There are plenty of games out there if you’re looking to self-soothe in stressful times. The entire cozy games subgenre is built on that idea, and even in games focused on intense action or horror, there’s catharsis to be found in fighting for your life. But instead of any of those, I’m here to tell you why you should play a game that will make you feel like absolute garbage.
Everything that happens in developer Wrong Organ’s Mouthwashing is your fault. Your very first action in the game is to crash the spaceship you’re on. Before meeting any characters or learning anything about the game’s story, you find yourself with a first-person view of a cockpit, with a screen alerting you of an oncoming asteroid, hurtling from your right. The only option the game offers is to turn towards the oncoming threat, then disable the ship’s autopilot to ensure you hit it.
From that moment on, your point of view shifts between the ship’s captain, Curly, playing through events before the crash, and his second-in-command, Jimmy, to see what happens after the crash. That’s because Curly was found horribly injured in the cockpit after the crash and is now unable to move or speak. Through this nonlinear structure, you learn what led up to the game’s self-destructive opening and what happens to the crew afterward — and both answers are worse than you could possibly expect.
The biggest horror games tend to focus on monsters. Whether you’re battling zombies (or zombie-adjacent creatures) in Resident Evil and Signalis or running from a xenomorph in Alien: Isolation, figuring out how to survive or even defeat your inhuman foes is a key part of most horror games. Mouthwashing is also concerned with monsters, but in this case, the monsters are human, and there’s no escaping or beating them.
The entirety of Mouthwashing takes place in a few small corridors of your ship, the Tulpar, which is essentially a long-haul cargo truck in space. After the crash, much of the craft is left inaccessible, and its crew of five takes refuge in the few remaining rooms as they try to survive. Most of its two-hour runtime is spent talking to other characters and solving extremely light puzzles, with just a few instances of more complicated mechanics (which tend to be far less satisfying than the walking and talking bits). That means you’ll quickly get to know the Tulpar and the rest of its crew — engineers Swansea and Daisuke and nurse Anya.
With its small cast, its claustrophobic setting, and its story focusing on the idea that the people closest to you might pose the greatest danger, Mouthwashing reminds me most of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. It shares another similarity with that classic work of psychological horror in that isolation — whether in a remote hotel or the void of space — leads to a psychological breakdown. As the Tulpar’s crew reckons with the possibility that they’ll never be rescued, their grip on reality begins to break down. Some of the game’s most striking images come in sequences where the physical setting falls away, leaving you and your character stranded in visions both horrifying and beautiful.
But the core of Mouthwashing’s horror isn’t in these fantastical sequences, but in its mundane reality. Before the crash, the crew learns that this will be their last voyage, as the company they work for is shutting down. Even before they’re forced to confront the possibility of perishing in space, the idea that they’ll be out of work in a world that values them less than it values their ship’s profits has the crew beginning to turn on each other. And when the mystery of what truly caused the crash is revealed, it hits equally close to home, rooted not in the game’s sci-fi setting or its reality-breaking premise, but in a horrific act of brutality among its crew.
Full of unsettling images and drenched in a sense of dread, Mouthwashing isn’t an easy game to get through. Even reaching the end isn’t a relief, as everything you’ve just been through will stick with you long past the finale. It’s definitively not a game for everyone, but if you can stomach its brand of misery, it’s well worth it to experience one of the most haunting horror video games yet.
