Indie Game of the Week 427: Mouthwashing

In retrospect, the choice to delay this playthrough because of anxiety around an upcoming piece of dental surgery was perhaps premature. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of PS1-era lo-poly visceral body horror to enjoy (along with several other flavors of yikes), but not a whole lot of mouth stuff relatively speaking. Mouthwashing is, reductively, the 1979 movie Alien if humans were the real monsters. The five-man crew of the long haul space freighter Tulpar work for the Pony Express corporation, with their current assignment looking to take just over a year, and while the crew is functional enough on the surface there's cracks starting to form. The game starts in media res, just before the ship collides with an asteroid after all its failsafes are sabotaged, and then jumps forwards and backwards through time to provide context behind why it happened and why what followed also happened. So to speak.

The Tulpar crew consists of Curly, the respected captain up until he sabotages the ship and engineers a fatal crash; Jimmy, the coarse co-pilot and default protagonist for most of the game; Swansea, the grizzled middle-aged mechanic who never minces words; Daisuke, Swansea's cheerful if dim intern that was foisted on him last second by the corporate leadership; and Anya, a trainee doctor that operates as the ship's nurse. Their dreary backstories prior to the crash dovetail with their eventual fates as the ship lies broken on some remote planetoid awaiting rescue, with the flashbacks filling in the timeline of events that precipitated the crash and the revelations that ensue afterwards. It's very much the type of game you're meant to unpack slowly, layer by layer, all the while being obfuscated by the game's frequent lapses into psychological horror as Acting Captain Jimmy undergoes several nervous breakdowns as he attempts to restore law and order with the increasingly fragile crew, all the while keeping the horribly maimed Curly alive through what few bottles of painkillers the ship has in stock.

Most of the game is depicted in first-person view and occupies the claustrophobic hallways of the Tulpar, typically involving the crew lounge, the medical bay, the utility and cryopod room, and the cockpit. Owing to it being a psychological horror game where the protagonist's mind is slowly unravelling, you'll also find yourself in... other places, from time to time. It's a relatively straightforward (mechanically at least) adventure game with some limited inventory puzzles that only occasionally breaks things up with a puzzle (acquiring a necessary passcode, for instance) or a forced stealth sequence. In other words, it's a very narrative-heavy sort of approach where you're tasked with paying attention to the story details and less so focusing on gameplay loops.

If there's a downside to Mouthwashing, which is generally excellent both as an achronological storytelling exercise and as a means of once again demonstrating the uncanny potential of the 32-bit era for horror games (given both Resident Evil and Silent Hill got their start there), it's those aforementioned stealth sequences. They're not overly difficult—it's the case that once you realize the "rules" the creature pursuing you won't ever reach you—but they do serve to grind the game's pacing to a halt due to going on for far too long, even once you know the tricks. Mouthwashing is a svelte two or three hours in length and I can't help but put on my conspiracy nut tinfoil hat and guess that these sequences, which stretch out a while, are meant to pump those average play length numbers up just beyond the Steam two-hour refund maximum but, hey, I wouldn't blame them in the slightest if that were the case (it is a little trashy to refund a game you played in full after all). One could also easily argue that running around panicking because some ghost horse demon is chasing you around gives you plenty of time to process the clues and story beats you've seen so far as the game lurches closer to its denouement. It is nice to occasionally have a repose from all the bleak existential horror that comes from a lifetime of mistakes by having some invisible ghoulie chase you across endless cargo bay walkways for a spell. I've always said this.

I've thoughts on the conclusion, which I'll be spoiler blocking here for obvious reasons:

So the implication here is that Curly took a chance on Jimmy, whom is presumably an ex-con or even a fugitive given the way he talks about his struggles on Earth and his defensive panic upon hearing about his upcoming redundancy, and the latter ended up betraying that trust by sexually assaulting fellow crewmate Anya a few weeks into this assignment. That she's despondent about a pregnancy that will come to term before the Tulpar reaches its destination explains her suicidal tendencies if not perhaps Jimmy's impulsive need to "take responsibility" with an abortion via catastrophic asteroid collision. What's notable about this Jimmy dude's characterization is that he spends the entire time apologizing to and trying to do right by Curly, potentially being one of the few voices advocating for his survival when the crew's out for blood against the psychotic commander that killed them, if not from the immediate impact then by the slow deaths via starvation as they wait for help that may never arrive. Jimmy, however, does not apologize to Anya once. If anything, he continues to be brusque and domineering with her as she mentally deteriorates from the strain of her situation, suggesting he's never once considered her agency or feelings. Even with his "noble sacrifice" at the end it gets that much harder to feel any sympathy for the man. (I'm also not quite sure if he actually partially cannibalizes his bestest buddy or if that was just a nightmare sequence, since I forgot to check Curly's leg before the ending sequence, but I wouldn't put it past Jimbo's cognitive dissonance.)

On the whole, I think Mouthwashing sits proudly in the same pantheon as your SOMAs and Detentions in delivering a twisty horror narrative that can take advantage of the medium to put you in the hotseat of a tortured soul and really make you feel the weight of their demons, metaphorical or otherwise, while playing around with cinematic tricks as often as it does gameplay ones to unnerve and mislead you throughout what, deep down, turns out to be a pretty quotidian (if still messed up) series of unfortunate events. And that goes the same whether you called out the villain long before the conclusion or were shocked to discover the truth when it was finally revealed; as any long-distance delivery person will tell you, the journey is what matters. That, and observing good dental hygiene.

Rating: 4 out of 5.