Demo oozes out of Slime in the Ice Machine

• Announcements by Sam Amiotte-Beaulieu
• Published:

Kickstarter coming soon for psychedelic time-travelling point-and-click deduction adventure

Typically a pool of congealed oily liquid in your bar is an easy way to fail a health inspection, but the upcoming Slime in the Ice Machine by New York-based developer Aconite looks to be anything but typical.

You’re Margo (short for “Margarita”), a hotshot journalist in New York City. Things are going great until you get a phone call from your dad back home in Houston that he’s suffered a serious injury and needs you. Arriving at the Bayou Village strip mall, you find your dad lying on the floor of his “legendary black cat-themed metal bar,” the Catbox. He explains that his current state is the result of a drunken altercation at the local church, which is aiming to “replace the entire strip mall (where you grew up) with something sinister.”

The good news is, he has a secret weapon for fighting back: a “pool of hallucinogenic slime oozing out of the ice machine in the bar’s empty storage room.” This extraordinary slime pool serves as a “psychotropic liquid doorway” that connects the Catbox with the “Bar World,” a swirling miasma of psychedelic energy that brings together “all great bars across space and time.” Now Margo must “plunge into the shimmering abyss” and travel to the greatest bars in the universe in order to learn the skills needed to save her dad’s joint and the rest of the strip mall.

Slime in the Ice Machine is a slideshow-style, hand-drawn point-and-click adventure where you travel between colorful, lightly animated scenes of psychedelic insanity. To call its setup unconventional is an understatement, but it allows for a wide array of wacky scenarios for players to untangle. One moment you’ll be learning how to bartend from a “1970s occult swinger bar” where your mixing of psychoactive cocktails changes the magical sexual desires of mages dabbling in various elemental mystic arts; the next you’re gambling with “slot machine ghosts” to increase your gaming ability, among many others. Each bizarre task increases your skills and allows Margo to learn new abilities. Leveling up your journalism skill can unlock the ability to “cyberstalk” individuals, for example. Serve enough swingers drinks and you’ll gain new cocktail mixtures that can unravel their hidden desires.  

Each location contains its own "surreal crisis" with dialogue and deduction puzzles to solve, viewable through Margo’s journal. For starters, in the Bayou Village you must drag and drop possible names of eccentric owners to the stores surrounding your dad’s bar, as well as determine the name of each of your dad’s seemingly identical black cats so his way-too-young girlfriend can give the right feline friend their medication. You’ll have to combine information uncovered in your travels through careful observation of the environments with the details gleaned from your journalistic exploits in order to progress further along your dive into “raw unpasteurized humanity.”

Slime in the Ice Machine is still far out from a full release, with a Kickstarter campaign planned to start soon to help finance its production. In the meantime, a substantial demo is available now on Steam for both Windows and Mac.