ILA: A Frosty Glide Review
Magic Rain Studios delivers a cozy 3D platformer about a young witch searching for her lost cat across a magical, snowy island.
ILA: A Frosty Glide. Credit: Magic Rain Studios / First Break Labs
ILA: A Frosty Glide from Magic Rain Studios and publisher First Break Labs features a young witch who rides her broom like a skateboard, and it takes that skatebroom concept and actually makes it feel great to control. It doesn’t feel like a gimmick, but rather the core of what makes exploring the game’s compact winter world genuinely fun. It's a short experience that knows exactly what it wants to be, even if some elements don't quite land.
ILA: A Frosty Glide. Credit: Magic Rain Studios / First Break Labs
ILA's cat Coco vanishes one night, and she must search a mysterious island where she believes her companion is lost. It’s a straightforward setup. As ILA finds mementos connected to Coco, we see some of her memories of them together. The game tries to flesh things out through collectible lore drops scattered around the island, but I stopped reading them after the first few. The writing never compelled me to care about the island’s mysteries when the basic “find your cat” motivation would have worked just fine for a brief game like this. Sometimes a straightforward goal beats elaborate worldbuilding, and ILA would've been better served keeping things simple rather than cramming in backstory, especially when the gameplay is so much better than the writing.
ILA: A Frosty Glide. Credit: Magic Rain Studios / First Break Labs
The island itself is technically an open world but structured into distinct zones, with later areas unreachable until you've upgraded your abilities. It’s sometimes impossible to collect certain secrets hidden in the world until you’ve upgraded your broom, but once you can chain enough jumps, backtracking becomes trivial.
The star attraction here is the skatebroom, which makes movement feel great. At first, you're barely clearing gaps, struggling to maintain altitude, but the game trains you through smartly designed jumping puzzles that teach momentum, turning, and how to chain glides. The controls are responsive, making gliding feel effortless. I appreciate how frequently the game opens up vertical shortcuts in the form of bouncy mushrooms; it prevents falls from ever feeling punishing.
ILA: A Frosty Glide. Credit: Magic Rain Studios / First Break Labs
Not everything clicks, though. The snowboarding sections don’t feel as good to play and are simply not as fun as the rest of the movement and obstacles. These parts of the game are made worse by the camera, which fixes itself at weird, distant angles as you barrel downhill. The camera is generally not great. While you can control it freely most of the time, it loved repositioning itself at the worst moments, forcing me to fight for a better angle constantly.
The Scandinavian aesthetic brings genuine coziness with its pastel palette and snow-covered peaks, but the blocky, sharp-edged visual style never quite matches the charm of the game's promotional artwork. That clean, cartoony style of the illustration would have made for far better visuals. The game just doesn’t pull off the blocky art thing as well as many other games.
ILA: A Frosty Glide. Credit: Magic Rain Studios / First Break Labs
ILA doesn't overstay its welcome with its 3-4 hour length. The core gliding remains satisfying throughout, the cosmetic collection elements provide just enough motivation to explore a little deeper, and reaching the end feels earned without any artificial padding. Despite some rough edges with the camera and those unnecessary snowboarding bits, this is a genuinely cozy platformer that nails the most important part of a game like this: making its core movement mechanic feel good.
ILA: A Frosty Glide is available now on Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch.
Overall Score: 7/10
Played on: PS5
