I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream Switch Review – I Have No Mouse And I Must Click

As LLMs and AI generation become a bigger part of our daily lives, there’s no shortage of jokey references to evil AIs. Before there was GLaDOS, before Skynet, before HAL 9000, there was AM. I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream was originally a 1967 short story by Harlan Ellison.

In 1995, Ellison worked with The Dreamers Guild to adapt the world of the story into a game. Now, in 2025, that game hit the Nintendo Switch, just in time for ChatGPT to take over the world. We’ve set out to see if the I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream Switch version is great, or is just another case of technology tormenting us. 

Welcome To Tech Hell

If you’re not familiar with the setting of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, here’s a quick summary. It’s the far future, and a terrible, extremely powerful AI called AM has killed nearly all humans on Earth. Those left alive it keeps around pretty much exclusively to be cruel to for fun. You take control of several different characters, all subject to AM’s spite for an unspecified number of years.

The game itself is divided into different scenarios, each controlling one of the characters in a situation their lunatic computer god dropped them in, usually to make them as unhappy as possible. It’s up to you to find out how to navigate the technical hellscape and get away from whatever personal torment AM has set up. 

It’s not a retelling of the short story. In fact, the game seems to assume you have some knowledge of the original story and the premise. No hand-holding here. It expands on the characters and their backgrounds, which is cool if you ever wondered about the backgrounds of characters like Ellen, Benny, and Nimdok. Just like the story, they’re all still crazy. 

Retro In Both Good And Bad Ways

So, how does I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream Switch measure up? A few things you need to keep in mind is that I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream isn’t a remake, it’s a pretty straight port to the new system, with a few conveniences to make playing a bit easier without using a mouse. You can use the Switch buttons as a shortcut for all the different potential actions for interacting with the world.

The visuals are a bunch of bleak pixel art backdrops. It’s atmospheric, imaginative, and has that particular vibe you really only find in adventure games of the era.

Of course, all this means that you do have to make do with 90s aspect ratios and a lot of dead space on the sides of the screen. It also means you’ll need to make do with using a cursor with the joystick, which isn’t the easiest thing when you’re faced with a 90s-era point-and-click. One of my major challenges was selecting the right dialogue while playing on a Switch Lite. A genre where the main strategy is training the cursor around looking for interactables doesn’t gel well with a relatively insensitive cursor.

This is also something that you need to understand when it comes to I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. It’s a point-and-click adventure game of its time. This means that the gameplay is mostly object-related puzzles that require your lateral thinking. Unlike some of the genres of the time, it’s not heavy on ridiculous leaps of moon logic to advance. You do need to be a bit cautious, though. There are ‘good’ solutions and ‘bad’ solutions. If you make the wrong choices, it might have a dire impact on your chances for a good ending. 

A few things do get a little bit obscure, though. Sometimes you have to do the same action twice to get the desired effect, with the character refusing the first time.

AM Broke My Save

The game is relatively short if you’re playing optimally and getting things right the first time. You could probably complete it in 3-4 hours if you knew what you were doing. You most likely won’t though. In fact, you might not even finish a particular attempt. This is because the game is horrifyingly easy to softlock. I managed to kill a run stone dead by not doing a puzzle before I’d exhausted dialogue with an NPC I wasn’t clear I could initiate dialogue with. It mars an otherwise cool premise, with interesting problems to solve. You will probably have to consult a walkthrough to avoid accidentally ruining an attempt with an innocent action. This plus manual saves means you can easily trap yourself if you’re not making a new save before every major decision.

So, is the I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream Switch version it worth playing? Yes and no. It’s a great bit of writing, and if you’re a fan of the story and its world, it’s the best way to explore more of it given the original author helped create it. On the other hand, the decision to bring the game over with minimal changes makes it an overall flawed experience. With a better cursor and some much-needed bug fixes, this would definitely get a higher score, but as-is, I think only big-time Ellison fans will want to suffer through the annoyances of playing when they could find a gameplay video somewhere.

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is available via the Nintendo eShop. Maybe also check out our DOOM: The Dark Ages review.

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