I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

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!

As suggested by the title, there are numerous controversial things within this game as the horror doesn't pull any punches. Content warning for as it contains mentions or containing some of the following: rape, victim blaming, concentration camp, death, torture, murder and corpses. This title was quite often seen as controversial due to one of the characters you play as being Nimdok, someone who worked with the Nazi's to kill, maim and experiment on the prisoners or those who got in his way. All five characters are being tortured for over 109 years because of what they did before he kidnapped them and decided to punish them for their numerous crimes. Like I said earlier, this game doesn't pull it's punches in the dark topics it covers so I wouldn't recommend it if any of the content above is triggering for you. Apart from this, the most I can say without spoiling much is that like many classic adventure games of the time (like Sam & Max, by Lucas Arts) you can get stuck to save often just in case and the ending can be very different if you don't do things correctly or you can get trapped in a chapter if you make a mistake. However, this game allows you to skip talking scenes so that you can get back to where you were stuck, correct when you did wrong, then move on to where you got stuck last time. The game is thought-provoking and AM is an incredibly entertainingly cheesy villain too. I streamed this myself and if you want to see some gameplay I have a link here to the first part to the game on my YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/mxHayuuxQeY

About 10 minutes in and a woman fed me with her mouth like I was a baby bird, I then made monkey noises in an attempt to eat this woman. I am familiar with the story, which to say it's one of the darkest, bleakest things I have ever read. The game seems to give a similarly uncomfortable experience. I'm knocking one star off because honestly the backgrounds are blurry to the point where you will be scanning with your mouse for interactable objects and paths.

IHNMAIMS is a classic point and click game from the mind of Harlan Ellison, the man who wrote the short story the game is based on, which is included with the game (I very much recommend reading the story, as its very well written). Graphics: Can run on a Speak-N-Spell (its a 90s point and click, for goodness sake). Nothing to write home about, but it gets the job done. Story: Probably the best part of the game. Learning about the backstories of the 5 trapped humans was very interesting. You dont have to read the story to know whats going on. Gameplay: classic 8-option control scheme for a point and click game. Each character is given whats essentially a hintbook, but if you use it too much, bad things start happening, and it could prevent you from getting the best ending. IMO, its a bad mechanic, but as Ellison wanted the game to be hard as possible, I guess I cannot complain. Scenarios vary from pretty simple (Ellen, Benny), to pretty annoying if you dont know what youre doing. What youre supposed to do next could either be intuitively obvious or stupidly vague. Sometimes both (or maybe Im just bad at Point and Clicks...) Id recommend a walkthrough, but if you wanna go in completely unaware, I wont stop.

Wait, what do I mean "tired"? Am I implying something insidious about how this game aged? Sure I do. There's too much pixelhunting for pixelhunting's sake.