I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

I played this game two or three times in the past, but never managed to finish it. The reason being, the content is so depressing that replaying it over and over feels like being stuck in purgatory or something. The first time was fun, I didn't know what to expect next, and it was fascinating to watch both the good and the bad endings for every character, and making disturbing moral choices just to see what will happen next. But when I finally thought I had all the endings I needed for a good endgame, I found out I can't even finish it, because for some reason some of the characters were missing their 'totems' and this wasn't obvious until it was their turn in the endgame (there is no way to check this). I don't know if it was a bug or if I screwed up their respective stories somehow, but I figured that if I got the ending wrong, they would appear back at the Hate Pillar screen. Whatever the case, I was really annoyed by this, and put off by the fact that I won't know if the same thing won't happen again if I restart the game entirely, so I just gave up. Still, it's a very unique game but requires more patience than I have I guess.

If you want a point-and-click adventure with a scifi background, disturbing elements and unsettling story with choices which affects the ending of each playable characters, that's the game for you.

I finally beat it, with the good ending. The game itself is fun and the puzzles are moderate. There are something around 5 bad endings, which are super easy to get, and one good ending. It's really hard to get the good ending. Like, one minor, seemingly unimportant variable will hose your only chance of getting it. It's likely the developers did this on purpose. That said, the game has significant replayability value. I didn't read the book. However, from what little I know of it, the game deviates quite a bit. I say treat this like a separate title altogether. If you liked the old point-and-click adventure games from the 90s, this will give you a familiar experience.

The story is EXCELLENT, but the game itself is glitchy to the point of broken. Each of the five characters has a short scenario; 20-30min. if you know what you're doing. This is fortunate, because you'll likely have to play a scenario multiple times. Sometimes this is justified, like when your character dies due player screw-ups. Other times this happens because story sequences glitch out and the scenario becomes unwinnable. At certain points of the game, if you don't accomplish certain tasks in a VERY specific order, the story won't progress and you will have to start from the very beginning of that scenario unless you reload a save. The problem is, unless you look at a walkthrough, you would have no way of knowing this happened. You could wander around for an hour without knowing you've hit a dead end. I encountered 4 of these glitches amongst 3 different scenarios. I'm certain that there are even more of these glitches in the game that I thankfully never encountered. While the story is definitely worth experiencing, the game itself is a complete mess. To anyone considering a purchase, have a walkthrough handy, or just watch a playthrough.

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is an interesting point n click game with a really dark theme. You can notice that it's quite aged, especially since the source material is dated back to the 1960s! With that said, it's quite cool that the author of the short story the game is based on worked on the game and even voice-acted a main character! It's your typical 90s point n click where it is totally possible to screw things up without the game letting you know until the very end, having you to replay parts of or the whole game. The story and the characters are what is interesting here, even if mentioned it doesn't hold up all the way today. At least it's slightly different from the source material which makes it better in that regard. I recommend to play this if you're a fan of older point n click or a fan of Harlan Ellison and his work!