I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

I lve this type classic single player games, no microtransacsions, offline and pure gaming, but due some glitch, i couldn't see the happy ending

I've wanted to play this for a long time,. but right from the beginning, I was disappointed. Sure, there are some interesting elements but the puzzles are illogical, dead-ends multiple and voice acting pretty unimpressive. Not my cup of tea, even though I usually enjoy classics.

Based on a short story by famous sci-fi author Harlan Ellison, the game-based version is greatly expanded and most certainly for the better. Kudos to both CyberDreams and the Dreamers Guild for cobbling together such an impressive feat; considering MS-DOS gaming was pretty much on its last legs by the end of 1995; as most developers were migrating to the rising behemoth which was Windows 95. The story, setting, characters, plot, dialogue- heck, the writing in general is top-notch and remains engaging throughout your playthrough. While no BioForge, the developers were imaginative enough to overcome the limitations of the DOS-based graphics with sheer artistic imagination. The later areas; such as the cyberverse and virtual reality venues- are especially impressive. The same can be said with the voice-acting performance. Even the secondary and tertiary characters deliver their lines with a competent smoothness. Despite all this praise, No Mouth is NOT beginner-friendly... While there is no trace at all of "moon-logic" puzzling (we're looking at you, Discworld), the player still has to be VERY careful with each and every decision their character makes. Telltale has nothing on No Mouth. Saving is your friend. Save fast and save often. Even for veterans who cut their teeth on challenging titles such as "Shadow of the Comet" as well as "The Koshan Conspiracy", there's still going to be a lot of trial-and-error. Be patient, experiment and keep a batch of alt save states.

First, the good: -The puzzles were by and large reasonable and entertaining. -Nostalgia 90's graphics -Decent voice acting -Each character is played in their own limited environment, which was a successful way to limit the traditional problem of "wandering around forever to figure out what's there before you actually play the game." The bad: -As others noted, its pretty buggy. I didn't encounter anything game breaking, but it did break immersion. -As others noted, the game really requires using a walkthrough to complete. Not because the puzzles are hard, but because there's game mechanics that are never explained in-game that dictate if you can complete the game. Example: That book you start with in your inventory? Don't ever look at it to see what it is, or you can't win. The ugly: The worst part of this game is that as much as it pitches itself as having "adult themes," it's really juvenile in its writing. It tries to be edgy, but only accomplishes a shallow pulling together of overused tropes. The characters never get a chance to feel relatable, and the redemption arc of each is so rushed as to feel forced and unbelievable. The story plays like an outline to be filled out later with actual depth and development, but never is. Throughout playing this game, I just found myself bored and disconnected, occasionally rolling my eyes at the cartoonish chaotic-evil villainy of AM, who also happens to be the only character with consistent, understandable motivation and personality.

I bought this when it was knew, had the mouse pad for years. Tried playing the game then but I just got stumped and went on to play other things instead. Picked this up on GOG a while back thinking I'd give it another chance, especially since I liked Disco Elysium so much. But I just don't like this. Yeah, it's old but so am I. OTOH, as was endemic in this gaming genre I just can't figure out what I'm supposed to do half of the time. Minor spoiler, the player is told that the first protagonist's goal is to kill himself. About five minutes into it I figured that out. Boom, that guy's adventure was over. Five minutes. But looking online, there were tons of other things written for him to do. Non-intuitive things. Especially when I replayed it and killed myself again a different way. Still way easy, and checking online I see I missed a ton of other stuff for him to do. Tried the second protagonist. I needed the walkthrough periodically, but played that storyline out. Remarkably unsatisfying. Third protagonist. Tried without looking anything up. Got stuck, found out that by doing something completely intuitive and in-characfer I had committed an error and couldn't complete his story. I give up.