolding for what the game actually is underneath — a classic first-person, party-based dungeon crawler with grid-based movement, turn-based combat, and random encounters, explicitly built in the lineage of "gridder" and "blobber" RPGs like Wizardry and The Bard's Tale. It's also a standalone sequel, following Into The Inferno, Navigating The Labyrinth, and Crossing The Sands, with the developer explicitly stating no prior knowledge is needed to enjoy this entry on its own.

Real class and race depth, for players who get past the front door

Where Toward The Ice earns its warmest praise is in party-building depth. Players assemble a team of six from ten classes, including new additions this entry — Valkyrie, Skald, Berserker, and Runecaller — or grab a pregenerated party to skip straight into exploring. One detailed, clearly experienced reviewer of the series specifically highlights four new non-human playable races added this time around, Kobolds and Gnolls among them, alongside a new rune-infusion system for equipping gear with additional effects. That same reviewer frames the game's island-divided open-world structure as "very refreshing" compared to prior entries, and explicitly recommends it to anyone who already loves The Bard's Tale Trilogy — a direct, credible genre comparison from someone with clear expertise in exactly this kind of old-school dungeon crawler. Their review lands on a specific list of pros and cons worth quoting directly: praise for the new races and classes, a more beautiful world, the rune-infusion system, "great old school atmosphere," and the fact that the game "doesn't hold your hand," weighed against smaller gripes like food taking up excessive inventory space and a resting system that could use refinement. It's a genuinely balanced, detail-rich account from exactly the kind of player this game is built for.

An opening that actively works against the game

Set against that praise is a genuinely serious first-impressions problem. One long-time RPG player, who says they've been playing games since the early 1980s across "hundreds upon hundreds" of RPGs, describes being placed on an unmarked, roughly 22-by-22 square island surrounded by darkness, with no greeting text and no indication of where to go or what to do next — calling it among the worst introductory zones they've encountered in that entire span of time. That's an unusually pointed criticism, and it's compounded by a separate, more basic complaint: one reviewer reports being unable to type their own character's name during character creation because of unrelated background activity interfering with input, a bug so fundamental it undercuts the game before a single dungeon has even been entered.

Bugs that make an otherwise decent foundation feel unfinished

Beyond the opening, several reviewers describe a game that simply doesn't feel finished. One detailed review states plainly that the game is "swarming with bugs," adding that it "doesn't feel completed; doesn't feel like a beta; feels like it is in alpha" — while still crediting the underlying design, arguing that if it worked correctly it would be "a solid second rate dungeon crawler." That same reviewer connects the roughness directly to the developer's release cadence, describing this as the fourth game of its kind shipped in quick succession and arguing the focus on volume has come at the direct expense of polish, a sentiment echoed by another returning owner of the earlier entries who says the series "just don't seem to be getting better."

A niche audience that's still genuinely satisfied

It would be a mistake to read the bug reports as the whole story, though. Multiple reviewers with very substantial playtime — one logging over 1,500 hours, another over 1,900, and a third over 7,600 minutes — rate the game positively without qualification, describing it in terms like "simple game to play, scratches the itch" and crediting the developer as actively engaged with the community. These are clearly players who know exactly what kind of old-school, unforgiving dungeon crawler they're looking for, and for whom the rough edges either don't register the same way or are simply part of the genre's expected texture. It's a real split in the review pool rather than a uniform pile-on, and worth weighing against the sharper early-access-style criticism above. At a discounted NZ$19.45 against a full NZ$24.32 asking price, it also sits at a fairly modest price point for a genre where devoted fans routinely measure their time in the thousands of hours, which softens the value calculation somewhat even for players who hit some of the rougher edges early on.

Verdict

Toward The Ice has a genuinely solid old-school dungeon-crawler skeleton underneath it — real class and race depth, a rune-infusion system, and an island-based open world that returning fans of the series call a meaningful step up. But a confusing, unwelcoming opening and reports of alpha-level bugs, including a basic character-creation input issue, are serious enough to weigh heavily against it, especially set against a developer criticized for prioritizing rapid sequels over polishing any single entry. Longtime blobber and Bard's Tale fans with patience to push past a rough opening may still find something worth sticking with here; everyone else should probably wait to see whether Dragon Dropper addresses the more basic complaints before diving in.