What is ICE Cream?
A darkly satirical survival RPG about keeping a family together while invisible forces quietly turn everyday life into risk.
The Game
You manage a family navigating modern U.S. cities under escalating enforcement pressure. Each turn, you allocate effort, respond to events, and make choices that ripple through nested systems of power.
The world operates through pressure. National policy sets the weather. Cities interpret and translate. Neighborhoods express consequences. Your family absorbs the impact.
Survival, sanctuary, and transformation are all possible outcomes. The game is designed to be won. But every choice has costs, and the margins are thin.
Design Philosophy
Satire punches up.
The game critiques systems, bureaucracy, and power—never the people trapped inside them. When something absurd happens, the absurdity belongs to the institution, not the individual.
Educational, not instructional.
The game teaches that rights exist, what tradeoffs look like, and how systems create consequences. It does not teach real-world tactics. This is a mirror, not a manual.
Failure feels structural.
When things go wrong, the game frames it politically—as the system working as designed—not as personal incompetence. You are not bad at the game. The game is about systems that grind people down.
Opacity by design.
Players experience consequences before causes. The world does not explain itself. This reflects how bureaucratic power actually operates: opaquely, arbitrarily, and without regard for individual understanding.
Inspirations
This game stands in a tradition of work that uses systems to generate empathy:
- Papers, Please — the bureaucrat's dilemma, complicity through participation
- This War of Mine — civilian survival under structural pressure
- Disco Elysium — systems as character, failure as revelation
- Oregon Trail — resource management as narrative engine
What This Is Not
- Not a tactical stealth game. You are not evading detection. You are navigating systems.
- Not a real-world how-to guide. This game does not provide actionable advice for immigration situations. See our Resources page for actual legal information.
- Not a power fantasy. You are inside the system, not above it.
- Not morally neutral. The game has a perspective about systems of harm. It does not pretend otherwise.
Why This Game
Games are systems that generate experience. When designed carefully, they can create understanding that lectures and statistics cannot.
This game asks a question: what does it feel like when ordinary life—going to work, sending kids to school, visiting the doctor—becomes risk? And what happens to people who must live inside that question every day?
The answer is not comfortable. That is the point.