The greatest triumph of mouthwash is putting you on the scene. The first is the most obvious crime: the captain intentionally directing his space freighter into danger. You’re there, looking through the eyes of the person in the cockpit. You open the locker, grab the key and insert it into the security control panel with a satisfying click. You see the plastic case open and a red button appear. You press it and you hear sirens. You grab the steering wheel and yank it.
Right off the bat, you want to know why this happened and where perhaps your character was showing signs of excessive plaque build-up and neglecting flossing. But the scene has changed! And you’re Jimmy, the guy on the space freighter, no matter how many months before the crash. You find out that you were transporting thousands of bottles of mouthwash for a company called Pony Express. After the captain’s actions, you are shipwrecked and have very little hope of survival. And the mouthwash? Yes, it has clogged 90% of the ship so only a few tunnels and areas are accessible.
Despite this, you encounter crew members who are not too elated with the situation, but survive nonetheless. Swansea is a grumpy veteran and engineer, Daisuke is his surfing intern brother, there’s the ever-anxious nurse Anya, and… Captain Curly lies on a stretcher in the medical room. Basking in the orange sunset glow projected onto his bandaged arm, Curly is a horribly disfigured victim of the crash and an incredibly depressing flash of blood-soaked bandages and red scar: a beacon and a clever reminder that yes, maybe it seems basically okay in that same second, but then it gets much darker.
To say more about the story would be to spoil a horror game that only takes maybe a few hours (maybe a little less) to complete. Still, the way it presents scenes gives the game a fascinating cinematic feel. Where other games hit you with natural ending sequences like bosses or fades to black, the mouthwash is violent. You can lock the door and the game will freeze, the PSX graphics will bleed, and you’ll hear a choking sound in the background like a tape being closed. It’s really something.
However, this is not only a clever visual effect, but also a way of converging the timeline to piece together essential context. At the beginning, you will witness the crew’s first foray into survival and how they deal with the disaster. The Pony Express mascot in the living room is immaculate and people have provisions next to their sleeping bags. Then the scene may change and weeks may pass since the disaster. Here you get a glimpse of the freighter before stress, pressure and despair seeped into everyone’s psyche. As one timeline moves forward, the other remains close behind. You can skip to that scene where you slam the door in a panic – but you don’t know why. Oh, don’t worry, you’ll find out because the first flashback may start in the living room, where the Pony Express mascot lies smashed to pieces.
And as I said before, you experience it all and it really helps you sit on the ship as you both figure out how the story ends and everyone’s inevitable descent into madness. Not only is it a brilliantly realized space, with the ship’s narrow tunnels always seeming a little too silent and winding, or the wall screens displaying calming night or day scenes, it’s a pleasure (nightmare) for the ears. The numb thud of your footsteps, the sound of Curly’s jaw creaking as you pop the painkiller into his mouth, and the hum of the scanner really surround you with the increasingly oppressive atmosphere of the ship.
Sounds good? On site. Things you do with your hands? Also great. The flow of what you actually do on the ship is straightforward but wonderfully tactile. The goals are often terse and sometimes outlandish, where Curly might ask for a cake, so you turn to a retrofuturistic food-making machine and engage in immersion in the fire. You look through the instructions pinned to the wall, then find the sachets and throw them into the machine in the correct order, and the machine deposits the finished item with a beep. I like that mouthwash always involves you in everything, where even the simplest of activities have a “I bet this will have a terrible effect on the future timeline” vibe. You never feel at ease.
However, I wouldn’t say that mouthwash is that terrible; coming from a large wimp like me. I understand that fear is subjective, but please know that this is not some great jump scare experience. I’d say it’s more depressing and macabre, just having a few surreal sequences that are really scary from a threat standpoint (someone or something is out to get you). Otherwise, there’s plenty of weirdness and nastiness as you experience psychotic breakdowns split into scenes where the ship warps and your eyes can pop out of the walls.
At times I’d say it suffers from a bit of surreal tunneling that goes on a little too long, or surreal interpretations of your character’s psyche that seem a little too far-fetched. Some scenes also lack direction, like “Go here” and you end up running around the ship for ages bumping your nose into every interactive thing, hoping that interactive thing will support you progress. There were a few times when I actually turned to the walkthrough because I was honestly a bit stumped. One solution I power I already know if I really activated two brain cells, but one? No, no chance.
Mouthwash is hard to review, namely because I have to circle around the story for fear of spoiling it for you. I hope I at least understood how he tells this story and what a well-told, concise entry into the crew’s deepest, darkest secrets and struggles it truly is. Trust me, you’ll want to play this game in one or two sittings, mainly because you won’t be able to put it down. The only times you can do this is when it doesn’t indicate those solutions well enough. Go and rinse your mouth out with this, I say.
