Harlan Ellison used to say that I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream was a game that nobody could win. I gather now, having looked at a few wikis, that this is not entirely true. But back in the mid-1990s when I first encountered this weird, horrifying video game, it certainly felt true. I Have No Mouth was… not a hit, exactly, but certainly the subject of a sustained mania in my student house at the tail end of the last century. Adventure games, or point-and-clicks, were our collective favourite genre, outside of endless sessions on Worms 2. Back then we recognised that, even amongst the Monkey Islands and Tentacles, I Have No Mouth was…special?
I Have No Mouth, and I Must ScreamPublisher: Nightdive StudiosDeveloper: Nightdive Studios, Cyberdreams, The Dreamers GuildPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on Steam, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox X/S and Switch.
The game is a sort of sibling to Ellison’s short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, which was written in the 1960s. This is a horror story in the purest sense – it’s gloriously wretched, haunting stuff. Due to the organisational pressures of a three-way world war, America, Russia and China all build their own supercomputers to manage the movement of nukes and troops and all that radioactive jazz, and these giant machines lurk far beneath the earth in a series of caves and concealed tunnels. In the course of the war, one of the computers becomes sentient and combines with the other two. It then exterminates all of humanity except for five people, who it spends the next hundred-odd years torturing. It also keeps them alive artificially, which is, I guess, all part of the torture as well.
In the short story, these five characters head off on a journey through the underground chambers in search of tinned food. In the game, the five characters, slightly changed for the shift in format, are sent out on individual adventures – although “adventures” is far too sprightly a word for the psychodramas that unfold. The game’s just arrived on consoles for the first time in a faithful adaptation from Nightdive Studios. Nightdive’s a team that specialises in these kinds of digital resurrections of cult classics. Rather than updating this particular game for the modern era, the studio has largely played it straight.
This means that the screen still contains an action window along with a series of verbs and phrases that can be used to direct on-screen characters. (One of these verbs is “swallow”, which is a pretty good indicator of the grimness that awaits.) While there are now button shortcuts that mean you don’t have to click on each individual phrase, you will still need to highlight parts of the environment using what amounts to a mouse pointer, now controlled with a stick, and with finessing available via the D-pad.