I've been screaming at my monitor for 20 minutes, and not for the normal reasons. Thanks to a tweet from itch.io's creator, I've been playing Tonsil Terror, a first-person (first-mouth?) scavenger hunt controlled with WASD and screaming.
With a wobbly uvula and two rows of teeth blocking your view from inside a mouth—which makes me think the protagonist has already had a strange day—the only way to see clearly ahead is to make the character let out a weird wail of a scream, and you can accomplish that by actually screaming into your mic. (The weirdness of your scream is up to you.)
You don't have to scream—you can hit the space bar to make the character scream instead, or just make any loud noise—but there's not much point to it if you don't. The only goal in Tonsil Terror is to collect pieces of candy, which isn't much fun, so you've gotta get your lungs involved to tack on the novelty of self-consciously saying "ahhhhhh" at an increasing volume with headphones on, hoping no one came home early. Letting go of inhibitions is the real terror.
If you let go too much and scream constantly, you'll attract ghosts, and eventually one of them will devour your mind. So, don't scream too much. Or do, because the fun of Tonsil Terror is watching your uvula flip out and then having your mind devoured by a ghost. It's a toy you can scream at to make screaming happen on a screen, which is satisfying on its own. I want more games to be controlled by screaming. Imagine Rocket League, but the only way to use boost is to scream. Get on it, Psyonix.
Tonsil Terror was created by Papercookies is available on itch.io on a pay-what-you-want basis.
