I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

I had read reviews of this game and liked the premise enough to try it out. However, I now completely regret doing so. Over the course of working through two of the characters' missions, I've come to the conclusion that the game mechanics themselves are fundamentally broken to the point that if you fail to perform a single task in a stage, there is literally no way to complete it. Similarly, if you perform tasks out of order from what the GAME wants, there is no way to complete the level. I've literally spent the last three hours trying to complete a stage, trying to determine where it became broken, and it was apparently right at the very beginning. Having wasted all of that time, I've decided I'm not even going to bother with completing it. I despise games that are designed so terribly that you cannot complete them without a walkthrough. It steals away any enjoyment of the game. It's a shame, too, because I really have enjoyed the story up to the point I had completed. But I absolutely cannot recommend this as a game to try and play through on your own. If you don't mind having to keep a walkthrough right next to you and following it verbatim, then you may be able to get on board with it. But as a gamer who prefers to only reference a guide when I become stuck on something I can't figure out, I think this is just shabby game design. No game should be so obtuse that it literally blocks you just because you chose to perform tasks in a different order from what the designers intended. I'm just glad I bought the game when it was on sale, so I'm not out very much money. Stay away.

Benny's sequence has an extremely frustrating bug. Every saved game I loaded from this sequence didn't load the actual Benny character, making them unplayable. I had to run the entire sequence using a walkthrough in one sitting with no saves, ruining the 'let's-see-what-this-does' gameplay. Even with that bug Benny's sequence didn't frustrate me like Ted's. It's a huge bait-and-switch, the first two scenes establishing that this will be some sort of grand puzzle in the style of MYST by way of David Lynch. And then you push a button and are whisked away to a slightly-dark parody of old King's Quest swords-and-sorcery games, complete with comic references to Dungeons & Dragons and the works of H.P. Lovecraft. I believe this segment was a part of an entirely different game that was never released, and was shoehorned into this game when whatever the original plan for Ted didn't work out. The first two scenes might as well have been a big title card that read "We had a great idea for this, but it was way too complicated to actually implement. Have fun storming the castle!" Despite many, many flaws this game is still going to be worth playing to a lot of people. I would especially recommend it to anyone writing/designing story-driven games. You could learn a lot by seeing what works and what doesn't in this title.

A previous reviewer mentioned how to improve the sound of the music which uses old/poor midi samples recorded as audio. He referenced DosBox as the wrapper for the game but the current download already uses ScummVM so you can skip almost all of his steps and do the following: Pick a soundfont from here (like Fluid R3 or a larger sample set which will likely sound even better) http://www.synthfont.com/soundfonts.html Download ScummVM Add this game's installed directory as a new game in ScummVM (i.e. C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games\I Have No Mouth) Selected the MIDI tab in ScummVM to choose your downloaded soundfont Run the game through ScummVM Maximize window/hit Alt Enter for fullscreen game with much better sounding music. As for the game itself I will return to edit the review. I have read Harlan Elison since I was a teenager and always meant to get around to this (very) short story and then play the game. I just read the story and now jumping into the game.

This game seems dark, yes, but with a clear logic... at the beginning. Solve several not-so-difficult points of history and... then you're stuck! Try all the option you have, nothing to do. Then go to read a walkthrough and discover that several scenes before you did not the correct action or you have done it in a wrong sequence (but it seemed correct). Luckily I use to save almost every step, so it wasn't so hard to find and reload the "crossroad", but then I have to follow, step by step, a walkthrough, or probably I have to restart the part several times. It is not so much fun to do again the same things more and more times...

I played this game two or three times in the past, but never managed to finish it. The reason being, the content is so depressing that replaying it over and over feels like being stuck in purgatory or something. The first time was fun, I didn't know what to expect next, and it was fascinating to watch both the good and the bad endings for every character, and making disturbing moral choices just to see what will happen next. But when I finally thought I had all the endings I needed for a good endgame, I found out I can't even finish it, because for some reason some of the characters were missing their 'totems' and this wasn't obvious until it was their turn in the endgame (there is no way to check this). I don't know if it was a bug or if I screwed up their respective stories somehow, but I figured that if I got the ending wrong, they would appear back at the Hate Pillar screen. Whatever the case, I was really annoyed by this, and put off by the fact that I won't know if the same thing won't happen again if I restart the game entirely, so I just gave up. Still, it's a very unique game but requires more patience than I have I guess.