Publisher: Impleron
Developer: Wrong Organ
Year: 2024
Platform: Windows

Rating: 4

On originality alone, the critically acclaimed, psychological horror Mouthwashing would rate much higher for me. And it certainly evoked an emotional response that I won’t soon forget. But that doesn’t negate the fact that for most of my playtime I was not enjoying myself.

As the game begins, you find yourself (in 3-D first-person perspective) in the cockpit of a spaceship. The console soon lights up and tells you that you need to steer left to avoid a collision. However, when you hover the cursor over the steering controls, the only option is to steer right, which brings up all sorts of questions. And when you click that, the computer says it’s trying to engage the auto-pilot, and the only option you have is to turn it off. Inevitably, you crash. As you stumble about the ship, you find yourself hallucinating all sorts of things, including life-size versions of your company’s mascot. Eventually, it seems, you black out.

Jumping ahead a few months later, you (which you now learn is Jimmy, the second in command) are meeting with your small crew to talk planning. There’s a considerable supply of food and water, though little chance of being rescued. You belong to the Pony Express, one of the last manned space freighter companies in the galaxy (while other companies are cutting jobs and automating everything). Your crew includes Swansea (maintenance), Anya (medical and psych), Daisuke (intern), and Curly, the captain who is stuck in the medical bay in critical condition following the crash. You quickly learn the company considers you all expendable and that holding onto hope is a fool’s errand.

Gameplay (using mouse and keyboard) is mostly simple. At the beginning it’s mostly fetch quests–finding items, chatting with others–going from one task to another to advance the plot. There are a few puzzly elements in the late stage, but nothing overly difficult (not terribly interesting). You can also die, which I did often. Jimmy hallucinates frequently and in the surreal landscapes of his mind there is danger, which you must avoid by not letting whatever evil creature is after you catch up. When you fail, you’re automatically restored to a point just beforehand. You even get a weapon during one of these sequences, which is easy to operate.

The game will frequently jump between periods in time before and after the crash, though the progress is consistent in that in the before time you will see events leading up to the crash, and after the crash you will see events going farther into the future as your supplies run low and hopes of being saved become increasingly dim. This is quite effective in balancing the storytelling, slowly doling out answers to both mysteries, keeping the player on suspense throughout.

That’s not to say the character development is all that. Characters talk very plainly and at no point does anything feel like a real conversation. What little you get to know of your crewmates is buoyed only by your brain filling in the blanks; otherwise, they’re mostly archetypes with mostly unexplained backstories and motivations. As such, it’s hard to root for anyone in the story or get too worked up about their fates. Though there are many long message board threads out there analyzing the characters and the symbolism, so this type of storytelling definitely has an audience.

It doesn’t help that the graphics are (intentionally) ugly as sin. Everything from character faces to kitchen appliances looks like the earliest of computer 3-D modeling. I’d go so far as to the say the monsters in Quake are prettier than anything here. Almost everything you see or listen to is intensely unpleasant from the graphics to the music to the sound effects. And that’s before you get to the end stages of the game containing truly horrifying imagery. I felt sick to my stomach on a few occasions for sure, and it usually takes a lot to bother me.

Mouthwashing is a game I’m glad to say I have played, though much like the movie Requiem for a Dream, I found it so unpleasant that there is zero chance I will ever play it again. I’m perfectly content admiring the workmanship from afar.