A good horror film scares you in the moment, but a great horror film stays in your mind long after the credits roll. We’ve been blessed with plenty of great horror games in recent years, but as October rolls around, there’s even more scary games to get us in the mood and scare us before Halloween. Mouth rinse it immediately grabbed me with its shocking, chilling images and pinned me down under the weight of mounting fear.
Mouth rinse is a three-hour narrative experience set on Tulpar, a Pony Express courier ship on a long-distance space voyage to deliver cargo. It’s your typical sci-fi capitalist dystopia; Humanity’s wandering among the stars has done nothing to facilitate corporate control over workers’ lives. Still, the crew is tight-knit: there’s the grumpy veteran Swansea, the anxious and avoidant nurse Anya, and the cheerful himbo Daisuke. The crew is completed by pilots Captain Curly and Jimmy. The game begins with a terrible disaster that leaves the ship stranded and blown off course.
The game jumps around the timeline, showing the crew’s dynamics before the disaster and the growing despair after the disaster. Months after the disaster, still lost in space, the crew is eager to find an alternative food source as supplies dwindle. The captain was severely burned in the crash, leaving him dependent on dwindling supplies of painkillers. No one will come for them, supplies are running out, and all they have in the hold is crate after crate of mouthwash.
How Mouth rinse continues, reality begins to blur and break down. Sometimes this happens diegetically; the Pony Express mascot begins to appear more and more often, and motivational posters line the halls of Tulpar. A crew member finds an ancient analog TV where it shouldn’t be and plays ancient company animations. Other times, these surreal transitions imitate a game crash or graphical glitch. There were a few times when I thought the game had crashed, but the broken visuals transformed into a recent scene.
There isn’t much in the way of combat and survival mechanics; instead, the narrative is a grim march towards an inevitable conclusion. Once used to deal with mundane emergencies, the ax is now being used for a darker purpose. Anya increasingly avoids her nursing duties, afraid to approach Curly in his burned and mutilated state. Jimmy cracks under the pressure. The only one who stays cheerful the whole time is Daisuke, the absolute master.
If this nightmare scenario intrigues you even a little bit, I highly recommend checking it out Mouth rinse ON Couple Or Itch.io. The game opens with a compact message containing the ship’s name, delivery status, and an ominous note: “I hope this hurts.” It certainly was, and that’s why my thoughts are still trapped in the distant space aboard the Tulpar.
