Mouthwashing review – 2024’s most difficult game, but not in the way you might expect | Games

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Mouthwashing review – 2024’s most difficult game, but not in the way you might expect | Games

It is perhaps poetic that throughout this year, the 30th anniversary of the PlayStation, developers have found such a rich vein of horror in early 3D visuals. Crow Country, Fear the Spotlight and now Mouthwashing all make terrifying use of low-poly characters, smeared textures and muted colour palettes to generate dread and abjection – and in this sci-fi odyssey from Wrong Organ they’re also brilliantly utilised to symbolise complete psychological breakdown.

The setup to Mouthwashing is simple and familiar: when a hulking spacecraft crashes in a remote part of the galaxy, the small crew slowly goes insane waiting for a rescue that is never going to come. Not helping matters is their cargo: millions of gallons of high-alcohol mouthwash – which very quickly gets abused by the desperate and deeply flawed castaways.

With the captain gravely injured, you play mostly as second in command Jimmy as he takes over the survival efforts. But you soon discover everyone has something to hide, from paranoid medic Anya to bullish mechanic Swansea. Everything on the ship is given a sinister edge from the disgusting food-processing equipment to the huge LED displays continually showing images of romantic sunsets and fluffy clouds.

What sounds like a tense thriller, however, is in fact a surreal exploration of social and mental deterioration. Characters hallucinate wildly, the narrative chops from before the ****** to after it, swapping between the two in a dizzying chronological dance; the ship itself seems to mutate in response to the paranoid delusions of its inhabitants; the weird vaporwave soundtrack hums and blasts in discordant rushes. There are elements of Event Horizon, Solaris and High Life in the interplay of human and technological breakdown; the way the ship’s U-boat-like corridors expand and contract like intestinal passageways; the way the crew’s psychoses are reflected back at them in smashed screens and ruined control panels. It is grim, fascinating stuff.

There are puzzles to solve and items to collect and combine, but nothing works as it should and the game continually plays with and questions your assumptions. It may remind some players of the cult hit Clickolding in the way it asks questions about player culpability and complicity – the things it wants you to do with the only weapons on board, the way it makes you hold the Captain’s mouth open to feed him painkillers as he moans and cries – although the visuals are nostalgic, your connection with what is happening on that ship is very real and very alive. There are serious messages too about guilt, grief and alcoholism which may land heavily with people who have been affected by these things.

Mouthwashing is a difficult but engrossing experience, a work of surreal horror invoking the cinema of David ****** and Dario Argento, but also extremely functional as a game, or at least a study of what games are and what they want us to do. That titles like this are still being made and have global distribution is one of the few bright spots in a depressing year for the games business. Book yourself in for a flight as soon as possible, you will and won’t regret it.

Mouthwashing is available now, £10.99

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