Rating: ★★★☆☆
Playtime: 8 Hours
Platform: PC
Duration: 8/31/2025 - 12/2/2025
TL;DR
It’s a clunky, early PC point and click adapting the story of a genuinely very interesting and impactful short story. The game has its issues, and requires a guide, but is an interesting experience with a very specific tone and feeling that most games can’t match.
REVIEW
I wish that I could say that I loved this game, and that the unique story and narrative fully pulled me in and immersed me into the creepy, depressing world that this game sets up. It’s not that it doesn’t do this, but there is just so much holding this game back.
YOU WILL NEED A GUIDE
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream | The Dreamer's Guild
How on earth was ANYBODY supposed to beat this game without a guide? The internet wasn’t readily accessible whenever this game came out. There are so many potential places where you can just end the game by making the slightly wrong choice! The interaction between some of the items that you need to progress isn’t always clear, in fact, it often isn’t, and the progression is nonsensical sometimes. This does in part play into the narrative, with the actual gameplay taking place inside of a simulation designed by an evil supercomputer for each of the five playable characters. It would make sense for these to be intentionally convoluted, for the computer, AM, to be wasting our character’s time and sanity for his own pleasure, but this is not great from a player’s perspective.
It’s an interesting bit of storytelling, having it blend with the gameplay so strongly, but I can’t say I’m a huge fan of it. Even though I played many parts of this game with a guide, there were still many parts where the path forward was unclear even with it.
STORY
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream | The Dreamer's Guild
The storytelling otherwise though was pretty nice for an early PC game. I think each character’s narrative is interesting, and more than just a mere adaptation of the short story. We get backstory and context for some of the characters personality traits, while it’s still not clear when in the ‘timeline’ this takes place, and if it takes place in the same universe at all. It’s kind of cool having things like that not laid out in a crystal clear fashion, as is the case with both the game and the short story. I found myself getting invested in the individual stories of the characters, especially Ellen, Gorrister, and Nimdok.
PLAYING THE GAME
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream | The Dreamer's Guild
To circle back to the actual play experience, the UI is kind of a nightmare with the ambiguous options of ‘look at’, ‘use’, ‘push’, and a handful of other options. I feel like this could have been resolved in a much more efficient manner using context dependent options for each item, but I’m not too familiar with the world of point-and-clicks from this era, so this may not have been the standard at the time. Some actions also take a very long time, and traversal back and forth through the areas can be quite tedious.
The visual design of this game is strange. It definitely comes with that early 3D jank in some places. I kind of like this for a story like this specifically with those themes of artificiality and taking place in a constructed world. The UI is a bit garish, but the characters do look nice. The voice acting is also passable for the most part, but some characters do have that hilariously bad early game voice acting, which I can’t be too upset about.
Overall, it’s an interesting story, but one I would never recommend without a guide, and one that I still think pales compared to the artistry of the short story. Still, if you enjoyed that story, this is a near necessary expansion of the idea that gives a lot of context for it and interprets the ideas in some very different ways. Realistically, given the time period, there was no way this game was going to live up to the story’s standard, but I can’t help but appreciate the attempt.
Tortured till next time - Mikey