I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: The 30 Year Late Review

The game that will always be remastered.

The pixel art is seriously peak.

(This review should be pretty spoiler-free.)

I have long been a fan of the late, great science fiction writer Harlan Ellison. One of his best (if not the best) short stories is a grim, inventive classic called "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream".

A video game version of this story, designed by Ellison himself, came out in 1995. It was a point-and-click adventure game. And I spent many years as a huge fan of adventure games.

So, of course, I never played this game.

Until recently. A version came out for Playstation 4/5, and I thought it was finally time to take a break from writing my own indie RPG to try it out. A got a copy on Steam for, like, 7 cents.

It's a fascinating title. Here is my guide for if you want to experience a truly unique game. Which is worth it, with warnings.

(If you want to read the story, and you SHOULD, Google "i have no mouth and i must scream full story". At least the Internet Archive version should be legal.)

YIKES.

Why I Never Tried The Game

While Harlan Ellison was a great and influential writer, he was also a seriously high-octane crank. Before the game came out, he wrote about how video games were a debased art form that existed to consume huge globs of time and not provide any actual art for the trouble.

This was a pretty reasonable thing to say in 1995 (and rings pretty true now, honestly). However, I felt that he didn't have the experience or attitude to be a really good video game designer on his first try.

This is doubly true because he was making a 90s point-and-click adventure game. You know? The genre that happily lets you get stuck for 5 hours because you didn't notice a particular pixel on one of 50 screens was a little darker than the others.

(My opinions of the genre are well-summarized in the finest piece of gaming criticism ever written.)

So we have an arrogant, first-timer, designing a game in a genre that is very, very tricky to get right. The best that you can hope for here is a failed experiment with intermittent bits of coolness.

That’s why I didn't play it. I thought that it would be, in part, a frustrating mess, and nobody would admit it because if they did Harlan Ellison would run to their house like the liquid metal robot from Terminator 2, unhinge his jaw, and swallow them whole.

I’m not sure how well this game plays if you haven’t read the short story. I’m still amazed they wrote an ambitious video game based on (shudder) reading. It was a different century.

Well, I Finally Did Play It

Playing it, I rapidly found that my initial guess was correct. Now that Harlan is lamentably gone, I can tell you that the game is strange, arbitrary and unfair by even the universally unforgiving standards of its genre. On top of that, it’s really buggy!

And yet, I recommend it.

The Good Stuff

It was written by a great writer, and it contains some of the most insane, deranged material I've ever seen in a video game. It has some disturbed stuff that, if it didn’t have such a storied pedigree, Steam and itch.io would remove it even before Mastercard yelled at them.

The game also has cool settings, an interesting story, and 90s pixel graphics that are charming as hell.

However, the gameplay is REALLY arbitrary. The whole game takes place in this world of dream logic where you just kind of have to use every possible action on every possible object to advance, no matter how nonsensical it seems.

To get the good ending, you have to play 100% perfectly, and things that can block you can be, again, totally arbitrary. Do two steps in the wrong order and you get totally blocked, with literally no option but suicide, even though there is no sensible reason why it should be that way.

My Harlan Ellison collection. (Or most of it.) Most of his work is brutally out of print and must be owned as crumbling copies from used bookstores.

So Here's What I Want You To Do

Well, honestly, you should just read some of the guy's stories. 100% guaranteed the best use of your time.

But if you play the game, find a good walkthrough. This one is great.

If you get stuck more than 10 minutes, use this to find out what you did wrong. Harlan didn't play fair. You don't have to, either.

Do all this, and you will experience a genuinely unique and ambitious vision of what video games can be, and one that still feels fresh today.

Preservation Of Video Game History

We hear a certain amount about preserving video game history, and I agree with it. To a point. Of course, the hoarder in me wants us to be able to own and play every video game ever made.

Then again, what percentage of video games are worth ever playing again? I have played almost all Atari 2600 games ever made, and I assure you most of them can be peacefully returned to the soil.

But this one? Absolutely, 100% worth saving. Is it a success? I'm not sure. But if it is a failure, it's the sort of failure that's better that a million mediocrities.

Cheat your way through it for a few hours. It's fascinating!

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Spiderweb Software creates turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good story and fun. We have announced our next game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory. Wishlists are greatly appreciated.