Indie Fund backs Slime in the Ice Machine

The evangelical church that owns the strip mall got rich off Christian memecoins and is calling in the back rents on the mortician, the year-round Christmas store, the bail bondsman, the sex shop, the tattoo removal clinic, and your dad’s legendary dive bar. The church wants to convert the whole lot into a Hell House for Halloween, an immersive theater exhibit that showcases sins like gender freedom and shoplifting gangs.

Slime in the Ice Machine is a hand-drawn narrative puzzle game set in Houston, where your father's black cat-themed dive bar is leaking psychotropic slime out of the ice machine in the storage room. The slime connects every good bar across space and time. You're a journalist: you’re trained to leap bravely into any situation that promises novelty and revelation, no matter how insane. You step into the slime and begin your quest to find some way to save the local strip mall.

You find yourself in bars full of occultist swingers, pub demons, ghosts trapped in electronics, pirates, revolutionaries, vandals, and a two-time-felon Santa. Each bar has a surreal crisis to solve. Untangle a ghost polycule, balance a party across the political spectrum of the First French Republic, decode graffiti in 1980s Tokyo. As you make progress, you collect new skills and level them up: bartending, seduction, gaming, vandalism, and above all, journalism.

The score is by Buzz McCoy of My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. This is his first game soundtrack, though he’s provided music for Paul Verhoeven, Gregg Araki, and even done a musical cameo in The Crow. TKK came out of Chicago's Wax Trax! scene in 1989 and have been trafficking in Satanic panic, tabloid Americana, camp, sex, horror, and psychedelia ever since.

A generous 3+ hour demo is out on Steam. Sam Barlow calls it "fearless and untethered," Jeanne Thornton says "run don't walk," and Tanya X. Short praises the "sharp, flavorful writing." A Kickstarter launches this fall. Play the demo, wishlist the game, and follow the campaign on Kickstarter.

Slime in the Ice Machine

Aconite

FUNDED 2026