ranzware
Mouthwashing is one of those damnable, cursed games like The Outer Wilds or MyHouse.wad where there are so many surprises and unexpected gut punches over its three-hour runtime, I want to default to that most unpersuasive of videogame recommendations: “Trust me, don’t read anything about it, just play it!”
But it’s my job to produce something to read about it, so I’m going to keep things vague, spoiler-free, and largely hewing to the beginning of the game. Developer Wrong Organ’s previous game, How Fish is Made, looks like the sort of thing that could inspire a spontaneous vegetarian conversion: A narrative adventure about being a sardine in a canning factory. Mouthwashing dispenses with a layer of metaphor and tells a story about human sardines.
You play as Jimmy, first mate aboard the ill-starred long-haul delivery ship Tulpar. The game begins with the Tulpar’s captain, Curly, suffering a mental break and crashing the ship into an asteroid, stranding its crew of five and subjecting Curly to horrific injuries. One of the defining images of the game is Curly, bandaged and burned, unable to move or speak, lying before the image of a sunset on one of the Tulpar’s glitched day-night cycle screens.
Swapping between perspectives before and after the crash, Mouthwashing tells a nonlinear narrative explaining what led to the disaster, and what happens to the survivors after. There’s some light puzzling with point-and-click adventure key hunting, but the real juice here is the writing and atmosphere of complete, utter dread.
Minty Fresh
The Tulpar is a fantastic setting. Mouthwashing is a lot like Alien or last year’s Scavenger’s Reign in its sort of blue collar sci-fi: We’ve reached the heavens and touched the face of God, so now space travel is a dull, rote, dead-end job.
The Tulpar has no windows, just mood-lifting screens presenting a simulated time of day, and the crew works for the Pony Express delivery company. The ship is festooned with images of company mascot Polle and Amazonian “motivational” posters about employee liability and the limit of five hours of rest between shifts.
But even with all the soberingly plausible suck of this future, there’s a mournful, bittersweet quality to the pre-crash Tulpar. “Was this really so bad, compared to what came after?” It’s a small but very dense, cluttered space, with great character details like the corkboard cluttered with notes and pamphlets in the med bay, or the board game left out from the crew’s game night. Over the course of the story post-crash, Mouthwashing does a fantastic job of showing this makeshift home degrade in tandem with the crew’s mental state.
The Crew
Curly: Captain, well-liked and experienced.
Jimmy: First mate, acting captain after crash, Curly’s best friend.
Anya: Ship’s nurse, saddled with responsibilities beyond her training.
Swansea: Mechanic, embittered 15-year employee, recovering alcoholic.
Daisuke: Mechanic’s “intern,” bumbling but well-meaning rich kid.
One of Mouthwashing’s freakiest moves is presenting Curly’s ruined body in parallel with food. The game has little tactile minigame asides where you click around to perform tasks and interact with the world in a more granular way, and these are predominantly used in two ways: preparing or handling food, and pulling open Curly’s mouth to feed him painkillers. In one pre-crash sequence you have to pick up a knife and use it to cut a birthday cake. The uneven sawing back and forth, complete with sloppy, squelching side effects (is this what the kids call mukbang?) churned my stomach, and that’s just the beginning.
But the body horror is downstream of Mouthwashing’s human drama, a story about the failed ambitions, resentments, and regrets of people forced to work a dead-end job, and the utter degradation they’re subjected to when one of them snaps. There were scenes late in the story—one in particular, involving the mechanic Swansea—that utterly devastated me. It’s all heightened by the knowledge that this suffering is meaningless: human life stuffed in a sardine can and made to rot in the name of a corporation’s inertia, its self-propagation for its own sake.
I said it in the title and I’m so proud of the joke that I’ll say it again here: Mouthwashing is my feel-bad favorite of Halloween 2024. If you’re going to play one new horror game this spooky season, make it this one. You can grab Mouthwashing for $13 over on Steam.
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Kurt Indovina
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