Year: 1995
Developer: The Dreamers Guild
Publisher: Cyberdreams
Platform: PC, Mac OS
Metacritic score:Not available
VGChartz sales to date: Unknown
WHAT MADE IT GREAT
Some of the puzzles can induce a similar feeling, but checking the sentence line for actionable objects usually reveals the solution |
Playing as each character allowed the perfect opportunity to include a variety of environments and settings. |
This is not the face of a man who cares what you think about his grim interpretation of the apocalypse |
WHAT WENT WRONG
Typically gamers like to win games. Throw in the added fun of a bleak hellscape involving insanity, rape, murder and other pleasantries and it's not surprising the game found only a niche audience. Not even the inclusion of a free mouse pad featuring a nightmarish image of Harlan Ellison's face (visible through a window in the box no less) could entice gamers to give it a try. But given Ellison's surly disposition, he probably would have been pissed if the game had been a commercial success and spawned dozens of sequels. In fact, it's fair to say most of the creative designs made were intended to trigger strong reactions. In Europe the game was heavily censored and its sale restricted to those 18 and up.
The Nimdok character was cut from the German release entirely, completely eliminating one of the possible endings. |
WILL WE SEE IT AGAIN
Not in a trillion lifetimes. Not even if time repeats itself in an infinite loop for all eternity. It defies all logic that this game was ever conceived in the first place. A notorious Luddite collaborating with a video game studio to make a product of limited commercial value is an event not likely to be repeated anytime soon. That makes original copies of the game fairly precious commodities whose price varies from $30 to more than $150 on ebay. Of course, there are less honest ways of finding a copy to download, but you may find yourself tormented by your own moral failings if you do. Of course that probably doesn't warrant an eternity of sickening abuse but then again I'm not a sentient cluster of supercomputers so what do I know?
But even if this game is doomed to remain locked in the subterranean complex of our collective memories at least the genre it represents is experiencing a small resurgence. Thanks to the rise of episodic gameplay, a whole new generation of gamers is rediscovering the fun of interactive stories. Telltale Games has found mainstream commercial success with bite-size installments of Sam & Max, Back to the Future and The Walking Dead. The stories of these games are often so moving you forget most of the action is on rails while the player only inputs simple commands that move the story along, a style of gameplay harkening back to the text-based adventures that made up some of the earliest video games. Maybe in a way time is circular, and even if the uniqueness and controversy of I Have No Mouth is unlikely to be repeated at least we can still find awesome graphic adventure games.
In one of these cages is locked all evidence of the game, in the others are the developers. |