Here’s a spooky psychological horror indie game from Swedish indie devs Wrong Organ (great studio name there). It’s a low-polygon romp that takes the original PlayStation’s graphical style and crafts a modern masterpiece.
Available on PC and all consoles, it launched in September 2024 and has quietly been making a name for itself.
Players are left stranded on a spaceship with four other crew members, with a perpetual sunset on the horizon and only the eternal bleakness of space for company. Huzzah!
OMG We’re All Doomed in Mouthwashing
The main things to remember about this game are as follows:
- It has nothing to do with mouthwash
- Potentially, that’s false advertising but we’ll let it off as the game is so good
- Space is horrible
- Don’t go to space
The plot is somewhat similar to Ridley Scott’s classic Alien (1979). Five ragtag crew members aboard the Pony Express freighter spaceship Tulpar crash into an asteroid.
Although the crew just about survives, the ship’s foam-based airbag safety mechanism blocks off important areas of cargo and other supplies.
With potential lethal decompression moments away, and one crew member left drenched in blood and bandages, for Captain Curly and the others it all looks a bit dreadful. And in time honoured sci-fashion, everything goes from bad to worse.
What plays out is a puzzle adventure game. There’s no combat or anything, it’s more a narrative-driven experience and, yes, we guess you’d call it a walking simulator.
Just one with some genuinely quite disturbed nonlinear plot developments (no spoilers here FYI).
Instead, there are disjointed plot twists, time dilations, non-diegetic transitions, deliberate glitches, and very little references to actual mouthwash. Instead, it’s just relentless hardship like this.
It’s melancholic and considered in tone. The crew go about with the general belief they’re already dead, so watching them over Mouthwashing’s length (it’s about two hours) is rather sad.
One by one, they come to some kind of realisation of how they can make their final moments worthwhile.
It’s a classic example of how video games can approach narrative differently to books, film, and TV. Mouthwashing may be a short horror game, but its bleak and nasty message will likely unnerve you (if not scare the bejeezus out of you).
Some gamers may find it a little too surreal, maybe even a little convoluted.
But the way it plays out, with that low poly visual style (used by other indie games such as the eerie Heilwald Loophole) is compelling. The game has a lot to say about contemplating isolation and the inevitability of your end, which plays out with an increasingly haunting synth score by Martin Halldin.
There are some fabulous sweeps with a chorus and beeps and boops to complement that.
Mouthwashing reminds us of a line by Rutger Hauer’s android character in Blade Runner:
“Quite the experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.”
The crew aren’t secretly robots, FYI, more along the lines they know they have a limited lifespan. Amongst the maudlin considerations they make as time runs out, they think of paracetamol and bandages.
Thanks to this game, we’d now be thinking of mouthwash.
Minty fresh mouthwash.
Go forth and buy some so that you may go out in a blaze of minty fresh breathed glory.
