I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

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.

I have to say I was rather disappointed by this. I thought that I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream's subject matter might make for a game unlike anything I had ever played. In some ways it was - in particular it's dark mood and serious themes - but it just was not fun to play. In gameplay terms it's a fairly standard point-and-click game. The story is well told and the voice acting, for the most part, it good enough. However, it's not a terribly nice game to look at and I found that moving the characters could be annoying, especially when trying to exit certain rooms in which you need to have your cursor on the right edge of the screen for the game to let you leave. Many of the puzzles are needlessly obtuse and i had to use a guide several times, each to find a solution I would never have come up with on my own. Playing the GoG version, much of the dialog was so muted that it could not be heard over the game's music. While you can have subtitles, it does take away from the game somewhat. While I know backtracking is a standard element of point-and-clicks, here it felt like there was an over reliance on it. Certain things would only appear after you'd done certain actions so you've have to retrace your steps frequently. The best part of I Have No Mouth... is the story. There are many better point-and-click games out there, so if you fancy a puzzler play one of those. If you want to experience a great sci-fi story, read the original short story instead.