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I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

Scream begins well. After an intro in which AM explains how much he hates humanity, he offers his five victims the chance to learn why he chose them, with the promise of some kind of final victory. You play each character in turn as they explore a world specifically designed by AM to trigger their particular fears and dredge up their worst memories. The games are full of twisted images; your wife and mother-in-law hanging from meat hooks, a man whose eyes have been surgically removed but are still attached by wires to the man's eye sockets, the devil patiently waiting to take a woman's soul. It's a lot of fun, and at first the game seems to hold the same sort of promising perversity of Sanitarium.

And so you, the unwary adventure gamer, play through a scenario, doing this, doing that, until at some point you find you've made a fatal error and you're back where you started from. And you have no idea what that fatal error was.

Scream is a kind of sick version of the movie Groundhog's Day. You live the same game over and over, each time trying something different until you piece together the correct solution. Some mistakes are obvious as you progress through a particular scenario, but others are not. The scenario played through by the character Nimdok is particularly nasty, as doing any particular thing out of order will cause you to miss crucial information with which you cannot complete the game. You are expected to just keep trying, over and over. Listening to the same dialogue, over and over. Doing things in a different order, making sure you talk to everyone every time anything new happens. Check constantly to see if you can now do something you couldn't do before, or to see if something has suddenly materialized in a place you've already searched. And while you're doing all this, you have no way of knowing if you've already screwed up; if the fatal mistake has already been made and everything else you are doing is futile.

Dramatically this makes sense. This is exactly the sort of thing an evil super-computer would do; make you live the same day over and over in such a way that even seemingly insignificant choices will cause you to fail. And if Scream was specifically designed to torture and aggravate the player, it is a screaming success.

The endgame is even worse. Each character can do a certain action in the endgame, but I can't see that there's any good reason to do any of those actions! The endgame can be solved with one character (not any of them, just one, although you wouldn't know that), and I just did the multiplayer ending because I saw it in the UHS hint file that I followed slavishly to get through the game.

Without cheating I would give this game about a star and a half, but if you cheat freely you get to enjoy a lot of twisted weirdness along the way. In fact, the game could probably be made into a pretty good movie (I Have No Mouth and It's Groundhog's Day), where you could experience the weirdness without having to personally experience the torture. But even with cheating this game is highly frustrating (it might be best to just play the entire game with a straight walkthrough to minimize the frustration level).

In spite of the lousy gameplay I would actually recommending buying this game if you found it in a bargain bin somewhere; the intricate stories and the warped imaginative creepiness make this quite entertaining, even if it's ultimately only playable with a walk through.

Ellison, who co-designed Scream is the voice of the AM, and if this is his idea of a fun adventure game then it's no wonder he is so good at showing evil. He just draws upon the sickness of his own mind.

-- Charles Herold -2000

Glitches:I hit something called the "Benny Bug" in which one of the characters will just disappear from the screen and you'll have to load a game elsewhere. According to the UHS file if you play the characters in a certain order this won't happen.