KATIE MARIE

Point and Click

Today I am writing to you to talk about a very old little game.

I have no mouth and I must Scream.

Now I know a lot of you will hear that phrase and recognise it, you might not know where it’s from, or where you heard however, as it has become a pop culture phrase. The original ‘I have no mouth and I must scream’ is a short story by Harlan Ellison (the boy knew how to write good titles). It’s a post-apocalyptic story, in a nutshell the story involves a gigantic war which then results in supercomputers/AI gaining sentience, leading to mass genocide (cheerful huh). The actual story is set 109 years after that inciting incident and runs from there. The story was pretty brutal and won a Hugo award. I recommend giving it a read.

But today I am not here to talk about the short story. I am here to talk about the 1995 point and click horror game based off this story. So in a way I am here to talk about the story too.

The game was made by Cyberdream and The Dreamers Guild and released in October 1995. It has since had re-releases in 2013 and 2016.

Also, it’s totally on steam for less than £5.

Summary

Warning, here be minor spoilers, I will not to go into detail to preserve the game play experience.

The game follows the plot of the short story, with three global superpowers warring and creating epic AI intelligences, once of which gains sentience. The war now over, the sentient AI known as AM killed everyone. Well almost everyone. AM keeps five people alive and brings them to the centre of the earth to torture them. Did I mention that AM is a total butt and full of rage at it’s creators?

AM keeps the five people alive for over a century using research and technology.

After 109 years of this, AM gives the five people, one of which is now the player, a new quest. This quest involves the player exploring personalised trauma designed to play into each characters personal fears and failings. Each character eventually prevails, on occasion aided by the two other AI’s mentioned earlier.

While AM considers what went wrong, a character (player chosen) goes binary and enters AM’s mind. They learn there are other survivors and must disable AM’s three brain components.

There are seven endings to this game and just to give you an idea of how stacked against you this game is only one of them is happy, five of them result in the original ending by Harlan Ellison coming to pass in one way or another and one ends badly but not as badly as the five.

General 

I love the old point and click adventure games; I love the steady pace and atmosphere of them. I think they are an amazing way to play horror games because of the mystery element they suit so well, the slower pace which allows for heightened tension and the inability to make your character do anything quickly.

So as you can guess, despite it’s age, I really enjoied this game.

Characters 

There are five characters

• Gorrister,  a man wracked with guilt over his wifes insanity.
• Benny, in game an bossy military officer, I say in game because Benny is way different than he is in the short story.
• Ellen, an engineer with a phobia of the colour yellow due to passed sexual assult.
• Nimdok, an elderly ex-Nazi doctor.
• Ted, a con artist, who for the game has developed paranoia.

I don’t want to go to much into the characters because of spoilers and because a lot of what the characters do is up to the player. But what I will say is that the characters feel fleshed out, they all have interesting stories behind them and make the gameplay more immersive because of it.

Setting 

The setting, despite restrictions due to the age of the game, is super vaired and enthralling. Again its difficult to say due to spoilers but each of the characters ends up in a unique setting that feels like it exists outside of the players experience rather than for it.

Overall this is a great game and well worth your time. It’s also cheep on Steam so give it a go I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream on Steam (steampowered.com)