How to play Icy Tower

Arrow keys move Harold. Space jumps. You can pass up through a ledge and land on it from above. The side walls bounce you and keep your speed. Esc opens the menu. In a replay, Space pauses.

Momentum and combos

Speed on the ledge is what buys height. A combo is a chain of jumps that each clear more than one floor. The chain ends if you climb only one floor, if you fall to a lower floor, or if the combo meter under the clock runs out. Wikipedia describes that window as about three seconds. I do not have a frame count, so I stop at “about three seconds.”

Scoring on the classic game

icy.pl’s scoring page gives 10 points per floor. Combo points are x² + 10x, where x is how many floors the combo crossed. One hundred single-floor steps are 1,000 points. A 100-floor combo is 11,000 points. The 2026 store page does not reprint this formula, so I label it as the 2001–1.5 community formula.

Why the view speeds up

The shaft stays still until floor 5, then it scrolls. Every 30 seconds it accelerates and flashes Hurry up. After five warnings the text stops, and the scroll is already fast. Floor art changes every 100 floors through stone, ice, wood, metal, chewing gum, bone, vines, pipe, cloud, rainbow, and glass, up to floor 1000.

Misses, and the file switches

A ghost floor looks solid and then lets you fall through. Players treat it as a bug in 1.2 and earlier. The 1.3 notes say it was fixed. Fun modes are files in the game folder, not shop codes: debug.me on 1.1, fun.mode.on on 1.2, and on 1.3 a lets.go file plus a fall at floor 22 and a replay saved as fld or funmode. There is no redeem-code list for this game.