Mario Bautista
While I think space horror sometimes feels like a known quantity as a subgenre, Mouthwashing, from developer Wrong Organ, constantly kept me on my toes. From its strange title to its jarring opening, it kept me off balance in all the ways good horror should. Right off the bat you can feel the intriguing mix of tones that the game plays with, setting you up for a story full of memorable characters and bizarre events.
You follow the five members of the crew aboard The Tulpar, a space freighter that crashes, leaving the captain incapacitated and the crew desperately scrambling for survival as their resources rapidly diminish. This seems like a common story, but Wrong Organ imbues this game with so much personality right from the jump, throwing them into a psychological pressure cooker with a heavy dose of surrealism.
What really makes Mouthwashing unique is the narrative, particularly the structure it uses to tell it. After opening with a quick text block that shows the stats of the ship, along with the ominous message “I hope this hurts,” your first title card tells you when you are in the story: “0 days before the crash.” It’s an ingenious way to immediately put you on edge, trapping you in an inevitable situation that you have to watch play out to your own horror.
We’re so often used to games being more narratively linear, telling stories from to back with occasional flashbacks to important scenes. Mouthwashing makes jumps integral to its storytelling, moving around in time to slowly piece together the full picture of what happened to the Tuplar both before and after the crash. Obviously this isn’t a new storytelling technique in fiction, see this year’s Strange Darling for a movie that does something similar, but it feels so experimental in video game form, cutting away from scenes at weird places that leave you scrambling to figure out the context of your new moment.
This technique does a great job of fleshing out the small cast of characters that you interact with. It allows you to get a notion of who someone is while in survival mode after the crash, then challenges or reinforces your impression of them by flashing back and showing how they were beforehand. Given the high pressure situation presented, the already strained relationships between the crew are tested as things seem more and more dire as time goes on. The web of tension that connects them is extremely compelling, and it’s great to watch it all unravel in ways that catch you off guard.
As far as gameplay goes, Mouthwashing is a first person, narrative-focused adventure game. You’ll walk around and talk to various characters while solving puzzles that often involve interacting with various objects you find scattered about. But none of that description really captures the feeling of what playing the game is like. Some of the puzzles are simple adventure game things where you combine items, but others can operate on an almost P.T.-like dream logic that’s exciting to try to work out. The gameplay always complements the narrative and mood of the game in a way that justifies it being an interactive piece of media rather than a movie.
One of my favorite ways it does this is with its use of objectives being shown on screen. Initially, this won’t seem like a big deal, but coupled with the narrative jumps, it can be exhilarating. When you’re dropped into a new moment of the story and still trying to figure out what’s going on, a completely unexpected objective can show up on your screen. A small, spoiler-light example of this is when you are transported back to before the crash, you’re given the objective to “Deliver the News.” At this moment, nothing in the narrative has come up that would seem “newsworthy,” so I was rushing to go find the rest of the crew in order for me as the player to find out what my character was going to tell them. It’s a clever use of the language of video games to create anticipation, and it’s really impressive how many times they find ways to play with this idea.
Initially, it seems like the setting of the game is pretty limited. You’re aboard the crashed Tulpar, and it doesn’t have a terribly large layout. There are a few rooms that you go between, and you very quickly get used to the place thanks to a good visual distinction between areas. It definitely has its own personality among the pantheon of space freighters, particularly due to a prevalent cartoon horse mascot, but it feels pretty cramped at first. This acts as a great way to set you up for the more surreal moments of the game where they start playing with the space to unsettle you. Hallways change, weird stuff grows on the walls, and sometimes you’re moved to different places altogether as the psyche of the characters begins to rapidly deteriorate. It’s never really clear whether this is something that’s meant to be literally happening or if all the surreal stuff is just in your head, but in the end it does really matter. The mood it evokes is such a powerful one, always finding ways to lull you into comfort before pulling the rug out from under you again.
Everything in Mouthwashing is presented in a beautiful low-poly style that perfectly captures the world of the Tulpar. There’s so much life to the ship, and a lot of that has to do with the strong visual sense that makes the most out of the style. When the game dips into surreal situations, the imagery shines even more, producing some wild and vibrant scenes that will stick with me for a long time.
Even though the gameplay is all in first person, there are some really great directorial choices in the conversation cutscenes, with cinematic camera angles that add so much drama to moments. As a bit of visual flair, the game will fill the screen with words for brief flash frames, often accompanied by some glitchy static effects, adding further punctuation to the sequences. You can tell just by watching a trailer that the strong visual identity of the game is something that sets it apart from the rest of the pack.
If it feels like I’ve been vague about the specifics of Mouthwashing’s story, that’s because it’s really best if you go in blind. The game only runs about two and a half hours, but it’s the perfect runtime for the journey it takes you on. It’s exciting to see games learning the right lessons from cinema, such as nonlinear editing and compelling shot framing, rather than just filling a game with overlong, non-interactive cutscenes and calling it cinematic. It’s a perfect combination of interpersonal drama and surreal horror that’s thrown in a well-paced, high-tension situation. After beating Mouthwashing, I immediately downloaded Wrong Organ’s previous game, How Fish is Made, because I could not wait to see more from the studio.
Review key provided by publisher. Mouthwashing releases September 26th on Steam.
