As point and click adventures go IHNMAIMS is certainly one
of the darker and most out there ones. Based on the short story of the same
name is follows the story of five humans who are held captive by a group an
artificial intelligence known as AM. AM has destroyed the earth and now keeps
the five humans alive for its own sadistic pleasure. They are held immortal and
eternal tortured, so far they have been tormented for 109 years.
The game works in the traditional point and click way. You
move around with the mouse and click on times to pick up and things to interact
with. There are dialogue trees to work though as well and unlike many point and
click games you can die. AIM won’t let you really die though and instead will
drop you back at the start of the adventure so it pays to save often.
However, each of the chapters can be completed in numerous
ways with different actions being carried out throughout. Your characters have
a spiritual health bar which increases whenever they do something good and
decreases when something bad happens. The state of the bar at the end of the
level along with the route you have taken to completion results in determining
if you have been successful or not (something you won’t know for sure until the
final act).
Taking control of each of the five captives in turn, players
must solve a mystery relating to each of them. These act as self-contained mini
adventures and change dramatically in content. One minute you might be
wandering around a fantasy castle making deals with the devil while another
adventure is set in a prison camp where horrific experiments are being carried
out on the inmates. The one thing that does stay consistent is just how dark it
all is though.
There is no humour here and each of the characters has to
overcome nasty things in order to make it through their section. Everything
relates to things in their past and they are certainly not for the faint of
heart. One of the characters main aims is to commit suicide so that gives you a
hint as to the tone. It’s also very easy to make mistakes which lead you down
the darker sides of the adventure. A number of times thing happened that
surprised us or we didn’t even know could be avoided and this can be
frustrating.
Frustration is one of the biggest problems with IHNMAIMS.
It’s wildly changing frame of reference within the different setups for the
adventures made us feel that much of the time we were simply fumbling our way
through it instead of having great revelations. Often using items on things
when you’re stuck can have a bad effect or bring the story to an end without
any warning and when you are intricately trying to get something sorted it’s
beyond annoying. In one scene we accidentally clicked on something in the
background and our player was immediately dragged back to the hub world by AIM
without any warning or chance to abort our action.
Overall, IHNMAIMS is a strange one. The story is excellent
and the dark tone and menacing atmosphere are something you don’t normally find
in this type of game. The multiple routes are also good (in theory) and it does
a lot right. However, it never really clicked with us. Without the humour it
dragged a bit and the fragmented stories of the captives and changes in tone
and design didn’t really help this. A lot of time we were solving things
without really knowing why we were doing it and I would be surprised if we
dived back in to find the alternative ways through the game. It’s certainly
worth playing through once though and one ever point and click fan should at
least try.
Overall 7/10
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