🚂📓⚰️ Playthrough/Review: Ice Station Zero
Oct. 7th, 2025 12:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solo_knightPlaythrough/Review: Ice Station Zero
What is it?
A solo journalling game with a strong horror element. You’re not supposed to survive.
Is it playable out of the box?
Sure, if you want to die. I played with the rule of ‘draw the card that allows you to win as your first’ (coincidentally, but I recommend it).
This calls for a Jenga tower but provides different mechanics to simulate it. I used the ‘start with 30 items’ and found that tense and dangerous enough.
Amendments:
I also removed a token that would bring me closer to winning at the end of every round, because if I relied on dice rolls, it becomes close to unwinnable, plus I removed an additional token for drawing 3x the same rank in one round.
Tools
1d6, pack of playing cards, 10 tokens, Jenga Tower or replacement
Price:
Free at the link above.
Verdict
Honourably Retired 🚂
Journalling Game 📓
This can get dark ⚰️
Wow. That… certainly was something (about 2h) Probably wrote 1K-1.5K of words (hard to say, because I pasted the prompts into the journal).
This is a science fiction, horror, survival story, which is SO not my thing, but right now I have downtime, I want to get more into solo RPGs, and this means deliberately trying out things to see what’s out there and what would work for me.
Somewhat to my surprise, I had a great time, and I will definitely give other games in this genre a go… eventually.
Even though I have played very little so far (and only oneshots and journalling games), I have read enough rules and playthroughs and listened to enough conversations to have a feel for how hard this is going to be (answer: completely unplayable, if by ‘play’ we understand ‘you have a fair chance of coming out alive’) because if I want a death simulator, I’d look for one or play a roguelike where I only need to click my mouse, not come up with an elaborate story.
I did not do the precise math (impossible without reading the whole game and tallying up how often you advance towards death and how often you advance towards a potential solution), but I can do finger maths: you draw 1-6 cards per round, many of which will tell you to use your jenga tower, but you only GET your tokens once you draw a particular card (special rules: you can draw it as your first card; Serendipity: it *was* my first card) and then you need to roll a 6 ten times to have a chance to win. In 6 days, I used about half the deck, had drawn 3 Kings (4 = losing condition) and lost 13 of 30 Jenga tokens (it accelerates once you’ve lost 20).
I removed only one token due to a dice roll, and that’s only because I drew the card that allows me to remove one on 5 OR 6.
There are just too many death conditions (tower fails, 4 Kings) and not enough winning conditions.
These days, that’s maths I can do in my head, which is very satisfying.
So do I recommend it?
I'ts a solid example of its kind. It showed me some of the pitfalls of journaling games (the game had given me certain instructions or I had made narrative decisions that weren't compatible with prompts encountered later); it gave me a better understanding of mechanics.
I think the basic structure of the game is sound and I am definitely up for playing more games like this in the future. It's railroady, at times it became a bit uncomfortable, but it was an intense human experience.
What is it?
A solo journalling game with a strong horror element. You’re not supposed to survive.
Is it playable out of the box?
Sure, if you want to die. I played with the rule of ‘draw the card that allows you to win as your first’ (coincidentally, but I recommend it).
This calls for a Jenga tower but provides different mechanics to simulate it. I used the ‘start with 30 items’ and found that tense and dangerous enough.
Amendments:
I also removed a token that would bring me closer to winning at the end of every round, because if I relied on dice rolls, it becomes close to unwinnable, plus I removed an additional token for drawing 3x the same rank in one round.
Tools
1d6, pack of playing cards, 10 tokens, Jenga Tower or replacement
Price:
Free at the link above.
Verdict
Honourably Retired 🚂
Journalling Game 📓
This can get dark ⚰️
Wow. That… certainly was something (about 2h) Probably wrote 1K-1.5K of words (hard to say, because I pasted the prompts into the journal).
This is a science fiction, horror, survival story, which is SO not my thing, but right now I have downtime, I want to get more into solo RPGs, and this means deliberately trying out things to see what’s out there and what would work for me.
Somewhat to my surprise, I had a great time, and I will definitely give other games in this genre a go… eventually.
Even though I have played very little so far (and only oneshots and journalling games), I have read enough rules and playthroughs and listened to enough conversations to have a feel for how hard this is going to be (answer: completely unplayable, if by ‘play’ we understand ‘you have a fair chance of coming out alive’) because if I want a death simulator, I’d look for one or play a roguelike where I only need to click my mouse, not come up with an elaborate story.
I did not do the precise math (impossible without reading the whole game and tallying up how often you advance towards death and how often you advance towards a potential solution), but I can do finger maths: you draw 1-6 cards per round, many of which will tell you to use your jenga tower, but you only GET your tokens once you draw a particular card (special rules: you can draw it as your first card; Serendipity: it *was* my first card) and then you need to roll a 6 ten times to have a chance to win. In 6 days, I used about half the deck, had drawn 3 Kings (4 = losing condition) and lost 13 of 30 Jenga tokens (it accelerates once you’ve lost 20).
I removed only one token due to a dice roll, and that’s only because I drew the card that allows me to remove one on 5 OR 6.
There are just too many death conditions (tower fails, 4 Kings) and not enough winning conditions.
These days, that’s maths I can do in my head, which is very satisfying.
So do I recommend it?
I'ts a solid example of its kind. It showed me some of the pitfalls of journaling games (the game had given me certain instructions or I had made narrative decisions that weren't compatible with prompts encountered later); it gave me a better understanding of mechanics.
I think the basic structure of the game is sound and I am definitely up for playing more games like this in the future. It's railroady, at times it became a bit uncomfortable, but it was an intense human experience.
