I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

I heard lots of praise for this game and I saw in the reviews to be ready for old-style adventure gaming stuff, but oh my I didn't remember what that really meant until I started playing the game. Environments that don't work consistently? Check. (aka an action might take you through a door in one room, but that same action will just take you near the door in a different room) Puzzles that don't make any sense? Check. Items that appear in places you've looked at ten times before because the game is coded to only have things progress in a specific order? Check. I was mostly interested in the story, but it didn't seem all that impressive. I went and read the book this is based on. Was not impressed. I remain confused about all the praise (game AND book), but I'll assume it was impressive when gaming was new and any interactivity was amazing.

I played IHNM when it came out, way back when and remember it being difficult and buggy. Gave up playing it this time around, for it being just too freaking buggy! Items disappearing from inventory, events not happening when they should. Not worth the frustration.

It is the best game I've ever played behind Luigi's Mansion.

It’s about five unlucky people, seeemingly the last of humanity, trapped and tortured mercilessly for the last 109 years. They are kept as prisoners and toys for the amusement of AM – a supercomputer made in the past to oversee a global war, until it reached sentinence and turned on it’s creators. Each of the five have their own backstory, sins and past traumas, which feature heavily in the game as AM devises new ways to torment them. The game is actually pretty diverse in the topics and themes it covers, although they are all rather dark and grim, which is a general theme of both the game and the short story. Now, for a newcomer to the genre the game may actually be pretty hard – it was for me. There was a good amount of the infamous so-called „pixel hunting” where you had to pick up an insignificant item from the background. So, was the story worth it? I think not really, sadly. It wasn’t bad by any stretch, and it did have cool moments. The concept and the fundation were pretty great, but the thing is – you can experience those just fine by reading the original short story, which works quite well on it’s own. For me it all kinda… fell apart as it expanded on itself. If you know what you’re doing, you can get through a single character scenario in an hour, maybe even less. They are all survivors of 109 years of torture and torment, stewing in their own doubts and guilt and thoughts of past wrongs for a 109 years. And they all solve their issues in an hour short episode, if you play your cards right. It seldom felt earned for me. Overall, the game didn’t really fully deliver on the horribleness and hopelessness of it’s base premise. Does it mean it was uniformly bad? No, and you may still enjoy it but I feel like a LOT MORE could have been done with it If you want to see how I did playing the game blind as someone new to the genre overall, you can do so on my channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etr7gGWEfMc&list=PLp4TpsJ7HUWWOKCkbL6lRiNOGibmXBBkz

As a story, it may have very interesting points, and is certainly the sort of thing to make people feel clever about themselves for "getting" it, but as a game its an abject failure. Illogical puzzles, "search the pixel" gameplay, utterly hilarious (unintentionally so) script almost bring this into the "so bad its good" category, and there is certainly something making you want to see whats going to happen next, but not in a good way. At least you get the short story as part of the package.