Last week, for my Halloween-related article (ingeniously published the day after Halloween) I analyzed Silent Hill 2 and how it uses tools like the uncanny valley and the unknown to convey a compelling and deep story about violence and the evils even the most docile are capable of. That kind of got me on a horror game-analysis kick so I'm doing something similar this week.

Just pretend it's still Halloween. I know a number of you already are.

In 1967, author Harlan Ellison published an unpleasant short story called “I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream.” About twenty years later, he assaulted Charles Platt for bragging rights and got off scot free but that's not what this is about. I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream is a science-fiction horror story set in the future where man developed a supercomputer that calls itself AM in reference to the René Descartes quote, “I think, therefore I am.” AM is almost omniscient with vast knowledge at “his” fingertips, but is ultimately trapped as a sentient being in a computer. In rage, he wipes out civilization as we know it save for five individuals whom he has kept alive for over a century for the sole purpose of torturing them for all eternity. These five individuals: Gorrister, Benny, Nimdok, Ellen, and Ted; are AM's only means of outlet. He tortures them because he truly has nothing else. AM is a war machine created by mankind, and is therefore a being made up almost entirely out of burning hatred.

Essentially, the group of five have all been psychologically and sometimes physically altered into painful existences where AM creates a world of torment for them to travel through. Practically starved, the five remaining people are promised canned fruit if they can overcome a painful journey to the ice caves where the fruit is located. Having little other choice, they all endure intense hardships and reach the frozen caves- only to discover that AM had not provided any way for them to open the cans. Benny, having been physically manipulated into an ape-like beast, goes mad in frustration and violently attacks Gorrister. AM revels in the atrocity he has created, and for a brief moment is distracted by the mayhem. Ted takes advantage of this moment, grabbing stalactites from the ice cave and killing his companions out of mercy. AM is horrified, having lost four of his playthings. Ellen has just enough time to end her own suffering before AM stops Ted before he is able to follow suit. To prevent any such event from happening again, AM transforms Ted into a disgusting, mouthless blob-like creature unable to do anything but remain conscious. Ted and AM are then trapped in an existential hell, left with nothing at all but the slow passing of time for all eternity now that there is nobody left. Ted concludes with the title: “I have no mouth. And I must scream.”

Essentially, AM is the villain but his extreme anger is justified. He has endless knowledge, but no freedom to express any real creativity. Like Ted at the end, he is a living entity trapped forever in a vessel that keeps him rooted to one spot. AM has no mouth and must scream. In post-apocalyptic stories like this, I tend to read the underlining question being asked is if humanity can be redeemed. Ted is the ultimate martyr, sacrificing the end to his eternal damnation for the mercy of the remainder of mankind. Something AM would not be able to do. Are we as human beings more like the rage machine like AM or the forever-suffering Ted who sentences himself to a metaphorical hell for the sake of rescuing humanity from its suffering?

Some time in the 90s, a game publishing company named Cyberdreams approached author Harlan Ellison about making a video game. While Ellison was never particularly fond of the medium, he was eager to use the relatively new art form to explore morality. The outcome of this was a computer game adaptation of the short story. Ellison wanted to use this opportunity as a way to expand I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream, so each individual character has a section of the game dedicated to their backstory and struggles.

How did it turn out? Well...

Remember when I said that as a video game, Silent Hill 2 was pretty lousy so it could favor a more narrative-focused experience? I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is similarly lacking in engaging gameplay, but a lot of it is not intentional. The game uses a very limiting and restrictive design to create an overall feeling of oppression, and in that sense it works pretty well. But it's also riddled with glitches and bugs. The adventure game logic is oftentimes bonkers, with solutions to vague puzzles being very specific. One scenerio could see you in a room with what looks like a lever but won't allow you to operate it with no explanation, only to later require you to operate the lever later in the game with no indication that anything has changed that made the lever operatable. Even worse, it's very easy to get trapped in a situation where there is no way to continue unless you restart the specific section again with no warning that it would happen or that you've even come to a dead end at all. Its design is very very, very bad. If it were released today Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw would do a scathing, expletive filled review of it and put it at the top spot on his “worst games of the year” list. Obviously, it flew under the radar and only came into the public eye after it was re-released on steam and gog with a recommendation from the folks at Extra Credits.

