Mouthwash review

Back in October, I played Mouthwashing in its entirety in one sitting, and then had to lie down for a while to recover. I felt sickened and disturbed by what I had seen over the last three hours. Mouthwash is about as classic a “walking simulator” as you can get mechanically, and while its emphasis on more intense gameplay was a little off for me, its narrative, vision and atmosphere made it one of the standouts of 2024 r., the folk champion of indie music, horror for a very good reason.

Mouthwash is one of those games where when you recommend it to a friend you say, “Nah man, don’t look up anything about it, just play it, trust me, promise you’ll play it? If Steam says you’re playing Path of Exile and I egg your house instead. This makes it tough to review without spoilers, but I’ll leave a full summary and plot analysis to one of these three-hour video essays on YouTube and try to delve into what makes Mouthwashing unique and spoiler-free.

The game begins with you playing as Captain Curly of the long-range spaceship Tulpar, deliberately setting the ship on a collision course with an asteroid. After a crash landing, the ship is damaged and flooded with emergency foam, sealing it against the vacuum of space. Curly is horribly mutilated and burned in an accident, leaving him unable to speak, but still painfully aware of everything around him. The iconic image of “Mouthwashing” is Curly’s broken body lying in the Tulpar medical bay, and the time of day and mood of the ship’s lighting screens fade to an eternal sunset.

Mouthwashing tells a non-linear story, alternating between Curly’s perspective before the disaster and First Officer/Acting Captain Jimmy’s perspective after. Tulpar is an amazing little video game environment, a phenomenon compared to games with exponentially higher budgets. It’s strangely homely before the crash, despite the ubiquitous motivational/discipline posters from Amazon-like employer Pony Express. Tulpar is full of great clutter and character details that make it feel like there’s a crew living in it, and the switching between pre- and post-disaster helps emphasize how drastically everything is deteriorating these days. One of the things I like most is the lack of windows and the aforementioned screens showing the time of day, which do nothing to alleviate the restricted, stuffy feeling of the place⁠—it resembles a submarine, and after the crash, the crew has no idea how to do. bad things look on the outside.

The claustrophobic horror with the specter of a cruel, uncaring corporation looming in the background reminded me of Alien, but there’s nothing supernatural or mysterious about the horror in Mouthwash, just the brutal aftermath of the human drama below… I’m sorry that this guy– capitalism. Someone really should sort this whole thing out. The aforementioned posters featuring the Pony Express mascot, Polle, made me fear that Mouthwashing’s workplace anxiety might turn out to be blunt and initially foregone. There are plenty of newfangled Vault Boys who get livid at the contrast between their cartoonish nature and the evil of their creators. But mouthwash is much smarter.

It’s a story about how a life without a future makes you bitter, about the diminutive joys and overwhelming horror that can be found in a shitty job, and how even the worst of circumstances don’t necessarily make one’s actions compassionate or justifiable. The members of the Tulpar crew met their fate in different ways: a failed student, a affluent kid pushed out of the nest, and an overachiever wondering if his success actually satisfied him, to name a few. They were all crushed by the lives they were thrown into, and their employer’s banal cruelty suggested that he himself was driven by the constant automation of their industry – after all, unmanned ships don’t go crazy and crash into asteroids.

When things get complicated and there’s still no rescue⁠—I guess this is a bit of a spoiler, but come on, it’s not a elated story⁠—it feels like someone’s ripping off a scab to drain the wound with a fire hose of pus. Ugliness and inhumanity in the later stages of history were always present, simmering and fermenting, which was the logical conclusion that humans were forced to live as processes. The fact that the Tulpar’s crew are so meticulously sketched and their characters believable and recognizable serves a similar purpose to the gloomy, trampled-on coziness of the ship before the disaster: it provides a point of reference for the horror.

Point and click

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The actual gameplay of Mouthwashing is less coherent than the story. Most of it goes smoothly, and there are a few strokes of genius that continue to impress me. There are also moments that really stink, but not in a “This game is meant to make me feel bad” kind of way, more like “I feel like this is a mistake or I’m frustrated and something’s missing.”

In most cases, mouthwash solves very elementary problems: finding different forms of key (numeric code, isopropyl alcohol, gun) to open different types of locks (doors, CHANGED, ALTERED). Optional hidden ID cards for each crew member make for an enjoyable scavenger hunt throughout the game, and I’m curious to see how the wardroom’s recipe system can be manipulated beyond the most essential plot elements. The way you have to click to open Curly’s jaw and administer painkillers is a brilliant mechanic that echoes macabrely throughout the game’s various scenes.

In more practical gameplay, where it fails most of the time, rinsing your mouth takes several tries. There are two puzzles at the end of the game that are aesthetically and thematically absolutely heartwarming: Climactic, shocking moments that really made my stomach churn. But my horror and disgust were tempered by the way they performed clunky, obtuse exercises that overstayed their welcome⁠—I’m not proud to say I googled what the hell I was supposed to do.

There is also one stealth sequence and one (sort of) action sequence. Some of the action was actually quite good and tense, but the stealth part, Yes. Beneath the layers of eerie fear is essentially a red-green lithe game that goes on for far too long. Doubly so if you’re as chunky as a bag of bricks like me and it takes some trial and error to figure out what’s going on.

But when it comes to atmosphere and narrative – the most essential parts of a narrative adventure, I’d have to guess – mouthwash hits the spot. Those crazy Swedes from Wrong Organ ate an absolute dinger and were rightly rewarded for it. It’s a horror film whose narrative and aesthetic will be remembered, celebrated and emulated in the future, and it feels like Wrong Organ is just getting started. The future of Tulpar may not be great, but the future of this group of game developers is dazzling.