I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

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.

• Pros: o Atmosféra / Atmosphere (pesada/heavy). o Criativo / Creative (adicionaram bastante pro conto original/they add alot to the original short-story). o Designe de Fase / Level Design (complicado em alguns pontos mas no geral é bom/complicated in some parts, but overall is good). o Direção de Arte / Artwork (bom pra passar aquele aspecto grandioso e de aventura/good to give that aspect of grandiosity and adventure). o Enredo / Plot (profunda/deep). o Escolhas / Choices (variado/variety). o Gore (realista e "divertido"/realistic and "fun"). o História / Story. o Horror (sentimos o desespero/we feel the dispair). o Mecânicas / Mechanics (bem usadas/exploited; o livro de dicas/the book of hints) o Narrativa / Narrative. o Personagens / Characters (Nimdok, Benny S2) o Quebra cabeças / Puzzles (maioria é justo/majority is pretty fair). o Violência / Violence (detalhada/detailed). o Vozes / Voices (Harlan Ellison) • Cons: o Bugs (principalmente na ordem das tarefas/mainly on the tasks order) o Dificuldade / Difficulty (faz você abusar do sistema de save/makes u abuse of save system). o Gráficos / Graphics (coisas importantes recebem pouco destaque/important things aren’t highlighted enough). o Quebra cabeças / Puzzles (minoria é complicada/minority is complicated).

I've been looking forward to this one!

Here is a snippet of experience. Within the first ten minutes of playing the game, I was stumped on a puzzle that required me to steal an item from an old man's residence. Seems simple enough. The problem? The solution requires the old man leaving for a short while, and the player is given no actions to control this. Entering and exiting his residence several times, fiddling around with items in other areas, and finally taking an in-game nap were all suggestions I read IN DIFFERENT GUIDES. Let me be clear here: there is no solution. It is completely arbitrary. The game doesn't bother attempting to hint at the fact that the old man even has the capability to leave, and since we are all very used to the idea of completely immobile NPC's in even modern games, it wouldn't be far-fetched to think that the solution would never occur to you. And so you wait, you fiddle, you revisit every other screen numerous times, try this object with that verb, all in a tiresome and fruitless manner so typical of adventure games until you happen upon the solution and think to yourself, "SERIOUSLY?" Oh, the endless disappointment. If I sound jaded and frustrated, I am both. Games like this have led me to feel this way. There is a mature and interesting narrative underneath the puzzle mechanics, yes. But the aforementioned example is just the *first* in a long line of time-wasting, illogical design choices you will suffer through. My advice: read the short story, skip the game.

This happened to my buddy eric