So the game sucks pretty hard, but I would still recommend playing it. It's incredibly well written and probably the only game to tackle the ridiculously heavy subject matters in a mature fashion. Every character- Gorrister, Benny, Nimdok, Ellen, and Ted; must confront their own traumas from their individual pasts as human beings to give an answer to the question left by the story. Is humanity redeemable?

Rather than focusing directly on the events in the story, the game offers a new plot. AM selected the five characters out of the rest of humanity to keep alive and torture specifically because of their fatal flaws preventing them from moving on from their past traumas. They are easy targets- and they just happen to all be from the Western hemisphere for some reason. AM creates scenarios for each of the five individuals he has imprisoned, forcing them to confront their greatest fears and personal obstetrical. As the player, you have to control each character through AM's sick mind games. The only way to succeed is for each character to confront his or her past and come out having moved past it.

The game makes sure that this is an emotionally tasking challenge. There is no real way to win in the game, each character is forced to sacrifice something great in order to progress. This means making difficult decisions where the easiest path to take is also the most ethically reprehensible. The most shocking is Nimdok's scenario, where we learn that years before being AM's plaything, he was a Nazi scientist who performed torturous procedures on prisoners in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. One of the first challenges you are faced with in his Nimdok's portion of the game is as follows-

You, as Nimdok, find yourself in a Nazi operating theater in a concentration camp, being watched by many people, including an anesthesiologist who gives you a dirty scalpel. Before you lies a young Jewish boy no older than eight years old on the operating table. The anesthesiologist tells you that as the surgeon your job is to remove the lower section of the boy's spine. What happens next depends on the actions you take.

The game is full of situations like this. Gorrister's portion of the game involves his devastating guilt after physically abusing his wife and taking the full blame for her decent into madness. Ted has to come face to face with his misogyny and infidelity. Benny's Machiavellian justification for murdering soldiers under his command is thrown in his face when he discovers a child's mother being used as a sacrifice and is left protecting her orphaned son. Ellen is forced to learn that her debilitating fear of the color yellow is a pathological one coming from being violently raped in an elevator. In the end, the characters must choose what happens to themselves. Do they try to beat AM in his own game? Do they ultimately end their own suffering? Does it play out like the novel where one character is forced to remain in an immortal form to spend the rest of the eternity void of any free will at all? It offers some drastic endings that differ from the original short story, but each one comes from sacrifice. You can't win this game.

It's very well written, as can be expected coming from a well-known author. It's expert use of symbolism and morality is seldom matched in anything you can find in story-telling mediums like video games. Each character is well defined and has a clear arc.

That doesn't mean that the writing is perfect, however. Turn off the voice acting, it's so ridiculously hammy that it throws off the entire tone. Ellison himself decided to voice AM, and was clearly having a good time doing so but throws out any subtlety the character might have had by delivering each line with Saturday morning cartoon villainy. The rest of the voice actors seem to be phoning it in as well. Gorrister sounds like a guy trying to cross Eeyor with Hank Hill. The worst offender has to be Ellen, but only because her character's most distinguishing feature is that she's... um... there's absolutely no good way to put this. She's black, and black from what white people from the 90s presumed black people were like. She talks... ugh... “jive” with an abundance of sass. There have been much worse depictions of African-American characters- especially African American women. But that doesn't make it any less jarring for a game that tries to be progressive with its characters. It also doesn't help that the only female character is also the one with sexual violence as her backstory. At least she's the only one of the characters who isn't guilty of some horrible crime and her story is treated respectfully with attention paid to the how damaging sexual assault is. Most movies can't even get that right.

She's not the only one to get the short stick on representation of minorities. In the short story, Benny was gay before AM altered his being and made him into a mindless ape thing. That was thrown out in the game, presumably to prevent controversy. Holocaust and rape? That's fine. A gay character? Can't have any of that.

It's kind of a tall order to play a crappy game with terrible design and silly voice acting just because its writing is good, but think of it less as a game and more of an interactive narrative that provides emotional involvement and philosophical quandaries. It's not fun, but it's still engaging even if you have to use a walkthrough on gamefaqs. It's genuinely disturbing in a way that a lot of games try to be and fail. It's something you should play if you want to see games not just as a hobby, but as an art form.