Mouthwashing begins with a series of contradictions. “I hope this hurts,” your mission log reads after listing the number of days your space freighter has spent hauling cargo across the cosmos for your bosses back at Pony Express. “Steer right,” you decide, after your ship’s computer tells you specifically to deviate left in order to avoid a collision with an unknown orbital body. Then it’s time to use the emergency key to override the cockpit console and disengage the autopilot, sealing your fate along with those of your four other crew members in the process.
Mouthwashing reviewDeveloper: Wrong OrganPublisher: Critical ReflexPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC (Steam)
You never have a say in any of these events – you must simply follow the instructions as the game presents them to you, even though every bone in your body (and the ship’s blaring red warning siren) is crying out for you to do the opposite. It’s unclear what’s led you to this point, but over the course of the next three hours, Mouthwashing will lay it all out in stark and unrelenting detail, jumping through time before and after this horrific accident-slash-act of sabotage to paint a complete and desperate picture of your crew’s descent into blinkered and unerring despair.
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It’s certainly not the way to spend an evening, but trust me when I say you’ll want to strap in for everything Mouthwashing has to throw at you regardless. For despite the futility of your remaining crew’s situation, Mouthwashing is a wildly inventive horror game that plays with the boundaries of time and space to exhilarating effect, and all with a gleeful glint in its large and unblinking eyeball. It’s not so much a scary game as one that simultaneously delights in pulling the rug out from beneath your feet while also extending an eager hand to haul you back up so you can see what’s coming next, leaving you utterly in thrall to its dark and absurdist humour as you’re whisked through time from one vignette to the next.
To say any more of its story would no doubt ruin many of the surprises that are best discovered for yourself. But as you ferry your crew between the days leading up to the crash, and the months spent desperately trying to survive afterwards, developer Wrong Organ makes wonderful use of its small and intimate setting. Your ship, the creaky and slightly dilapidated Tulpar, only ever consists of a handful of rooms and winding, scratched up corridors, but each of them proves surprisingly elastic in the before and after. As detritus builds up, tempers fray and everything starts to unravel, your route through them gets reconfigured, the focus of your next task shifting from room to room as others get blocked off or slammed shut after an argument. It’s remarkable how much it feels like an active working environment while also being a kind of houseshare in space, with certain crew mates always retreating to their designated offices when things get tense. And when some chapters last barely a minute, every lap you take through these rooms always manages to feel different from the last.