I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (1995)
Based on a novel short story [clarification courtesy of Belmas, thank you!] by Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is a point-and-click adventure game from 1995. I remember seeing the box with the muted face on store shelves as a kid, knowing I wasn’t really ready for it, but still remaining intrigued. As the game’s title may allude to, the themes of the game are a bit dark and on the mature side, in a psychological sense. I wouldn’t really classify it as horror, so much as a grim moral baggage puzzle.
In the intro backstory, a computer called “AM” has wiped out all of humanity save the five characters you will play as, whom AM has been torturing (and artificially keeping alive) for the past century. Each has their own Twilight Zone sort of scenario through which they work through their emotional issues. You can “die” (fail) in these scenarios, but it should only happen rarely (except for Gorrister) and you simply restart that character over again, but not the whole game. I’m very glad that I chose to play as Ellen first, since I really quite enjoyed her scenario and voicing and it gave me high hopes for the rest of the game. The puzzles are mostly logical, and there are relatively few pixel hunts, but there are some sections (for me, this was mostly with Gorrister) where you aren’t even sure if you can progress any farther. You probably can, but the game also has a few bugs here and there (I believe an entire section of Nimdok’s scenario may have been skipped over due to a bug), and so saving often is recommended. In general, the tone of the game is a bit like the older Star Trek episodes – slightly corny while trying to handle larger themes – and I think this was probably fine in 1995, but now detracts from the experience. I imagine the novel short story handles everything much better.
The game has both “good” and “bad” endings, including at least one bad ending epilogue for each of the five characters. I only saw bad endings, partially due to a possible bug, and the fact that after the credits roll the game exits completely – I don’t typically feel like firing it up again when a game does that. YouTube user “Zen” has you covered if you want to see the endings with good commentary though. And although the “good” ending has a nice twist to it, and the game as a whole is well voiced and includes some great scenarios, I don’t feel like the finale was worth the full playtime. IHNMAIMS cost me $1 to buy in the Vodo Big Brother bundle in late October 2013.
Number 14 of The 26 for 2017 is done! (Yeah, I know I won’t finish all 26! It’s a goal, not a mandate! :))
P.S. Running in SCUMMVM, it was very satisfying to be able to play the game on a very old laptop at my parent’s place, my desktop at home, and my Linux box, and have Steam’s cloud saves carry over each time!
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I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
#14 of 26 (2017)
11 hours playtime
no achievements
I played it back in the day and have been meaning to play it again… I think I’ll install it now and see how I feel about it.
And the game is based on a short story, not a novel. The story is quite good but is not very extensive or big on explanations.
All in all, I think it takes less time to read the story than to play the game :)
Hmm, I may give the story a read then! I don’t think I could’ve stomached it as a full novel (just too much misery over too long a time to read), but if it’s a short story, I can definitely have a go at that! I wonder if the game is better for having read the story… I kind of think it could be?
And thank you for the clarification! :)
Yeah, I played that game for the ~2 hours it took to drop the cards. I did kind of like it (I like the point-and-click genre), but not quite enough to keep playing it at the time. I should revisit it some time.
And yes– don’t you love Steam cloud (when it works)? :D
I don’t think I’d really had the pleasure of experiencing Steam Cloud saves apart from re-installs or new computers, but it’s been a long time since I’ve made use of either of those, so seeing it in action so perfectly here when I had to cat-sit with only a slow-running WinXP machine at hand, it was awesome! :)
And I’m a big fan of point-and-clicks, many of them being among my all-time favorite games, but I think a YouTube playthrough would be okay for this one, once you’ve tried all the characters out. Or maybe just for Gorrister… his scenario was the worst of the five gameplay-wise (story-wise, it was interesting).