“Mouthwashing” is a first-person psychological horror game that follows five crew members at each other’s throats after their space freighter crashes. It was developed by Wrong Organ and published by CRITICAL REFLEX. It pairs design and audio elements into a horrifying and fantastic game. Beware to any readers who have not played through ¨Mouthwashing¨, as this article contains spoilers.
The player begins “Mouthwashing” by playing as the space freighter´s captain. They are given instructions to assume a specific path to prevent the crash of their ship. However, the player deliberately throws the ship off course straight into a space rock. They then jump from playing as the captain to playing as Jimmy two months after the crash. Here they are given an insight into the crew: Swansea, the ship’s mechanic, Daisuke, Swansea’s surfboy intern, Anya, the ship’s nurse and Jimmy, Tulpar’s makeshift captain. The previous captain, Captain Curly, who is now in critical condition, is housed permanently in the ship’s med bay, taken care of by Anya. Curly, disfigured by the crash, is missing parts of his arms and legs and is wrapped entirely in bandages with his flesh and singular lidless eyeball peeking through.
From this point onwards, the player switches between time frames in the game to piece more parts of the story together. While the scene that introduces each of the characters is three months after the crash, the game then goes back around two months before the crash. The game also switches perspectives of characters between these time jumps. For playing in the present time of the game, after the crash, the player plays as Jimmy. Before the crash, the player is Curly. These time jumps give vital information about the game.
The first objective of the game is given to the player by Anya, as she is in the med bay taking care of Curly. She gives Jimmy the task of finding the captain’s code scanner, which gives all the codes to locked doors on the ship. After finding said code scanner, the crew is able to unlock the storage room holding their haul.
A key aspect of the game is the Tulpar’s haul: Dragonbreath mouthwash. Two months after the crash, the crew unlocks the ship’s storage room, finding it loaded with boxes of mouthwash. The crew is distraught by this information, finding that taking over a year to make a shipment of mouthwash absurd. They react in different ways: Anya is in distress, Jimmy is in outrage, and Swansea pops open a bottle and starts drinking it. Due to the alcohol content, he finds himself able to get drunk. Daisuke falls into Swansea’s footsteps, mostly due to his admiration of Swansea and his need to feel seen by others.
After this point, Daisuke gets stuck in the emergency safety foam that is keeping the ship together. Swansea needs Jimmy’s permission in order to get the emergency axe to free Daisuke. This is another objective given to the player, which is important for later on in the story.
An important objective given to Jimmy by Anya is feeding Curly his pills. Curly needs to take his painkillers, otherwise he wails in agony. Jimmy is frustrated with Anya as she continues to task him with giving their mangled captain his pills, despite the clear anxiety and distress that it causes Anya. The player when giving Curly his pills is able to open and close his mouth, which awards the player with an achievement. Jimmy, near the mid way point of the game, complains to Anya about all of the tasks he has been given, listing them off; finding the code scanner, typing the code into the door, chopping up foam, and then finally giving Curly his medicine. He talks about how he is taking responsibility, and then goes to give Curly his pills, giving him a short monologue of how much he understands the pressure of being captain now.
Later on, there is a part of the game where the player needs to navigate their way through the storage room in the dark. However, there is a monster lurking around, and every time the player walks for too long, they get caught/die, and need to restart the level. The way the player is able to see the monster is by using their code scanner as a flashlight. They need to stop moving when they hear the monster moving around nearby. The monster resembles the ship’s mascot, Polle the horse. Polle actually frequently haunts Jimmy in the actual gameplay parts of the game. Polle is meant to represent Jimmy’s subconscious guilt and the weight of the responsibility he is meant to take, which is why he appears as the game’s various monsters.
Each one of these characters is both well-written and very complex. Jimmy, assuming the role of captain after Curly is injured, begins to crack under the stress of being a captain after only a few months. It does not help, either, that his attitude to his crew members is either outright dislike, as in Daisuke’s case, or passive aggressiveness, most notably to Anya. As the player begins to learn what exactly happened on this ship and what led up to the crash, they are transported back and forth in time, both pre-crash and a few months after the crash. The relationship between Jimmy and Anya can be deciphered through a few scenes pre-crash: the psych evaluation scenes between Curly and Anya, as well as the Dead Pixel scene, a moment shared between Curly and Anya.
What I think is the most beautiful aspect of this game is how it does not rely entirely on classic horror, aka utilizing a big scary-eldritch-horror–type monster haunting the player throughout the game. While it does utilize monsters to reign psychological stress on the player, that is also exactly what it is, a psychological horror game. The words haunting the player ever since the beginning of the game, or, more specifically, the character Jimmy, are “take responsibility.” This game relies on the real horror of what people do. Jimmy, who is assumed to be the “antagonist” of “Mouthwashing,” finds the inability to fess up to his own mistakes. However, so do other characters, most notably Curly.
In addition to the characters, I believe that the sound design in this game is also perfect. It can be dreamy, calm, and almost even hopeful, such as the title screen music. The music during the Dead Pixel scene also encapsulates that feeling of serenity. The audio can also be chilling, or disconcerting, such as the audio that plays whilst the player roams the Tulpar’s hallways after crashing the ship in the beginning scene. It can be really unsettling and it sets the mood. Paired with the fantastic visuals and colors, as well as background elements and the overall design of the ship, they pair extremely well together.
Overall, I believe that “Mouthwashing” is a masterpiece of a game. It has extreme depth to its story and its characters, as well as some seriously unsettling designs in the more horror-esque parts of the game. The character speeches as well, particularly Swansea’s speech to Jimmy at the very end of the game, are so beautifully written. Swansea’s speech genuinely moved me, and it changed me in some way when I watched it for the first time. “Mouthwashing” intrigues and it compels. I definitely recommend it to anyone who likes a good, well-written horror game.