Slip Space: The Burma-Shave Analogy Review

In the 1930s, 40s and 50s the Burma-Vita company came up with an advertising campaign which took advantage of America’s newest love – the automobile. Five or six small signs would be placed along a busy road far enough apart that you could easily read them as you drove by. The first four or five signs each had the line of a poem which either promoted traffic safety or their brushless shaving cream. The last sign always gave credit to the product – Burma-Shave. You can find plenty of examples of the signs at http://seniors-site.com/funstuff/burma.html

What if our perception of reality was similar to a Burma-Shave ad? We cannot perceive all of the billions of billions of quadrillions of Plank Units of time which go past every second. So we only note the signs while allowing the rest of the scenery to fly by. What would happen to our perception of reality if we saw the signs at a different frequency? What would happen to other people’s perception of us?

This is the basis of the story behind Slip Space.

Slip Space is the work of one man – Dan Markosian. It is a puzzle palace, reminiscent of Rhem, with good story line and graphics.

The Story

You awake to the confusion of a bizarre vision. The Government has planted a chip in your head and you are now the unwilling agent of the SIA, Strategic Intelligence Alliance. A mysterious building has been appearing and vanishing around the country and you have been selected to go and investigate it.

As stories go, this is a good one, if not great. It is good in that the plot actually advances throughout the game and I found that I really did want to find out what was happening. It wasn’t great in that there is little characterization and no twists or subplots. But it is perfectly good for tying the puzzles together. I give the story a solid B.

The Sound and Graphics

Did I mention that this was the work of one man? You will not find any Great Art here. But the graphics set the mood and are well adapted to the puzzles and the story. The worlds are stark and surreal. The visions are Art Deco. There is nothing to complain about here.

I have not taken many screen shots, but you should get a feel for his style from what I have included. Besides, you can find many more screen shots at the website. http://64.150.166.24/Gallery.html

The opening has a very nice piano piece. I was quite impressed to hear a real instrument rather than the usual synth chords. The rest of the game has very simple ambient music.

The voice acting is quite good, even if Dan did do all the voices himself. He used different dialects (that’s an acting word meaning “accents”) and they were strong enough so that you knew who was speaking at any given time.

The sound and graphics also get a solid B.

Game Play

This is the classic point and click slide show. It has the good features of an easily identifiable cursor and nice large hot spots. No pixel hunting that I can remember.

The down side is that there is always an angle you would like to look at, but can’t get to. In the Shave, especially, a 3D environment would have been a big help. But it would also have been a lot more work.

Nothing exceptional, but no problems. Another solid B.

The Puzzles

Ah, now we get to the heart of the matter. The whole point of this game is the puzzles.

First, the puzzles are all of the logical type. There are no inventory based puzzles, in fact, there is no inventory at all.

All of the puzzles have a mathematical heritage, but you don’t need a math background to solve them. What you will need is patience and good-note taking skills. You will not need any reaction time skills or hand-eye coordination. These are entirely cerebral.

There are five Slip Space worlds. On average, you have to solve one puzzle to get into the world and two puzzles within the world. And these are significant puzzles. It took me several weeks to finish the game.

I would rate the difficulty as medium to advanced. If this is your first experiment with adventure games, I would really suggest you start with something a bit simpler. Seasoned adventurers should have no problem. I found all of the puzzles to be fair. That is, the clues were right there and made sense once you identified them for what they were.

There was only one puzzle that I had a problem with. There was a control panel which I expected to display a pattern of lights, but the lights were all gray and dim. I wrote to Dan and asked about it. He wrote back the same day and told me that there was, indeed, a pattern there, but apparently is was too dim for my monitor. So he re-rendered that scene with brighter lights and emailed the updated file to me. ( It has since been made part of the regular download.) That is customer service.

The only critique I can make for the puzzles is that there is little to no layering. You have a great deal of freedom in deciding which puzzles to work on next, but there is no higher puzzle which all the lesser ones lead to. Once you finish the challenges in front of you, you are done.

But still, considering that this is the work of one man, there is a lot of creativity here. And nowhere did I get the feeling that a maze or slider was being thrown in just to make the game longer.

These were good puzzles and I grand them an A-.

Final Verdict

This is a solid production. The author achieved exactly what he wanted. I enjoyed it the whole way through. It was a little shallow in places. There was no feeling of a strong start, but a rushed finish. I was left wanting more. This was the work of a single individual with no corporate backing.

Combining that all together, I give Slip Space an A-.

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows® 7/Vista™/XP (SP2/SP3)
• CPU: Intel® Pentium® IV or equivalent AMD®
• RAM: 512 MB RAM (1 GB Recommended for Windows® Vista™)
• Graphics Card & Monitor: 128 MB DirectX® 9.0C Compatible 3D accelerated video card, supporting 32bit (true color) color depth at 1024×768
• Sound: 16-bit DirectX® 9.0C Sound Card
• Additional: Mouse, Speakers, DVD-ROM Drive