At first glance, Mouthwashing appears to be about the perils of capitalism. This is not a galaxy of post-scarcity. The space transport you find yourself forced to crash into an asteroid in the game’s opening scene does not invoke Star Trek. The people on board with you are not the friendly if unsteady crew from Murderbot. The ship itself has no sense of home to it.
Mouthwashing features a wolf in sheep’s clothing corporate entity that is now the standard bearer of late capitalism in video games. There’s a cute mascot and commercial jingle, but obviously it is sinister underneath all that. There’s no sense of hope for our crew, least of all from their corporate overlords, but as we’ll learn through three playable hours of horrific events, there was no hope even before the crash.
Take a swig from the bottle now, as we’re going to start with what the game is really about.
Mouthwashing is about rape. This is not a metaphor about what capitalism does to its populace, but the inciting event for the entire game. Not only that, but you play as either the rapist or an apologist the entire game. It’s rough to experience! The game attempts some subterfuge at the beginning about who actually crashed the ship, but its real deception is hiding the true crime of our player character.
I think it’s okay that the rape itself is not text in the game, the subtext is plainly obvious. The discovery that one of the characters is pregnant and then piecing previous facts together yourself is painfully rewarding. And it’s possible developer Wrong Organ made the correct choice in not explicitly showing or referencing the sexual assault, as seen late last year with the game Horses. While the modern games industry is well into middle age, the storefronts are still cowards in the face of payment processors.
But what is Mouthwashing beyond this challenging premise? It feels mostly like a walking simulator (always complimentary) with non-linear vignettes jumping you between both time periods around the crash and player characters. You’re suddenly transported to a different part of the ship with almost no context of what’s going on beyond a simple goal ranging from “Acquire Code Scanner” to “Give Curly his Fucking Medicine.” From there you need to speak with crewmates, explore the ship for an object, or perform some act of unavoidable violence.
It’s never an easy game to play, even the birthday cutting cake scene is poisoned with knowledge of what’s to come. The gameplay itself is simplistic outside a few surprisingly challenging sections; not exactly tough, but there’s a couple of difficulty spikes that had me checking if there was a way to skip it out of curiosity (there isn’t). There’s a final sequence that’s quite scary to start with, but by the time I beat it felt mostly silly. I even got an achievement for failing it ten times!
Mouthwashing isn’t a satisfying or fun game to play, I felt I had to unstick myself from it upon completion. But it does offer a mature storyline in a compact package so often missing these days. The puzzles and actions required of you are thought provoking while being relatively simple, and you will be challenged in connecting the thematic and narrative dots together. Like modern elevated horror on film, I can’t recommend Mouthwashing to everyone, but I also think the audience for it may include you, even if you aren’t naturally predicated on the genre.
