October officially starts in less than a week, and with that comes the spooky season, and you all know what that means: loads of Twitch streamers looking for hordes of indie horror titles that last about a few hours in order to cram as many of them into whatever horror game marathon schedules that they can come up with. And on that note, let us welcome developer Wrong Organ’s latest entry into the genre,Mouthwashing.It’s a quick little horror title, clocking in at about two and a half hours tops, so it’s definitely a bite-sized bit of psychological horror. But can it still end up being a good enough game, be it All Hallow’s Eve or any time?
Rinse and Spit
Mouthwashingis the story of five crew members aboard the Tulpar, a space freighter for the intergalactic Pony Express company. When Captain Curly seemingly goes mad and sends the ship into an asteroid, that leaves everyone stranded and Curly reduced to a burnt husk who can’t move or speak. The crew members only have limited supplies to work with, and when they bust open the cargo they’re hauling to try and find anything, all they discover is an endless supply of mouthwash. Now everyone has to deal with isolation, hunger and the gradual loss of sanity as madness kicks in and things take a turn for the bizarre…and the dangerous…
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Notably,Mouthwashingis a non-linear story, with each new bit swapping between having players play as copilot turned de facto captain Jimmy in the present and the now-immobile Curly in the past before the wreck, each at various points in time. Some days before the wreck, some being months after it. It’s a nifty use of non-linear method, especially when it comes to setting up mysteries. The very first thing the player does in fact is man all the controls and crash the ship, immediately getting players invested in just what the heck happens. It’s a genuinely well-done story, and has a good chunk of rather surprising twists, even once you’ve reached a point where you think you’ve seen everything.
The crew members are also a nice lot, and make you ever more just exactly what happened to each one in one way or another. Be it the naive yet optimistic intern Daisuke or the more gruff and cynical mechanic Swansea, all of them have nice and colorful personalities, and all of them deal with the current situation in different and tragic ways. Although as the player quickly learns, even in the past, there were still issues among them. It’s a small crew, and one where not everyone receives the best outcomes, but the time spent with them is enjoyable.
A true highlight inMouthwashing,though, is the visuals. Despite the areas available only consisting of a few rooms and some hallways, the game knows how to keep the creepy visuals coming, be it the more mundane stuff like the emergency foam spread everywhere that really emphasizes just how chaotic the wreck was, bits of body horror like Curly’s tragic condition that has left him without any limbs or most skin, or the more surreal hallucinations, ranging from eyeballs everywhere to freakish landscapes. All of this is accompanied by blocky, fifth-generation graphics that provide a nice contrast, and work well with the ship’s more low-tech retro-inspired vibes.
The True Horrors
Mouthwashinghas a rather captivating story at its core, one with a lot of bleak horror and bizarre, creepy visuals with a decent amount of stuff to uncover…unfortunately, there’s a still a game here accompanying this story, and that’s where things fall flat. Despite the non-linear story being a big selling point, the actual gameplay is fully linear, just hopping from objective to objective while moving in first-person. And if it was just a visual novel or such, that could still make this an easy recommendation. Unfortunately, however, elements like basic, non-challenging puzzles (if we’re being generous) have been added, typically those that just require a code scanner, and they end up feeling like hollow ways to pad out the gameplay.
Even more unfortunately, someone apparently realized thatMouthwashingis an indie horror game, and as such, the horror can’t merely come from, say, a tense atmosphere, creepy visuals, a well-written story with a lot of good scares, a feeling of dread coming from everyone, or anything like that.Clearlywhat a game like this needs is sections where you have to evade some sort of monstrous force that can kill you in one hit and forces you to start the entire section over. Because that hasn’t grown tedious at any point in the past decade (looking at you,Silent Hill: The Short Message)
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The sad part is thatMouthwashingonly has three of these sections, all scripted, and given its runtime, this means that it ends up having just enough of these parts to be annoying, yet not enough to feel substantial. One is basically just a horror version of Red Light, Green Light, but with sound as you walk across metal platforms, the other is a chase through a maze with weapons where you have to hunt someone first, and the third has you escaping a monster in some vents by…actually, I never figured out what the goal was there or how I even got past that part. After evading the pursuer by taking some corners, it just warped the character to a new section. But none of them are that fun and feel more tedious than anything else.
And really,Mouthwashingis not a game that should be padded, because if anything, it draws attention to other flaws like the repetitive nature that comes with only having the same few rooms and corridors to work with, or comes from using the same freezes and glitching effects for every scene transition, or minor things like awkward controls where to use an item, you have to zoom in on something, press Tab on the keyboard to open the inventory and select the item to use, which builds up to a notable level of annoyance. In the end,Mouthwashing’sstory alone might make it worth checking out, but maybe watch a horror stream of it before you decide to check it out for yourself.
Closing Comments:
While Mouthwashing has an incredible story and nicely disturbing and surreal visuals that could make it worth checking out, the shallow gameplay sadly hinders it, with dull puzzles, annoying chase bits and repetitive bits weighing it down. The twisted tale of the Tulpar is captivating, but if you’re in the mood for a quick horror title, you can likely do better.
Mouthwashing
Version Reviewed: PC
Mouthwashing is the tale of five crew members stranded on a shipwrecked space freighter, running low on supplies. Through a non-linear story, players learn what exactly drove the now-charred captain to madness, and witness the rest of the crew’s descent as well.
