The Caverns of Hammerfest



"More than 200 levels! Loads of enemies! More than 70 quests! More than 350 items to collect! A lof incredible secrets!"

- Disclaimer from the website

Remember the time arcades were actually existent and all of the machines ended making you use up all of your allowance as you played those hardcore games they had to offer?

The Caverns of Hammerfest is a Flash game made by the French game developers of Motion-Twin in February 2006, and is the masterpiece homage to the good old platformers that made you yell Big No-s at the loss of your character's last life. Particularly inspired by gems like Bubble Bobble and Snow Bros, the insane difficulty it has to offer is notable (while also being very fair), but its real charm are the countless collectible items and the nice graphics you come across in your quest.

In it, you're a snowman named Igor brought to life when a sorcerer steals your carrot nose, who also happened to kidnap and slave all the sentient fruits of the orchards of Hammerfest for no apparent reason. Now, Igor must venture to his subterranean hideout and go through 100+ levels without dying (did we mention there are no save points?) in order to recover his honor and free his fruity friends from the clutches of Tuber the evil sorcerer.

Okay, this pretty much sums it.

With the ability to throw bombs that freeze your enemies, to progress you have to clear the levels out of the bewitched fruits by sending them to the bottom of the level with them. It's not as easy as it sounds, unfortunately, as you'll see in latter levels. To help you on your way, though, there are the aforementioned 300+ items, most of which have twisted effects of all sorts that go from dandelions that make you flutter to trophies that summon a three-eyed-god to make your enemies dizzy. And these are among the weakest.

The game can be found here. There is a downside, though: you can only play once per day (you can buy more games if you're impatient). This marketing strategy may seem like a problem at the start, when your runs don't go past level 10 and they managed to get you addicted already, but once you're skilled enough and your plays start to, literally, take more than 1 hour, it won't bother you much anymore.

Note that there aren't even many hammers in the game, as it is rather named after Hammerfest, one of the coldest and nothernmost cities of the world.


