I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream adapts Harlan Ellison's short story into a 1995 point-and-click adventure that holds up as one of the genre's darkest. Five humans (Gorrister the suicidal loner, Benny the mutilated brute, Ellen the hysterical phobic, Nimdok the secretive sadist, Ted the cynical paranoid) have been kept alive and tortured for 109 years by the insane supercomputer AM, which destroyed the rest of humanity after the Cold War's three superpower computers merged into a single hate-driven entity.

Each of the five characters confronts a personalized hellscape designed by AM to prey on their specific fatal character flaws. The player rotates through all five, navigating dilemmas dealing with insanity, rape, paranoia, genocide and other powerfully charged emotional issues. To win, you must demonstrate redemption: prove that humans are better than machines by making choices that allow each character to find dignity in defeat.

Full digitized speech covers over 40 characters, with Harlan Ellison himself voicing AM. The adventure pulls no punches; Ellison co-wrote the script with David Sears specifically to ensure the game retained the story's transgressive bite. The game's framework for redemption-through-choice was unusual for its time, and the disturbing content remains memorable decades later.