I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

First, the good: -The puzzles were by and large reasonable and entertaining. -Nostalgia 90's graphics -Decent voice acting -Each character is played in their own limited environment, which was a successful way to limit the traditional problem of "wandering around forever to figure out what's there before you actually play the game." The bad: -As others noted, its pretty buggy. I didn't encounter anything game breaking, but it did break immersion. -As others noted, the game really requires using a walkthrough to complete. Not because the puzzles are hard, but because there's game mechanics that are never explained in-game that dictate if you can complete the game. Example: That book you start with in your inventory? Don't ever look at it to see what it is, or you can't win. The ugly: The worst part of this game is that as much as it pitches itself as having "adult themes," it's really juvenile in its writing. It tries to be edgy, but only accomplishes a shallow pulling together of overused tropes. The characters never get a chance to feel relatable, and the redemption arc of each is so rushed as to feel forced and unbelievable. The story plays like an outline to be filled out later with actual depth and development, but never is. Throughout playing this game, I just found myself bored and disconnected, occasionally rolling my eyes at the cartoonish chaotic-evil villainy of AM, who also happens to be the only character with consistent, understandable motivation and personality.

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.