After playing this game all the way to 100% completion, I have a surprising amount to say about it, and most of it is very good.

ICEY is, at its core, a game meant to be "picked apart," going through the various endings that in turn, pick apart concepts of game design, game development, and even how attached a player should be to the main character. Comparisons to The Stanley Parable are very justified in this regard, but I think there's a few ways that it actually excels beyond Stanley.

The first and most obvious is the action game elements, which are pretty good in their own right. Simple enough to be understood, but can provide a challenge on the harder difficulty if that's what you're looking for.

The second way is that The Stanley Parable, while still a great game, suffers from the law of diminishing returns as the players gets more and more endings; eventually the surrealness wears off and the player won't be inclined to see them all. I wouldn't be shocked to learn that a big majority of players have never seen all the endings. With ICEY, there's a sense of progression since you know you're working towards a "true" ending (which I'll come back to in a minute) that you need to get all the other endings to unlock. And the endings also vary widely in tone, some of them are humorous, some are horrifying, some are a very neat look into the creative process one goes through when making a game.

Unfortunately, this is where my biggest criticism of the game comes in: if you asked me the steps you needed to take to get on the path of getting the true ending, I honestly couldn't tell you. I've looked through numerous Steam guides and none of them seemed to help me unlock what I needed. The last hour or so of me playing was just getting as many endings as I could at random until I found what was evidently the "right" one; it wasn't just a matter of getting 32/34 achievements like the guides I found said.

All that said, I absolutely still recommend ICEY. It's cheap and even comes with the soundtrack for free. That's another thing: the soundtrack is very, very nice and fits the tone of the game very well, though I'm not sure it's something I'll be listening to a lot in my spare time.

After playing this game all the way to 100% completion, I have a surprising amount to say about it, and most of it is very good. ICEY is, at its core, a game meant to be "picked apart," going through the various endings that in turn, pick apart concepts of game design, game development, and even how attached a player should be to the main character. Comparisons to The Stanley Parable are very justified in this regard, but I think there's a few ways that it actually excels beyond Stanley. The first and most obvious is the action game elements, which are pretty good in their own right. Simple enough to be understood, but can provide a challenge on the harder difficulty if that's what you're looking for. The second way is that The Stanley Parable, while still a great game, suffers from the law of diminishing returns as the players gets more and more endings; eventually the surrealness wears off and the player won't be inclined to see them all. I wouldn't be shocked to learn that a big majority of players have never seen all the endings. With ICEY, there's a sense of progression since you know you're working towards a "true" ending (which I'll come back to in a minute) that you need to get all the other endings to unlock. And the endings also vary widely in tone, some of them are humorous, some are horrifying, some are a very neat look into the creative process one goes through when making a game. Unfortunately, this is where my biggest criticism of the game comes in: if you asked me the steps you needed to take to get on the path of getting the true ending, I honestly couldn't tell you. I've looked through numerous Steam guides and none of them seemed to help me unlock what I needed. The last hour or so of me playing was just getting as many endings as I could at random until I found what was evidently the "right" one; it wasn't just a matter of getting 32/34 achievements like the guides I found said. All that said, I absolutely still recommend ICEY. It's cheap and even comes with the soundtrack for free. That's another thing: the soundtrack is very, very nice and fits the tone of the game very well, though I'm not sure it's something I'll be listening to a lot in my spare time.