Review: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (Nintendo Switch)

Based on the classic Harlan Ellison story, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is set in a future world where only five humans are left alive, living inside a computer. Small problem; the computer has godlike power, hates humans, and is entirely insane. It exists only to torture these people, which it has been doing nonstop for 109 years.

It’s not a happy tale, no.

This is a port of the 1995 point-and-click adventure game, with the late Ellison himself playing the voice of the mad computer, “AM.” As the player, you take each of the humans, one by one, through the nightmarish landscape AM has created for them. Each scenario has been constructed to play on the traumas they suffered before the apocalypse. I won’t get into those here, as discovering them (along with the characters) is part of the game.

But the situations are all rendered in a fantasmagorical way. One character wakes up on a giant metal ship filled with rotting food, bloody tablecloths, and no other people. Another has to explore an ancient Egyptian temple made out of technological waste. Jungles, haunted castles, and concentration camps must be explored in their low-res, ’90s glory.

The interface is simple; you move from room to room, interacting with objects, picking things up, and putting them together in various combinations to solve puzzles, both obvious and obscure. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream uses commands like TALK, SWALLOW, PUSH, LOOK AT, which can be accessed by mousing with the L/R sticks or by the ABXY buttons. The L/R sticks can be a bit cludgy, especially when you have to interact with a very small object or dialogue choice in which case you can use the directional buttons for finer control.

It being a retro adventure game, failure is expected. As you go through each room trying to figure out which variation of > USE BLUE KEY ON HAMBURGER will get the damn door open, you will sometimes die. This presents no problem in the story, as AM has been killing and resurrecting the humans for over a century. You then go back to the first screen, where you select which character to play, but every time you go back to one you played before, the scenario resets itself completely.

It’s a hell of a story, which is why the original remains a sci-fi/horror classic, and why this ’90s game has been revived. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream does a good job of capturing the tightrope walk of the characters who live in a hell that they cannot escape even through death, but who are nonetheless spurred on by the hope that maybe they can beat AM. That maybe they can overcome their trauma. That maybe they can find a scrap of food to eat. And AM uses that hope to crush them over and over and over.

The ’90s graphics obviously have their retro charm now, and the jankiness only serves to make the landscapes all the more surreal. (Is that a dirty bed or the remains of a corpse?)

Further, the voice acting is really good, with all the characters coming across as unique, and very flawed, people. Ellison seems positively giddy as AM, always assuring you that no, really, this time he’s going to play fair.

If the game has a flaw, it’s one inherent to all games of this type—that some of the puzzles are so cracked out it’s almost impossible to reason how they work. Trial and error is the point, after all. The other issue is that sometimes objects are virtually impossible to see on-screen. After consulting a walkthrough in frustration, I learned that a seemingly useless piece of technology was holding another, smaller, object that I needed to grab. But I wasn’t even able to tell that it was there until I was told it existed.

I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream is unsettling at times. Ellison’s original tale played on the idea of having your sense of identity ruined by an evil god, and of having the most depraved sins of humanity played out for its amusement. The game doesn’t back away from that. But being a game, it does offer a way out that AM never would; though there are a lot of bad endings to the game, it is possible to win when played perfectly. It’s just going to take a lot of dying and despair to figure out how.

For those who love point-and-click adventures that are a.) very challenging and b.) confined to a very dark sandbox, I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream is going to scratch that itch.