I’ve had a lot of fun chopping off heads in my day, but Aerial Knight’s Mr. Freezy makes the celebrated video game pastime more…cerebral. Out now on PC and coming September 8th to PS5, Mr. Freezy requires a more thoughtful approach than most games to the act of separating heads from shoulders, turning it into a puzzle game in which a serial killer must collect as many heads as possible.
Somewhere in the basement of an abandoned house in New Detroit, Mr. Freezy hones her killer skills as she hones her axe on the necks of her victims. Heads are arranged across two rows, and it’s your job to line up at least three of the five heads in a single row so you can harvest them in one fell axe swipe. The more noggins you liberate from necks at once, the more points you earn on your way to beating the level’s goal while coming in under a certain number of moves. However, these heads are a stubborn, slippery lot. Changing a head’s position costs you a move and causes adjacent heads to move to the opposite row. Then there are numerous heads that have special characteristics that make them even more challenging to chop—the Knight Head can’t be chopped without a special axe, for instance, while the Old Head moves by itself, and the Greedy Head costs two moves every time you try to move it.
I’ve never played a puzzle game quite like Mr. Freezy before. In an interview with the eponymous Aerial Knight (whose real name is Neil Jones), he said he and his development team wanted to create something simple.
“[Mr. Freezy] was something simple that I wanted my grandmother to be able to play,” he said. Jones said his grandmother really enjoyed the mobile game Dots, and from that game’s simplicity in which you connect dots of the same color, Mr. Freezy was born. “I wanted something like that, where you just kind of like tap it, it does a thing, and then you can have explosions, and it’s really rewarding,” he said.
But while I see that vision, I don’t get Dots when I play Mr. Freezy; I get Atlus Studios’ 3D sokoban-like, Catherine. Now chop with me here. Both have similarly dark narratives. In Catherine you’re trying to avoid being killed in your sleep by a female killer of men, and in Mr. Freezy, well, you get to be a female killer, trading Catherine‘s existential dread manifested as monsters for a much simpler axe. And much like Catherine, which involves arranging boxes one at a time to build a tower you can climb to survive, Mr. Freezy relies on moving heads to kill efficiently.
Both games tap into your pattern recognition ability. Understanding how certain configurations of heads move is the key to success in much the same way that pushing boxes into specific patterns is for Catherine. I know when two heads are on the same side on either end of the line, I can easily move them at once to arrange a gnarly combo. Same with any three heads in the middle. And figuring out that pattern was a big part of what made Mr. Freezy so fun. Making use of the special heads and fitting them into my head-moving strategy was another part.
Mr. Freezy isn’t a big game; there are 45 levels and I’m still hovering around level 20 with six hours of playtime, going back to previous levels to push for higher scores in fewer moves. But Jones was going for a small but mighty approach because, as an indie dev, he has to. Keeping his games small means he can get them out quickly, for people to (hopefully, he adds) buy them, so that money can keep people fed and employed. Rinse, repeat. Because, he said, if the machine stops, momentum is lost, imperiling his tiny studio of four.
“We just make the stuff, [then go] onto the next thing, and a lot of times we’re juggling two things at the same time,” he said, sharing that his studio is already in the middle of their next project. That’s the precarious nature of indie development right now, exacerbated by a discoverability crisis for indie games which Jones has taken into his own arms…literally. In the lead-up to Mr. Freezy‘s launch, Jones began posting daily videos of himself doing pushups for every Steam wishlist the game got.
“Games aren’t about games anymore,” Jones said, explaining why he did “about four-and-a-half-thousand push-ups” to support Mr. Freezy. “They’re about hype and influencers, drawing attention. The game being good is like only like 40 percent of what matters now.”
Mr. Freezy is good. It’s a unique puzzle game that fully engages my brain, making it satisfyingly hot. It’s damn fun when you use your head to chop off others.
