I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream Build 20898352-Skidrow

But AM had gone way past that point of vulnerability. AM had given every indication it was dead. Chinese, Russian or American dead. Which was no trick to an entity that had burrowed through hundreds of thousands of miles of solid rock to link its three lobes decades before. No trick at all to pretend to wink out and go to sleep for good. And a few decades from now we learn that AM isn’t gone at all. Because the Final War has broken out, and in a matter of a few days AM has done the perfect job of fulfilling the purpose for which its separate parts were created. Built to logically destroy the “enemy” as swiftly and sweetly as a superior intelligence could manage, in the Most Perfect of All Worlds, the unholy trinity of the merged one-mind AM has done just that. It has murdered the enemy totally. It has wiped the human race off the face of the planet.

Cold war paranoia and hysteria dominated the civilized world in one form or another from the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the crumbling of the Berlin Wall in 1989. For most of the 20th century the human race lived in a state of repressed panic and diminution of personal freedoms. But all that ended and the threat of nuclear holocaust blew away as lightly as the tabloids that fueled the paranoia. No more threat of war, and the world moved forward into a new age of thousands of brushfire wars in countries no one had ever heard of. Safe at last. In a pig’s eye. What none of us knew was that during the years 1945 to 1989, the three great superpowers had set in motion secret projects that would permit vast subterranean complexes of self-repairing computers to wage a global war too complex for mere human brains to oversee.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is a point-and-click adventure game based upon Harlan Ellison’s short story of the same title. The game’s story is set in a world where an evil computer named AM has destroyed all of humanity except for five people, whom he has been keeping alive and torturing for the past 109 years. Each survivor has a fatal flaw in their character, and in an attempt to crush their spirits, AM has constructed a metaphorical adventure for each that preys upon their weaknesses. To succeed in the game, the player must make choices to prove that humans are better than machines, because they have the ability to redeem themselves. Woven into the fabric of the story are ethical dilemmas dealing with issues such as insanity, rape, paranoia and genocide.