Developed/Published by: Wrong Organ / Critical Reflex
Released: 26/09/2024
Completed: 07/01/2025
Completion: Finished it.
If you can’t tell, recently I’ve been trying to play more games from 2024 to “catch up” on the zeitgeist, and it’s definitely been revealing to me that we live in a golden age of short, interesting video games. The kind of thing where you look it up on How Long To Beat and decide to just get it and install it immediately, because you can get through it. It doesn’t need to go on a backlog! You can just play it!
Imagine how “final facial expression from that Vince McMahon [“bad man!”–Ed.] meme” I was when I saw Mouthwashing was literally two hours.
I mean that’s the length of a movie!
I praised Indika heavily for its incredible high fidelity visuals, saying something along the lines of “it wouldn’t work otherwise” so I rather like that along comes Mouthwashing, a similarly narrative-heavy game that looks like a PS1 game and… also looks fucking amazing and works! Turns out–and stick with me here–”art direction” might be a more important component of video games than “it looks real.” Indika uses high fidelity pointedly. Mouthwashing uses low fidelity pointedly.
A psychological horror game set on a crashed, “blue collar future” space freighter (think Alien) you play the ship’s acting captain across a series of months as the food slowly runs out and the remaining crew–including yourself–get increasingly unmoored from reality; while as the player, you start to understand what’s really going on and what really happened.
I’ll be straight, immediately: I liked Mouthwashing, but I didn’t love it. It does some things incredibly well–it uses glitches and crashes that make you think the game has actually hung to transition across the non-linear narrative, and it’s always effective–but it doesn’t really come together.
In some respects, the game suffers from the fact I played Indika almost directly before it, a game that nails its interactivity when it matters (well, apart from those retro game flashbacks, but they dont linger in the mind.) Mouthwashing feels more like a visual novel where you have to walk between nodes for the most part (nothing wrong with that) but there are moments where it expects you to play it like a game, and due to the fact that it can’t suddenly go out of its way to explain mechanics to you, there’s a lot of stumbling about and failing which, sadly, pull you right out of the narrative that it’s trying to get you deeper into. And then the feedback for the mechanics are so poor you might not be entirely sure you’re even doing it right (I had to look up at least one section as a result. Not ideal.)
To be frank, also, the story doesn’t actually pay off. There’s a lot of interesting world-building in Mouthwashing–I love the reveal of what the ship is carrying, and how pointless it makes everything feel–but the characters are poorly sketched, without a lot of depth (the one female character, who is so important to the whole thing, is terribly served) and I think it makes the extremely heavy implications of the denoument feel sort of problematic. While I won’t spoil anything, I think there is a certain care you have to have over the kind of character you are asking the player to embody, and I don’t think Mouthwashing takes enough care over that.
However: the game does manage to be successfully creepy at points, and has an excellent line in low-poly body horror; I think it’s meaningful it’s trying to be more than just that. It may simply be a case of a team reaching for something they aren’t quite equipped for–but I respect them for giving it a shot.
Will I ever play it again? I don’t think I’ll ever need to.
Final Thought: Mouthwashing takes two hours, it’s interesting, it’s trying something, it looks amazing. More games should be doing this. Maybe they are! I love it.
