ILA: A Frosty Glide

My first glide on Ila's skatebroom had the same effect on me that a great opening chord has in a song you have never heard before: I knew immediately whether this was going to be worth my time, and it was. ILA: A Frosty Glide is a small, handcrafted 3D platformer from Barcelona-based Magic Rain Studios, built by two founders who literally met while skateboarding, and that origin story is stitched into every design choice. The premise is emotionally grounded in a way the cozy genre rarely commits to: Ila is searching for Coco, her black cat, who also happens to be her last living connection to her late mother. The island she arrives on is a snow-dusted, voxel-adjacent world that sits somewhere between a PS1 fever dream and a lo-fi playlist cover, and the original score by Joaquim Scandurra (Sku) shifts and grows alongside your progress, opening with a quiet piano and building into something genuinely wondrous by the summit. The skatebroom is the whole game, in the best possible sense. You jump, hold to glide, and spend coins to upgrade your Stardust Charges, which are the resource that keeps you airborne for longer stretches. Mid-air recharge rings are scattered across the island to extend your glide chains, and the progression arc from barely clearing a gap at the dock to chaining long arcing flights over frozen forests is exactly the kind of movement growth that makes platformers satisfying. Ground-pounding glowing spots opens 70 Magic Fortune Chests scattered around the island, and the Swept Market lets you spend coins on new skatebrooms, hats, capes, and accessories, none of which are required but all of which are charming. Bouncy Hopshrooms act as vertical shortcuts and ensure that falling rarely feels punishing. The world is compact on purpose, and for most players it runs three to four hours front to back, with completionists landing closer to six. Lore arrives through handwritten letters from Ila's father Bryn, hidden art scenes that piece together her family history, and the quiet geometry of the island itself. The narrative does not shout at you, which is the right call for a game this short. What it does do, by the time you reach the summit and the emotional payoff lands, is leave you feeling like the designers knew exactly when to end the experience. That restraint is a form of craft that larger studios routinely fumble. Not everything holds together cleanly. The camera is the recurring complaint across virtually every review of this game, and it is a fair one. Fixed perspective zones, particularly during the snowboarding downhill sections, can pull the camera into awkward angles mid-glide, and the polygonal art style, while gorgeous to look at, can make depth judgment genuinely difficult when lining up a ground-pound or a tight landing. The snowboarding segments in particular feel less considered than the freeform gliding they interrupt. There is also no in-game map, which means revisiting areas looking for missed collectibles involves a bit of aimless looping. Minor inventory UI bugs have been reported at launch, though none impede progress. For a small studio's first major release off a Kickstarter that exceeded its goal by over 330 percent, these are the rough edges you forgive because the core of the thing is so clearly made with intention. If A Short Hike lives in your library as a permanent resident, ILA belongs in that same folder. It is quieter in its ambitions, more focused on pure movement joy, and emotionally lighter on its feet than it first appears. The soundscape alone earns it a place on any playlist of games you put on when the world outside needs to go quiet for a few hours.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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