1992 · Famicom · Game story
Solomon’s Key 2: The Island Is a Box of Ice
The Japanese Famicom puzzle turns a frozen island’s rescue into a sequence of tiny construction jobs: make ice at Dana’s feet, erase it, push it, drop it, and leave no flame creature untouched.
In this story
A cold answer to a hot problem
Coolmin Island is made of ice, so its crisis arrives in the most legible possible form: the evil wizard Druidol has released fire creatures there. Dana, still a novice in Nintendo’s account, receives ice magic from the fairy queen and has to make the island survivable again. The setup is charming because the puzzle rule is already inside the story. Fire is not an abstract target icon. It is the thing that does not belong in this frozen place, and every square of ice Dana makes feels like a small restoration of the island’s natural grammar. 1 7
That clarity lets the game become complicated without becoming obscure. The player never loses sight of the job: remove every flame creature on the fixed screen. But the actual work is indirect. Ice can be made, destroyed, pushed, and dropped, so the shortest visual line between Dana and a flame is rarely the entire solution. A fire may need to be met from above, boxed in from the side, or reached only after the player has built the route that makes the correct push possible. 1 4
The result is a rare action-puzzle mood: calm on the surface, exacting underneath. There is no need to rush through a cloud of enemies. Instead, a screen asks the player to look at ice as material. Where can a block stand? What will it become if it is pushed? What does its removal do to the route behind Dana? The game’s best rooms make a single block feel like a sentence whose meaning changes when the player gives it one more square of space. 3 8
Trivia Nintendo’s description is unusually direct: hit a fire creature with ice, and it is defeated; defeat every one on the screen, and the round is clear. 1
See it in action
The block starts under your feet
The game’s defining limitation is also its most elegant idea: Dana does not conjure a convenient staircase in front of herself. A player account devoted to the Famicom original stresses that ice is created and removed at Dana’s feet. That immediately changes the texture of thought. To rise, Dana must first stand where a new block can exist; to cross, the player must make a floor from a location already reachable. Creation is not a remote command. It is a commitment made from inside the board’s current geometry. 9 4
This single constraint keeps the puzzle honest. A prospective block is never merely an answer to the flame that is visible now. It may become the only way back, the ledge needed to approach a higher platform, or the object that blocks a later fall. Because Dana must occupy the source square, every construction choice includes a question about position: where will the wizard be when the ice appears, and which side of the new obstacle will he occupy afterward? The board becomes an argument about future access rather than a collection of targets. 4 7
That is why simple early screens teach so much. One newly made block can be a step, a plug, or a piece of ammunition. Destroying it may recover a route, but it may also remove the only support from which a later construction can begin. The pleasure is not in finding a flashy spell. It is in learning that the smallest physical rule—the block begins at Dana’s feet—has enough consequences to organize an entire island of puzzles. 3 9
Trivia A detailed modern play account notes that the game’s ice can be created or removed only at Dana’s feet, not freely in the square ahead. 9
Pushes and falls do the talking
Once the player stops treating ice as scenery, the room begins to speak in verbs. A block can be pushed toward a flame, arranged above one, or allowed to fall with useful force. The Japanese strategy guide reduces the central reading order to three questions: where the flames are, where Dana can make ice, and where a block will go when pushed or dropped. That is a compact description of a game with surprising physical wit. A block is not valuable because it exists; it is valuable because it is about to move. 4
The push is especially satisfying because it turns preparation into a visible payoff. The player may spend several moves building a stack that looks excessive, then remove one supporting piece and watch the intended block descend into the only useful lane. Nothing about the screen has changed secretly. The solution has been assembled in public. When the fire disappears, the result feels less like a trick than a machine the player has patiently built out of temporary ice. 5 4
That physical language also gives the game its lovely sense of reversibility and danger. Removing ice is necessary, but removal can turn a carefully prepared bridge into a dead end. Pushing a block can solve one flame while placing a new wall between Dana and another. The right move is often the one that changes the board twice: first by putting a block somewhere useful, then by making its new position create a second opportunity. The player is composing trajectories, not simply clearing objects. 5 8
Trivia The original’s Japanese strategy material repeatedly describes solutions in terms of making ice, removing it, dropping it, and pushing it into position. 5 4
A screen is a finished machine
Solomon’s Key 2 is at its most convincing when a puzzle seems too quiet to contain a trap. A fixed screen presents a few platforms, a handful of flames, and enough empty space to make improvisation look tempting. Then the player removes one block too early and realizes that the last flame cannot be reached, or pushes a useful piece into the one corridor Dana still needed. The game encourages a productive habit: before acting, imagine the room after the final flame is gone and work backward from that completed state. 4 2
This is not simply puzzle-game caution. It is a way of seeing the screen as a mechanism with limited raw material. Every ice block that appears can later become floor, weight, wall, or weapon, but it cannot do all those jobs in the same moment. The player therefore has to decide which future use is irreplaceable. A flame close to Dana may be easy to extinguish now, yet worth postponing if the ice needed to reach it is also the key to arranging a more distant target. 3 8
