First of all... good luck.

I'll start by explaining why I'm making this forum post: recently, we realized that the Nitrome series on speedrun.com was almost complete, missing just a couple of games. One of these games was Ice Breaker: The Red Clan. I started playing it to try and build up to an actual speedrun, expecting a similar experience to what I'd gotten with the sequel (Ice Breaker: The Gathering), which was somewhat difficult and sometimes frustrating, but ultimately very manageable.

As it turns out, Red Clan is significantly worse. It has many more levels where it feels like you have to slice correctly to the millimeter and be forced to reset if you fail. In other words, in this game, it is sometimes possible to do everything correctly and still lose. Thankfully, this isn't the case for every level, but it was enough to overpower my motivation to complete a full run. After a few initial attempts, I wasn't having any fun running the game anymore.

I did, however, run all 40 Individual Levels. I figured it was better to share them with the world than leaving this game's leaderboard in its sorry state, even if I wasn't going to complete a full game run. I did come up with a few strategies on my own, but most of them were taken from 15 year old YouTube guides.

I hope my level runs can be useful to anyone who may want to run this game some day. If you follow everything I did, you should be able to get a time of less than 25 minutes, at minimum. I'm sure there's potential for a much faster run though.

Here are some notes on the harder levels:

• 11 - I have two runs for this one. The slower one is easier and can be used as a backup if the faster way does not work.
• 14 - There are two ways to beat this level, and I have runs on the leaderboard for both. One is significantly faster, but both are horribly inconsistent, so I'm not sure which one is truly better.
• 16 - This is a prime example of a level where you can play perfectly and still lose. I don't have any tips, just get lucky.
• 17 - This is another very random one. I cut up the ice wall at the end more or less on a whim, but it seems to be the way to go to prevent the vikings from getting stuck on that wall at the end.
• 24 - I was unable to replicate this.
• 26 - Good luck with this one. Here are some other ways to beat it that I either found too inconsistent or wasn't able to replicate at all: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
• 27 - It doesn't look that bad, but this level is easy to mess up. The first three vikings can randomly refuse to slide down the slope(s) or get stuck during the fall. The fourth one is also tricky: sometimes you can't get him to slide down properly, and if you don't cut up the ice in a certain way at the end, he will overshoot the boat and fall in the water.
• 29 - This one isn't hard, but there's a slightly faster way that I wasn't able to replicate.
• 31 - The ice cube does not have to hit the viking, it can hit the rock and the strategy will still work (slowly).
• 32 - I couldn't get this strategy to work.
• 33 - The third cut is deceptively difficult to get right.
• 37 - Very easy to mess up.
• 39 - This one is slow by design, but I didn't try doing it this way, which seems a little faster.

That's all from me. Good luck to any future runners!