With the amount of monsters available to kill in this location, constantly respawning IC:1 to get experience is probably its own punishment. And XPs received are halved for every 30 monsters of the same kind you kill, so eventually you'd get very little from it.

By the way, there's a little glitch with this respawning under the Windows ASCII version. When you enter the ice queen's domain, a long message is printed and the white "Y"s are drawn in the screen before you are finished reading them all - so they appear in the wilderness map prior to the actual level change.

IIRC that long message also gives a pretty good indication that this is intentional.

I didn't know about the XP halving, still, I milked them for a good 200K xp or so. My character was ridiculously powerful so it seemed like an abuse to respawn them; maybe for weaker characters it's a challenge.

Actually it's intentional. But I forgot to take a little detail into account that only got added after implementing the snow golems. The general behavior will be the same but nothing is without consequence in the game :-) Fixed.