I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

I have a terrible habit of starting game after game and then not finishing them (or finishing many, many years after I start), this was not the case with I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. I played through the whole thing in one sitting several years ago. More recently I played it again, also in one sitting. It gets its hooks into you and doesn't let go. It's also a game that I tend to recommend to people provided it fits their particular tastes. It is wonderfully told and the beginning speech is one of my favourite pieces of exposition. It touches on subjects that can turn out very poorly if not handled with tact and care, but even for me who can be rather sensitive to certain subjects, it was handled well enough that I still thoroughly enjoyed it, even if that one scenario did make me squirm rather a lot past a certain point. I never liked yellow anyway (vague point is vague). I don't like games being too hard and this one hits the sweet spot in that sense, it's not easy and I certainly had to look things up once or twice but not once was the atmosphere or immersion disrupted. I'm a person who plays for feel, story and atmosphere, not challenge. My partner played and he likes more of a challenge than I do and he also thoroughly enjoyed it. Be prepared for a dark, bleak story that is wonderfully executed with atmosphere to spare.

There's definitely a lot of interesting story ideas going on with this game. As someone who never played it back when it came out, I have no nostalgia helping me to forgive its many flaws. I cut my teeth on the old Sierra adventure games in the 1980s, so I know how difficult adventure games could be. But even those games (with a few exceptions) wouldn't put you into unwwinable states. With this game, getting stuck in unwinnable states is the majority of the experience. And you'd never know you were in an unwinnable state, as opposed to just missing something, without outside information. The game itself will never let you know you've cut yourself off from progress. I found myself in impossible situations multiple times, and as I got closer to the end I used a guide just to make sure I wasn't doing something out of order so I wouldn't have to repeat sections of the game from old saves. And even doing that, I still got all screwed up a couple times, such that I had to go back to old saves. You can't even backtrack; once a piece of story has advanced, old sections and characters get closed off. Like I said, elements of the story are good, but the gameplay is so terrible that it sucks the enjoyment out of the experience. Only play this game with a walkthrough close at hand, unless you are interested in wasting hours of your life replaying the same parts over and over.

This game is a great adaptation... unfortunately it's showing it's age. I liked it and loved the story but I'll be honest here: if you're under 40 the user interface might be nostalgic, if you're under 30 it might be annoying. If you're under 20 though, painful might be the best way to describe the UI of this game. Great story, but the game part needs a bit of patience.

All in all, the game has some great elements to it. Not only is Harlan Ellison a remarkably talented writer, he's also surprisingly proficient at voicing AM, the computer antagonist. However, the puzzles can be a bit odd, and it's not at all difficult to get yourself into a nearly unwinnable scenario.

I read the novel before getting into this game, to make sure I had a good foundation on what the game was trying to express. The original short story was, possibly, a take on the cold war and nuclear apocalypse, and the story uses this to paint a picture of hell. The game's story was written in collaboration with the orginal author Harlan Ellison (who also provided the voice acting for the AI AM), and the writing is definitely the game's strongest part. Apparently the game's main focus was decided to be the character's back stories and psychological problems when the game's main writer David Sears asked Ellison why AM had selected the five people into its eternal torment. This question surprised Harrison and they then worked out the characters' backstories. The narrative is told in a sequence of 5 independent stories during which the characters come to terms with their own shortcomings. The final chapter is particularly interesting. The programming was outsourced to an external company. I have no idea if the product was hurried into release, but the game is a buggy mess. There are glitchy graphics (Benny grows an extra arm during a cutscene), out-of-sequence puzzles being buggy (digging a grave, exiting the screen and returning to the screen removes the grave, but the interactable grave object still exists on the screen), save corruption happens (loading a game in Benny's chapter will cause the character to be invisible and interacting with anything will soft lock the game, although re-saving and loading again will fix this), there's at least one game locking puzzle that can be sequence skipped, object examine texts don't get updated (pick up a key, looking at the thing where the key was will still describe a key being on the table), sometimes cutscenes don't get triggered until the screen is entered a few times... It's a disaster. The puzzles are somewhat challenging. Often times the solution to a puzzle is to go back and forth between trying something and then talking to a character to get their updated response to it. In Ellen's chapter you can only pick up a really obvious item near the chapter's end for some reason. The final chapter is extremely difficult, albeit interesting. It should be noted the game has some of the most surprising solutions to puzzles I've seen in a long, long time. Some of it is pretty gross. I'm amazed what they were allowed to leave in the game - who knows what the publisher forced them to remove. Originally the author wasn't going to let the developers add in a "happy" ending as he didn't want the game to be winnable, but they had to later make some amendmends, supposedly because it would have been bad marketting to advertise a game one cannot win. Music was pretty enjoyable. There was enough of it to offer some variety, although there could have been more. It's pretty traditional mid 90s MIDI if that's your thing. Artwork is mediocre. Animations have room for improvement while backgrounds look alright.