So not too long ago I wanted to see if I could melt a small brick of metal by creating a circular lens (using the mouse scroller so that the circular brush is very large) out of glass. This worked fine until I was only able to get up to around 921 Cº just from focusing the photons on the metal.

Out of a whim I decided to cool off the glass down to 200 C and then fire the photon stream towards the lens. What I saw was that the photons coming out of the lens cooled off the metal reducing the temperature from around 900 down to 600. What I saw on the temperature display was that the photons had cooled off from their original temperature. Now I don't know how the photons are programmed in the game, but I can tell that this reduction in temperature means that the photons are treated as particles that can gain and lose kinetic energy.

Obviously they should transfer their energy, but the fact that they cool off like solid matter doesn't make sense to me.

Dude, I'm well aware that they're particles that transfer their electromagnetic energy into kinetic energy for atoms when they strike a material object (I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear, I tried so hard in my description to make my problem vivid). That wasn't my problem. When the glass was hot the photons traveling through it heated the metal (as I expected and that is what I wanted). My problem arose when the glass was cold, the photons coming out cooled the heated metal. I just don't see how a photon can cool a heated object.