 * An Ice Person: Igor. Sandy also counts.
 * Ambiguous Gender: Not gender per se, actually, but there have been a lot of discussion whether the red fruits are apples or tomatoes. Even the dev team acknowledges it. Though if one thinks closely, he might remember that enemies are all fruits, while all vegetables are items. And there is actually a tomato item.
 * But it should be noted that tomatoes are, after all, also fruits. Just a mistake on the developers' logic, then.
 * And Your Reward Is Clothes: The hardest quests often lead to disguises.
 * Badass Adorable: Igor.
 * Badass Long Robe: Tuber.
 * Beneath the Earth
 * Big Eater: And Igor somehow doesn't gain a pound from all those candies. Played straight with the Ghost Candy item.
 * Blind Idiot Translation: As pointed out in this thread. The developers don't seem to care.
 * Bonus Level of Hell: P.D. 54; Also a Brutal Bonus Level.
 * Breath Weapon: The ring items, which allow you each to breath fire, freezing balls and... arrows.
 * Check Point Starvation: You must go through 100+ levels without dying to beat the game, or else you'll have to start over from level zero. Good luck.
 * Circling Birdies: Whenever you manage to stun a fruit, be it through items or a slow ice block, it gets circling stars in its head.
 * Collision Damage
 * Co-Op Multiplayer
 * Deadly Dodging: When there are strawberries in the levels, or swarms of watermelons, or both.
 * Death Throws
 * Defeat Means Friendship: That's how bombing the posessed fruits works, right? Right?
 * Degraded Boss: All of the 'bosses', the exception being the final one, are more like introductions to new fruits.
 * Difficulty Spike: Once you get to the 90s. Alternatively, the parallel dimensions, compared to the levels they are found at.
 * Directionally Solid Platforms
 * Distressed Damsel: Wanda Not explicitly stated in the game, but, according to Word of God, she's indeed that apple. She's also the one who made Igor.
 * Downer Ending:
 * Drop the Hammer: An item.
 * Earn Your Happy Ending: After going through all that madness, you finally get that carrot back at the end!
 * Elaborate Underground Base: It is Tuber's hideout.
 * Every Ten Thousand Points: You get extra lives past 100,000 and 500,000 points. After these marks, they only appear again every one million points.
 * Everything's Better with Spinning: The animation for death and when you're thrown away by shockwaves.
 * Evil Laugh: In level 2, coming all the way from Tuber's lungs in 101.
 * Excuse Plot
 * Fetch Quest: All of the quests.
 * Fighting a Shadow: The bat at level 100?
 * Flunky Boss:
 * Friendly Fireproof: Averted, in that your bombs also stun your partner in 2P Mode.
 * Goomba Stomp: It is an ability that can be achieved for one stage if you get a Koopa shell item.
 * Gotta Catch Them All: The items, which are considered by most what really makes the game addicting. However, nobody still unlocked all of them.
 * Guide Dang It: Okay, if you want big scores, you must check walkthroughs about the orders in which you must kill the fruits in order to get the big crystal. It's nigh impossible to figure them out by yourself, mainly when there more than one of the same fruit.
 * There's Cadomax, which is in French, and Zaxarinka. The latter being made by the best player of the English version himself.
 * Harder Than Hard: Hell in Nightmare Mode. And it's required for a virtual Hundred-Percent Completion.
 * Harmless Freezing: Turning the fruits into cubes of ice only makes them angrier.
 * Hell: P.D. 54.
 * He Who Fights Monsters:
 * Hundred-Percent Completion: No one ever accomplished such feat as of yet. But, item unblocking aside, a few hardcore players have beaten Hell in Nightmare Mode and got the Red Bomb, the holy grail of Hammerfestians.
 * Idle Animation: Igor blows a bubble out of a bubblegum after a while or pulls a silly dance.
 * Instant Ice, Just Add Snowball Bombs
 * Invincible Minor Minion: The fireball that comes after the second Hurry! to pursue Igor, in the style of Baron von Blubba from Bubble Bobble.
 * Joke Item: The chocolate mousse, which not only looks like poop (it is poop in the French version) and is only worth 1 point, it's also a coefficient 5 item. It means it's one of the rarest items in the game, which have only a 0.14% chance of appearing in every level.
 * Kill It with Fire: When under the effects of the Ring of Fire item.
 * Kill It with Ice: How the gameplay works.
 * Locked Door
 * McGuffin: Igor's carrot.
 * Mook Maker:
 * New Game+: Okay, aside from the fact that every time you play it it's a new game and you're ever slightly more experienced, it's how quests work. Also, once you beat the final boss, you get the even harder Nightmare Mode.
 * Nice Hat: Disguises.
 * Nintendo Hard: It takes often more than one whole month to hone enough your skills only to be able to get to the final boss and beat it? We say 'only' because you don't know how merciless Hell can be.
 * It took 5 months for this troper to beat the game.
 * Nostalgia Level: P.D. 16 (Super Mario Bros.), P.D. 43 (Bubble Bobble), P.D. 51 (Rick Dangerous) and P.D. 62 (Sonic the Hedgehog).
 * Path of Most Resistance: This is the point of the Parallel Dimensions, which often (but not always) have rewards or are shortcuts.
 * Lost Forever: If you don't pick up the items on a level before going to the next, they're lost. Same thing happen when you pick up certain items, like the pearls. These items can make things specially frustrating if it's a coefficient 4 and upwards item that you just lost.
 * Poison Mushroom: A bunch of items are there just to make things harder.
 * Portal Network
 * Power-Up Letdown: Out of many, the biker helmet and the dandelion.
 * One Bullet At a Time: Before you complete certain quests, this is how the bombs work.
 * Randomly Drops: The items.
 * Reference Overdosed
 * Restart At Level One
 * Scarf of Asskicking
 * Schizo-Tech: While the game supposedly takes place in 404BC it doesn't stop from there being modern-day objects as items (and even robots) and teleporters.
 * Scoring Points: Played straight this time. Scoring big not only nets you lives, there's a 5 level ranking based on the top players by score.
 * Secret Level: The Parallel Dimensions.
 * Selective Gravity: Subverted. Everything falls (with an exception being those watermelons).
 * Self-Destruct Mechanism: Bombinos.
 * Sequential Boss:
 * Shapeshifter Showdown:
 * Shout-Out:
 * Bubble Bobble: The Trope Codifier gets a Parallel Dimension, in level 43, with levels being straight from it. Also, like the first game often had levels with the tiles making a drawing or words, Hammerfest has a few levels with tile-art too.
 * Special notice to the Baron von Blubba/Monsta at level 93. Worth mentioning that the level is full of watermelons, which behave exactly like the Monstas from the original Bubble Bobble.
 * Don't forget the bubbles that wrap Igor, the umbrella items that make you skip levels and the big crystals that fall when you kill the fruits in a certain order.
 * Snow Bros: The protagonist's a snowman. That's all, interestingly enough.
 * Hare Nochi Guu: Pokutes, Mandas, Chourou's chesthair and a doll of Guu are items. One quest is based on collecting them.
 * Super Mario Bros.: Collect all of the four mushrooms and you get Mario's signature quest. Also, P.D. 16, the Secret Coins and the Koopa shell item.
 * Sonic the Hedgehog: P.D. 62.
 * One Piece: Chopper and Luffy's hats are items.
 * Half Life: The Gordon's Key item is a crowbar identical to that of the first game.
 * Rick Dangerous: P.D. 51, which not only is styled on the game's first level's evironment, it also has the Ankhel Jewel as a reward at the end. And the Rigor Dangerous key, needed to get into said P.D.
 * Dr. Slump: In the French version, the poop item is called Arale's delicacy (literal translation). Arale, from the show, is known to have a fascination with feces.
 * Johnny 5, UFO Robo Grendizer, Ulysses 31, Star Wars, RoboCop and Transformers: All get items on the robots-based family items.
 * Phew.
 * Snowlems
 * Socialization Bonus: Some items can only be acquired in 2P Mode.
 * Songs in the Key of Panic: The sped up music that plays after the first Hurry!, just like in Bubble Bobble.
 * Spikes of Doom
 * Surprise Difficulty
 * They Just Didn't Care: It took more than one year for the English version of the game to get the Parallel Dimensions after the French and Spanish ones, and the game still has a bunch of typos, but they pretty much forgot about it already.
 * Turns Red: For all of the fruits after they unfreeze or the Hurry! warnings.
 * In Nightmare Mode, they already start like this.
 * Warp Zone: Primary way to get to the Parallel Dimensions.
 * X Meets Y: Bubble Bobble meets Snow Bros meets Bomberman.

...Ka-Bonk!