There were a few different games at this year’s PAX West that struck me as being inspired by labor issues, particularly those that spun out of the pandemic lockdowns in 2020. Some played it for laughs (Puzzle Depot), others for absurdity (Threshold), but they all draw on the experience of being an expendable, replaceable cog in the machine.
Mouthwashing starts there, but then pinwheels off into surreal insanity. Now available on Steam, it’s a short horror adventure game about, to simplify it dramatically, space truckers who are doomed from every angle. If you’re looking for something weird, creepy, and short to play for Halloween 2024, Mouthwashing is a decent pick.
Mouthwashing is set aboard the Tulpar, a space freighter with a 5-person crew. Six months into its latest shipping run, the captain deliberately crashes the ship in an attempt to kill everyone aboard. Instead, the rest of the crew survive without a scratch, while the captain is left badly mutilated.
The crash leaves most of the ship full of impact foam, which forces the crew into close quarters. They’ve got nothing to do but watch their supplies diminish and wait for a rescue that might never come. Out of desperation, they crack open the cargo hold in search of more supplies, and discover they were risking their lives to transport thousands of bottles of alcoholic mouthwash.
Now the crew of the Tulpar gets to be scared, frustrated, trapped, and since they’re not in a situation where they can be choosy about calories, always just a little drunk. Before long, you’re watching a bad situation get worse through the eyes of people who were already close to the breaking point. If you think you know how this will go, you’re probably only half right.
Mouthwashing tells the rest of its story through a series of short, interactive chapters, which frequently make big, unannounced jumps in time and space. You get to see the preparation for the trip, which is full of bad decisions and corporate neglect, and how it eventually leads up to the nightmare that the Tulpar becomes.
The parts of Mouthwashing that are set before the crash are some of its most effectively tense, as you see all the little frustrations of life aboard the ship start to compound on one another. Everything aboard the Tulpar is designed for maximum profit at the cost of maximum human damage; for example, there’s a poster on the wall that informs you that employees don’t get to sleep for longer than 5 hours at a time. This is what you’d get if Amazon made spaceships, and you can see the stress fractures coming from a long way off. It’s a wonder anyone in this setting ever lived long enough to complete one of these shipments.
In those more grounded moments, Mouthwashing is the kind of slow interactive adventure that people usually want to call a “walking simulator.” You stroll around the ship, talk to the crew, and solve a couple of simple problems. It’s well-told, with some solid turns of phrase, but it’s not much of a game.
As the characters begin to psychologically disintegrate, Mouthwashing takes that as a chance to get weirder, to the point where it changes genres several times. This doesn’t always work in its favor, like one scene that’s a poorly labeled stealth challenge, but it does make it hard to put down. It’s impossible to tell what’s going to happen next, or how.
That’s driven home by Mouthwashing’s scene transitions, which feel like they’ve been put into the game specifically to drive other game developers nuts. Mouthwashing never simply cuts to black when it could implement a graphic “tear” or a simulated audio glitch.
The effect is to make the game look like it just barely didn’t crash to desktop, as a visual reflection of the characters’ downward spiral, and they’re always timed to take you by surprise. It reminds me of the weirder insanity effects in Eternal Darkness for the GameCube, where the game would pretend to turn off your TV or format your memory card just to mess with you.
That’s one of a couple of dozen storytelling decisions that make me want to recommend Mouthwashing, but it does have one big point against it: it’s really short. A single run through the game might take you 2 to 3 hours. It’s good for a long, surreal evening, but after that, you’ve seen most of what it has to show you.
That’s not much of a drawback, though. Mouthwashing is effectively creepy in ways that most other games don’t bother to explore, and dodges a lot of the pitfalls of modern adventure games by moving too fast and being too weird to ever be dull. It’s going to stick with me for a while, both for its baroque gore and its modern style of corporate horror.
[Mouthwashing, developed by Wrong Organ and published by Critical Reflex, is now available on Steam for $13.99. This review was written using a copy of the game bought on Steam by Hard Drive.]
