Mouthwashing Is A Suffocating Lo-Fi Horror Game About Slowly Dying in Space
You creep through the rusting halls of the deep space freighter Tulpar, its drab brown interior occasionally punctuated by corporate propaganda posters that encourage you to work longer, harder, and better. But as you go deeper, it’s clear that things aren’t quite right. An alarm begins to blare as this place breaks down in real time, lights cutting out as steam leaks from creaky pipes. With each step, there are somehow more posters on the walls, collaged like wallpaper, a chorus of company buzzwords closing in around you. The music continues to build, and you turn a corner to see a figure staring back at you, and it’s… Polle, the harmless standard-issued animatronic horse mascot.
No, this isn’t a killer Chuck E. Cheese rip-off out to get you. It never tries to strangle you with its metallic hooves, and unlike the Ridley Scott movie that the game is riffing on, you’re also not transporting a dangerous alien. Because as this introductory sequence makes clear, our protagonist isn’t trying to outrun murder robots, an extraterrestrial, or some other outside threat, but the weight of horrible mistakes.
This is the bleak world of Mouthwashing, a first-person psychological horror game developed by Wrong Organ, who fellow genre-heads may know from their surreal freeware title How Fish is Made. While their latest starts out in a somewhat more grounded place than what they previously worked on (in that you don’t play as a sardine engaging in faux-philosophical discussions), it gradually builds towards similarly hallucinatory turns that make this a brain-searing lo-fi horror experience.
The Tulpar is broken beyond repair, and its crew is trapped in the deep reaches of space. It seems that their captain, Curly, attempted to end it all by crashing their freighter into an asteroid, leaving him with debilitating injuries and a single piercing blue eye that stares into your soul. You play as his co-pilot, Jimmy, as he and the rest of the crew grapple with dwindling rations and increasing vitriol that puts them at each other’s throats. As the player, you spend most of your time chatting with co-workers and tracking down items to complete tasks while you all bitterly wait to die.
If it wasn’t clear from this setup, this experience is downright oppressive. Your ship is a dreary, increasingly dilapidated tomb portrayed via low-poly visuals which, like many games in this style, invite us to imagine the finer details for ourselves. These dimly lit corridors draw us in, less building towards jump scares or frightening encounters with monsters, and more inching us further into these characters’ headspaces as they approach heavily foreshadowed carnage.
But beyond just gore and viscera, what’s most interesting about the game’s scares is how it introduces surreal imagery and upsetting sights that symbolize dark secrets; for instance, we see impossible MC Escher-esque walkways as this ship’s twisting interior reflects the racing minds of this condemned crew. And while things start out surprisingly mundane, mostly consisting of conversations and chores, this makes the later eye-catching sequences stand out even more, particularly the inspired final 30 minutes, which cleverly switches things up mechanically while offering plenty to think about.
Beyond its ambiance, one element that makes this experience work is its sense of style, something best embodied by its nonlinear storytelling. Riffing on the jump-cut heavy Thirty Flights of Loving, or more specifically, the similarly frightening Paratopic, we hop between different time periods out of order. While this effect is slightly less disorienting here because on-screen text informs us when the scene takes place, this out-of-order approach builds intrigue by forcing us to speculate how certain events came to pass before taking abrupt turns that shatter our previous assumptions. Eventually, it becomes difficult to tell what’s real and what’s a guilt-driven delusion.
Through these back-and-forth leaps, we eventually get to know the cast. At first glance, the rest of the crew seem easy to read: there’s Swansea, a cranky old mechanic, Daisuke, a naïve intern who’s a little too chill, Anya, a medic having a tough time, and Curly, who is to blame for all of this. But as we learn more, each of them gains wrinkles, culminating in reveals about their motivations and why they’re in this situation to begin with. You won’t like all of them, but they’re certainly more than cannon fodder horror characters there just to bite it. That said, if there’s an issue here, it’s that while most of these folks have extra layers beyond what we first see, Anya feels more thinly written than the rest, which squares awkwardly with the fact she’s constantly catching verbal abuse from her male co-workers.
Overall though, as events become increasingly feverish, each of the crew are plagued by grounded concerns, particularly around their atrocious employer, Pony Express, which loves to nickel and dime its unfortunate underlings. There’s a dark, wry humor at work in this depiction of corporate drudgery, which helps make the horror pop, and their company comes off like a slightly less nefarious but similarly exploitative take on the Alien series’ Weyland-Yutani—while there are a lot of initial overlaps with Alien, including blue collar workers being trapped in space, this story goes its own way by the end. The corporate commentary comes to a head when you finally find out what you’ve all risked (and probably forfeited) your lives to haul, the reveal coming across with pure pitch-black comedy as an advertisement for the product fills the screen.
As this corporate lambasting shows, while this experience unleashes plenty of disturbing low-poly sights, including a particularly gruesome birthday feast, it also has plenty on its mind beyond viscera. It eventually uncomfortably peels back the layers of its characters like a Charlie Kaufman film, prodding at fears of purposelessness and employment anxieties as it builds towards its nightmarish climax. From the well-considered shot compositions to how it places you in these characters’ moods and inner thoughts, there is much more going on here than just PSX-styled sadism. If I have an issue related to its delivery though, the very last scene feels somewhat plain compared to the rest of the vague, often symbolic final stretch, ending things on a bit of a down note.
While Mouthwashing certainly won’t be for everyone, its unsettling sights and slow-burn narrative are difficult to scrub from memory. It builds toward brutal reveals with style and purpose as its fragmented storytelling forces us to fill in the gaps—its suggestions of violence are often worse than the real thing. It has plenty of terrifying sights, but perhaps its scariest element is how it puts us in the headspace of someone committing increasingly awful acts, all conveyed via distressing moments of interactivity that make you feel complicit in the butchery. Through its portrayal of desperation and crushing guilt, Mouthwashing is as cold as the vacuum of space.
Mouthwashing was developed by Wrong Organ and published by Critical Reflex. It is available for PC.
Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.