I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream
               Cyberdreams PC CD-ROM - œ29.00

                  Reviewed by Neil Shipman

"An adventure of speared eyeballs and dripping guts and the smell
of rotting gardenias."

There has always been a trend among game designers to take an
established work of fiction or fantasy and attempt to translate
this into a computer adventure. Hence, in the early days of
adventuring, we had Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings, James Clavell's
Shogun, Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland, and a plethora of
games based on the classic horror novels of Frankenstein by Mary
Shelley and Dracula by Bram Stoker. The one which stands out from
these examples is Shogun because it was produced by Infocom with
involvement from the book's author. (The authors of the other
books never had the opportunity of seeing their work brought to
the medium of the computer since they'd all popped their clogs
before home computing was even considered a remote possibility!)

Authors and game designers recognise a good thing when they see it
and, over the years, collaborative ventures have continued to
feature fairly prominently on the shelves in your local computer
game store. More recent titles include Terry Pratchett's
Discworld, Frederick Pohl's Gateway, Terry Brook's Shannara and
Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama.

I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream was originally a short story
written in 1967 by science fiction supremo Harlan Ellison. Ellison
is a prolific author, having written 64 books, about 1700 short
stories and numerous scripts, essays and reviews. His TV credits
include scripts for episodes of The Outer Limits, The Return of
the Twilight Zone and Star Trek. He has won more World Science
Fiction Convention Hugo Awards than any other writer. So signing
him up to collaborate on turning I Have No Mouth, And I Must
Scream into a computer adventure was a real coup for Cyberdreams.

In the Cold War era, the three superpowers of America, China and
Russia developed complex computer systems which they buried
underground. Into these machines they fed everything about the
human race, with the emphasis on knowledge related to killing,
murder and war, because these were computers designed to carry out
acts of death and destruction.

The three computers learned how to repair themselves and, as they
amassed knowledge, they sensed each other's presence.  But,
instead of planning each other's destruction, they joined together
in an unholy trinity and started the Final War, the annihilation
of every living thing on the planet. Man had taught them how to
hate and destroy and, together, they turned on their maker and
destroyed mankind.

Allied Mastercomputer was the name the American's gave to their
creation - AM for short. But the three machines had gained
sentience. Now, together, they could think. Cogito ergo sum. I
think, therefore I AM.

Encased in miles of rock, able to think but not to live, what can
AM do now that it has destroyed its creator? Unfortunately for the
five people concerned, the crazed entity selected specimens of the
human race which would become its playthings - beings it could
torture, whose bodies it could repair to give them near
immortality and whose souls it could torment for ever. When the
game begins these damned souls have been in the belly of the
insane machine for 109 years.

Gorrister is a suicidal loner who longs for death, a
self-proclaimed victim of the women in his life; Ellen is a
brilliant engineer who turns hysterical when confronted by the
colour yellow; Benny is a Vietnam veteran whom AM has chosen to
torture the most, scarring and crippling him and altering him into
a 'human chimpanzee'; Nimdok is a doctor in a Nazi concentration
camp who was involved in sickening 'research' on inmates; and Ted
is a cynical paranoid who expects death - or worse - at every
instant.

AM has devised a new game for these five remaining members of the
human race. Now, playing for higher odds than before, it offers
them the hope of salvation, a way out of the altered reality
innards of the machine. Can the five beat AM at this game? And
what if they do? What future could there possibly be for them with
the Earth above their heads totally destroyed? Or is the
destruction of mankind another of AM's lies?

At the beginning of the game the five characters stand in front of
the Hate Pillar on which are etched AM's feelings of hate towards
its creators. Each character in turn has a separate mini-adventure
in which he or she must succeed in beating AM. Only then, from the
cages in which they are sealed, will it be possible for them to
finally reach salvation and end more than a century's torment.

The theme throughout each of these mini-adventures is that of
facing up to one's fears, recognising one's inadequacies and
attempting to come to terms with oneself. Gorrister is tormented
by feelings of guilt and sorrow, blaming himself for his wife's
incarceration in a mental hospital. Ellen's fear of all things
yellow is the result of repressing a horrifying experience in her
earlier life. AM's cruelty to Benny is a reflection of the
soldier's savage treatment of his platoon members. Nimdok has to
acknowledge his involvement with Dr Mengele in the concentration
camps of 1945. And Ted must own up to his life of lies if he is no
longer to fear disclosure of the truth behind the facade.

These are games that the individual players can never win.
Instead, there are a variety of ways to lose - heroically, at the
peak of one's humanity, or in a selfish, cowardly, frightened
manner. Each character has a Spiritual Barometer - a full face
picture on a green background - which shows the effects of their
actions. Something which raises their self-esteem brightens the
background and changes their expression from sorrow and pain to
one of happiness. Conversely, a wrong action results in a zap from
AM, a darkening of the background and a more sombre face. Too many
wrong actions and that's the end of their opportunity to escape
from perpetual torment.

