I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

After playing abit too much adventure games you start to expect warious "combine dog with a coffee pot" puzzles and plots existing just to make some reason for you to move between the screens. Not in this one. The story is a dark, sci-fi nightmare for pretty much everyone in it. Mad supercomputer made to wage war against humanity, the machine is trapped in it's original purpose. Unable to break free from it's own curse, it constructs personal hell for five last humans on Earth. In order to beat this mad god, you have to face your fears and show it, that unlike a machine, you can overcome and atone the evils in your past. Or not. What makes this game special is an interesting form of non-linearity. It's short, but gives you just enough variation to keep you interested if you decide to replay it and try something new. For a 1995 game the controls are fine and most of the bugs i've seen were with the animations, but no game breaking ones. Puzzles are mostly logical and theres a pretty helpful tool available for all characters to guide them with riddles. The atmosphere, visuals and dialogues bring a truly unique experience.

I would have gave it 5 stars but this one is censored. Besides that, it's a very interesting game.

This game has some flaws, largely with occasional odd logic and not cluing you in to what needs to be done. Though I say this as someone who has never been especially great at point and click adventures. So I had a guide up ready to help out when i got especially stuck. And honestly that is the only glaring weak point in the game as i remember it having just finished it earlier today. Everything except those 'stuck' moments was smooth and compelling. Even little things like characters being able to quickly move from one end of an area to the other, while not looking like they were being fast-forwarded. That alone helped keep me immersed, while also not being tedious every time i realized i had to backtrack a bit. Of course the story is the strongest point of this game. I stayed up all night playing it because every time i got to play as a new character I NEEDED to know how their story played out, as well as the part it played in the story as a whole.

I expected an enjoyable and climatic advanture - the rating (4,5/5 stars) and comments suggested so - but I was disappointed. The biggest problem for me were bugs. This game requires from you walking around and trying everything with everything, pixel hunting and, in general, it's not very forgiving, you may have to use save/load feature quite frequently. I'm patient, I'm okey with pixel hunting and testing things, but not if there are significant bugs. For example, in one place the item becomes clearly visible, but the character "doesn't see anything" - and then you start to think, if you broke the game - do you need to start all over - is it even possible to finish it? This makes you go straight to a walkthrough and I personally hate it. However, it is quite climatic, so if you want a climatic adventure and you are okey with using a walkthrough to pass the game, then you may find it enjoyable.

This is a fantastic science fiction 'what if', however the execution is pretty bad. I love the story and the concepts, but getting to the end is a painful repetitive bore. Be prepared to listen to the same canned dialog over and over as you work through this using trial and error. You have to complete 5 individual story lines, but each one has multiple places where the key dialog branch will not display because you did not interact with everything on the screen in the right order. Example: the Anubis character will not give you a needed dialog option unless you looked at and tried to use the sarcophagus just prior to that. Even the official strategy guide leaves out these gems which you will only find by repeating each section until you stumble on the required permutation. My aversion to repetition of the same dialogs over and over, got the best of me and I could not finish this. It was taking more time than I wanted to put into it. If you like that kind of thing you might like this, but it was a disappointment for me. Again, it is a great story, the graphics and game play are serviceable, but, you have been warned about the need to complete seemingly trivial unrelated tasks (you forgot to look at that poster on the wall!) in the right order, or you will not be able to progress.