Binky: Frozen in Time is a new Commodore 64 platformer from Thalamus

Thalamus Digital has released a new single-screen puzzle platformer for the Commodore 64 called Binky: Frozen in Time. The digital .D64 file launched on September 24.

Binky is a spiritual successor to the team's prior retro title, Thin Ice. The game puts you in control of an ice dragon who lost his ice breath. He compensates by freezing platforms just by walking on them. You have to navigate 20 different caverns, freezing every freezable surface to activate an exit portal before the timer runs out. It's a straightforward arcade premise that gets complicated by the stage hazards.

Fire imps actively thaw the platforms you just walked across, which sounds like exactly the kind of late-stage arcade friction that ruins a good run. You also have to dodge active lasers, crushers, jumping fireballs, and rolling barrels. If you want a higher score, you can hunt for colored keys to unlock chests containing B-O-N-U-S letters. Collecting the full word grants 5,000 points and an extra life. The control scheme relies on a joystick plugged into Port 2, though you can map movement to the keyboard if you're playing on an emulator.

The Gremlin Graphics reunion tour

Programmer Chris Shrigley and artist Terry Lloyd built the game under the Snowball Effect Games banner. The two developers first worked together at Gremlin Graphics in the mid-1980s. They collaborated on seminal Commodore 64 releases like Bounder and Future Knight, and both men later helped establish Core Design in 1988. Shrigley also programmed the C64 ports of Trailblazer and Die Hard 2.

The rest of the credits read like a roll call of British 8-bit development. Simon Phipps provided the cover art, Paul 'Dokk' Docherty drew the loading screen, and Tomas Danko composed the SID soundtrack. Andy Roberts produced the project for Thalamus Digital Publishing Ltd., his modern revival of the classic 1986 UK software label. The original Thalamus published some of the most technically ambitious games on the platform before closing in 1993.

Floppy disks and device 8

The game ships as a standard .D64 disk image. It runs natively on original 1982 Commodore 64 hardware, the VICE emulator, and modern FPGA setups like the C64 Ultimate or the C64 Mini.

If the game detects writable storage on device 8 at boot, it creates a persistent save file for the high score table. If you're running it off a read-only setup, it just disables saving for the session and lets you play normally. Managing save states on 40-year-old disk drives is usually a headache.

Source: Binky: Frozen in Time - C64 Reveal Trailer