The screen layout is pretty standard with the graphics window
taking up the top two-thirds of the screen. Below this comes the
sentence line, then the Spiritual Barometer, command buttons and
inventory. There are eight actions: Walk to, Look at, Take, Use,
Talk to, Swallow, Give and Push. Clicking on Talk to brings up a
list of conversational options in a panel which replaces the
command buttons and inventory. Game options are accessed via a
small floppy disk icon to the right of the sentence line and allow
you to save and load games, alter the volume of music and sounds,
select voice or text for narration and dialogue and change reading
speed.

Gorrister's adventure begins on an old zeppelin and takes him, by
way of a roadside diner, to a confrontation with his
mother-in-law.  In the process he learns more about his and
others' responsibility for his wife's mental illness.

Ellen finds herself inside an electronic pyramid with the colour
yellow everywhere she looks. The Egyptian setting for her
adventure seems strangely inappropriate and there is an odd mix of
Egyptian and Christian artefacts from sarcophagi to the Holy
Grail. As befits an engineer, her task involves high tech
equipment like power gems, CD-ROMs and computer chips.  By

confronting her personal demons - including a really scary moment
that made me jump - she is eventually able to get one over on AM.

Benny is transported to an environment peopled by a tribe who
sacrifice victims to AM. Can he display compassion and prevent a
young boy from being selected in the sacrificial lottery? And can
he obtain forgiveness from the ghosts of the platoon members he
himself killed in Vietnam?

Nimdok finds himself in the compound of a concentration camp with
a mission to find the Lost Tribe of Humanity. The experiments in
which he has been involved are gruesome, but easing the suffering
of his patients is rewarded by escape to a bunker where he finds a
mythical golem and, ultimately, the object of his search.

Finally, Ted is placed in a Gothic setting with gargoyles,
witches, black magic and demons of the occult. He must work
through his paranoia if he is to succeed in opening a passage to
the surface world.

The chilling atmosphere of the whole game is enhanced by the
finely-detailed SVGA backgrounds. It's just a pity that, in order
to preserve a sombre mood, the designers have chosen to make
everything so dark. The characters are less impressive with a
rather cartoon feel about them and the way they move is ludicrous.
Cyberdreams' entry into computer adventuring, Darkseed, was
notable for the poor movement algorithms of its characters.
Unfortunately, they still haven't got it right and you are treated
to strange sideways shimmies, moonwalks and crab-like shuffles.

You can play the mini-adventures in any order but you must
'succeed' with each character before you can tackle the endgame.
Each of these adventures is short and might take you no longer
than half an hour. The puzzle structure is weak and there are very
few objects to manipulate. Every player has a Psych Profile in
their inventory at the start and this can be used to gain a hint
about what to do next.

You spend as much time talking to other people as you do using
items you have found. The conversations lead you to discover more
about your situation and, as you do, new conversational gambits
arise. However, there are very few instances where the line of
dialogue you choose is obviously incorrect. Talking really
consists of clicking on nearly every line until you've run out of
things to say. Consequently, you don't feel as if you are really
affecting the flow of the story or solving a particular problem.

Characters' speech is delivered in some of the phoniest accents
I've heard in a long time. The only thing that makes up for this
is the voice of AM itself. Harlan Ellison plays AM with venom
dripping from his tongue. When AM says, 'Hate' you really do feel
that hate is the emotion which drives the crazed machine. It's a
pity that the other voice actors cannot come anywhere near to
matching Ellison's passionate delivery.

Generally, the sound effects in the adventures are good and add to
the sense of menacing evil throughout. The musical score, on the
other hand, is very poor and certainly doesn't warrant the
description of 'atmospheric'. Although you can alter the volume of
sound and music, the levels are inconsistent. Sometimes you can
hardly hear AM over the background noise while at others its voice
booms out.

Also, the game does have a number of bugs which can lead to
duplicated items, system lock-ups and crashes. Saving regularly is
therefore recommended but be sure to do so under different names
because there are numerous dead ends - unusual in adventures these
days - and if you hit one of these your only option is to start
all over again.

The endgame requires you to select one of the five characters for
a trip in the inner landscape of AM's brain. Id, ego and superego
must all be confronted to reveal humanity's salvation, but this is
far too easy to accomplish and fails to leave you with a sense of
satisfaction when you come to the end.

I Have No Mouth, And I must Scream won Computer Gaming World's
award for the 'Best Adventure of 1996'. All I can say is the
competition must have been dire because there is no way this title
is one for the archives. It only rises above the mediocre because
of its storyline - the glorious failure involved in confronting
one's own demons and gaining personal salvation.

PC system requirements are:
486DX 33MHz processor or higher
4MB RAM MS-DOS 5.0 or higher
Vesa compatible SVGA Graphics Card (640 x 480, 256 colours)
Sound card
Mouse
Hard Disk with 15MB of free space
Twin-speed CD-ROM drive

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In Frobs We Trust !
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