The game’s restraint is what makes those plans readable. There is no scrolling landscape to blur the consequence of a move. Each screen holds the relevant objects in one neat frame, asking the player to transform the same small space until it reveals a safe sequence. The pleasure of a solution is often less a burst of speed than the moment an awkward arrangement suddenly becomes inevitable: this block must fall first, that gap must remain open, and Dana has just enough room to make the next piece. 2 4
Trivia The Famicom manual archive characterizes the game as a fixed-screen puzzle and notes that Dana cannot jump, making constructed height and access do the work. 2
Undo is part of the conversation
A serious puzzle game benefits from being willing to let the player think aloud. The Famicom original includes a rewind function, as the Japanese manual archive points out, and that feature changes the emotional temperature of experimentation. An incorrect block does not automatically turn curiosity into punishment. The player can test a push, watch the route close, and step back into the moment before the commitment. The screen still demands a solution; it simply permits the player to learn the board’s grammar through a conversation rather than a lecture. 2
That kindness is well matched to the game’s material. Ice is precarious by nature: it is created, removed, shifted, and made to fall. A system built from such temporary elements invites a player to ask “what if?” again and again. Rewind makes the question playable. It does not tell the player which block should be saved or where a flame ought to be approached. It simply protects the act of forming a hypothesis, which is exactly what the later rooms ask players to do with increasing care. 2 5
This produces a distinctive rhythm of patience. Rather than treating a failed attempt as a reason to memorize faster inputs, the player can revise a single relation: leave the support in place, make the upper block first, push from the other side, or delay the tempting flame. The game becomes more satisfying as those revisions grow smaller. Eventually, a board that first looked stubborn begins to offer a vocabulary of recognizable corrections, and the player can feel skill arriving as clearer questions. 4 5
Trivia The Japanese Famicom manual archive identifies rewind as a built-in function, letting a player test a line of thought without immediately abandoning the screen. 2
A hundred small workshops
The game’s scale feels earned because it returns to one exceptionally fertile rule rather than constantly inventing new tools. GAVAS describes 100 stages in the main Famicom puzzle, each asking Dana to use ice creation and destruction to save Coolmin Island. The variety comes from arrangement. A block that serves as a staircase in one room becomes a falling weight in another; a safe open floor becomes a problem when the next flame can be reached only by preserving a narrow construction lane. 3
The dedicated Japanese guide’s long catalogue of solutions makes this design strength visible. Its explanations do not need a parade of new spells to stay interesting. They talk about building two or three ice blocks, lowering them, clearing one flame before another, and protecting a stone or opening. The nouns stay humble; the order keeps changing. That is the mark of a good puzzle toolkit: the player becomes more alert to the consequences of familiar pieces instead of waiting for the game to rescue interest with a new gadget. 5
There is an almost workshop-like satisfaction to this repetition. Each screen supplies the materials and the problem, then invites Dana to make a temporary apparatus that will cease to matter once its fire is gone. The player carries no arsenal forward and needs no elaborate inventory. What carries forward is a habit of construction: look for the weight, the support, the push line, and the square from which the next ice block must be born. 8 3
Trivia GAVAS describes Dana’s magic as both creating and destroying ice, a two-part rule that lets a useful block become a useful absence later in the same room. 3
The editor keeps the island open
The most generous surprise is that Solomon’s Key 2 lets the player turn from solver into setter. Nintendo’s 「がめんをつくる」 mode supports 22 self-made puzzle screens. That feature belongs naturally to a game in which the drama comes from relationships between a few things: a flame, a place to make ice, a ledge, a fall, and a route back. Once players understand how little material is needed for a good trap, they can begin to arrange those same relationships for someone else. 1 6
A long-running Japanese fan archive shows what that invitation made possible. Its pages collect submitted and self-made screens, treating the game’s small grammar as something players can continue speaking with after the built-in puzzles are done. An editor can make a room whose whole personality lies in one inconvenient flame, one badly placed support, and one block that must not be made too soon. The important part is not a tally of rooms but the fact that a few clear rules can be rearranged into a surprising new problem. 6
That is the lasting charm of Coolmin Island. Its ice magic never becomes vague fantasy power. It remains a precise set of permissions and consequences, clear enough to teach with a handful of squares and rich enough to support player-made riddles. The player who finishes a difficult screen has not merely found a route through a frozen island. They have learned how the island thinks: build from where you stand, preserve the square you will need, and let the final falling block say exactly what you meant. 1 6 7
Trivia Nintendo says the editor provides room for 22 original puzzle screens, and the Japanese fan archive continues to host submitted creations made with that feature. 1 6
A few more screens
2 official imagesSources & image credits
Facts were checked against the links below. Official media remains the property of Nintendo and the relevant rights holders.
- Nintendo Classics: ソロモンの鍵２ ～クールミン島救出作戦～ Nintendo ↗
- 『ソロモンの鍵2 クールミン島救出作戦』1992年／ファミコン レトロゲームの説明書保管庫 ↗
- ソロモンの鍵2 クールミン島救出作戦｜ファミコン GAVAS ↗
- ソロモンの鍵2 クールミン島救出作戦徹底攻略ガイド レトロゲーム横丁 ↗
- ソロモンの鍵２～クールミン島救出作戦～ 攻略 horus02 ↗
- ソロモンの鍵２～クールミン島救出作戦～の深淵 ソロモンの鍵２の深淵 ↗
- ソロモンの鍵2 ファミコンゲームソフト列伝 ↗
- ファミコン：レトロゲーム・アーカイブス レトロゲーム・アーカイブス ↗
- 8月後半に遊んだゲーム（10本） monk128 ↗
