My wife and I are expecting our first child soon, so I’ve spent the better part of the year thinking about crucial concepts like leadership, responsibility, accountability, and trust. I wonder who I am and how I should raise another person without passing on all my worst traits to him. It was in this emotionally raw state that Mouthwashing came along and punched me in the face. While it’s mechanically basic – there’s not much to do beyond talking to other characters, collecting things, and searching the spaceship you’re in – it tells its story in a way that couldn’t be done without the weight of interactivity, taking full advantage of what makes it different games from movies and TV. And I don’t operate the word “burden” lightly, because that’s how I felt at times as I continued to play (in a good way). “Please don’t make me do this” I thought about it often, but discovering the secrets of how badly things had gone on this ship always forced me to continue.
The premise is basic: a group of people on the long-haul space freighter Tulpar deal with the effects of a disaster, with the perspective changing at several different points over the course of about a year. Going into more detail about this story would spoil more of the mouthwash than I’d like, because the surprise of separating what happened here and why is the driving force. But suffice it to say that the two to three hours of gameplay mines as much fear, character exploration, and body horror as you could possibly imagine.
The surreal tone is enhanced by the PS1-style Mouthwashing visual style. The characters are distinctly human, but also fair off enough to be dismissed as something else entirely. It’s an amusement park mirror, a twisted image used to express how we view people as tools in real life and how uncomplicated it is to deny the humanity of someone who looks right at you. This is a great choice because hyper-realistic or more stylized graphics would take away from the feeling of the uncanny valley it’s heading towards. Likewise, the distorted sound and restricted, muffled voice make you feel like you have cotton in your ears, further adding to the feeling that you’re driving through fog, trying to see what might be going on beyond your line of sight.
The same applies to construction. The jumping between moments, both before and after the disaster, is disorienting, but I never lost the thread of the story. Dreamlike sequences are similarly strung together, giving you basic tasks like opening doors or mixing drinks that always carry an undertone of menace, making the mundane feel unsettling. You’re always waiting for evil just around the corner, but it often appears in realistic and lifeless ways that, out of context, seem completely normal: petite interactions, slightly unusual questions and statements that tickle the part of your brain responsible for recognizing danger. And this is how evil often manifests itself in real life, through a mask of apparent sincerity, until you recognize it for what it is, hopefully before it’s too delayed.
Sometimes the evil is more pronounced, especially as the Mouthwash comes to an end and more practical mechanisms are used to suppress the disgusting actions and worldviews of the Tulpar crew members. Still avoiding spoilers, one character in particular was so off-putting that I had to step back and wonder why I reacted to them the way I did – I could only acknowledge that people like that really exist, and in the worst moments I can almost understand where they’re coming from, even though they’re painted here in extremes. It’s a deeply uncomfortable feeling, resonating with characters you hate so much, and knowing the damage someone can do when they don’t look at themselves in a meaningful way (or just through passivity).
And while these characters may be extreme in their behavior, they are not over the top. Much remains to be deduced, and the crew is clear. There are moments where screen flashes, raucous sounds, or accompanying messages can tend to be over the top, but they never create a jump-scare effect, just ways to accentuate the rhythm of the story. One in particular realized that both gave me context for the name “Mouthwash” and showed me just how murky the story would become.
That said, if it moves beyond the fascinating conversations and into a few more action-focused sections, it’s not always the smoothest transition. The low forays into survival horror and even first-person shooters, while initially pioneering, became a bit frustrating as the imprecise controls required more patience than the rest of the story. These sections seem frustrating by design, but they were still frustrating. Fortunately, they are also short-lived, so they didn’t interfere with my fun too much.
And while it may be obvious at this point that if you’re sensitive or easily upset (especially when it comes to losing bodily autonomy), the mouthwash game isn’t going to be uncomplicated, nor was it meant to be. It’s an uncomfortably close look at deeply flawed people, and it doesn’t skimp on holding up a magnifying glass – or, in this case, a literal ultrasound – to look even deeper.
So as I await the birth of my daughter, an occasion that fills me with incredible excitement, that anxious part of my brain keeps screaming at me, and the Mouthwashing app expressed these worries in the words: “Who are you at your worst? Is this person good enough to be entrusted with your child?” Few games have hit me so strenuous at such a specific moment in my life, but that’s what good art does – it holds up a mirror. And I hope you like what you look back on.
