🧴 Mouthwashing

Steam:

The five crew members of the Tulpar are stranded in the empty reaches of space, shrouded in perpetual sunset. God is not watching.

I watched and rewatched playthroughs of this game and was blown away by the masterful storytelling. I highly recommend playing it yourself without spoilers if you enjoy impactful and subversive stories (and are an adult).

Spoilers ahead. Trigger warning

Mouthwashing is brilliant in multiple completely different respects:

Film / game blending

Mouthwashing innovates and vastly improves upon the “cinematic game” blend that AAA titles like God of War / Until Dawn / Detroit Become Human have been trying to perfect for a while now.

Historically, these AAA titles may have been a decent experience, but the film / game aspects have felt disjointed and unharmonious.

In contrast, Mouthwashing seamlessly blends gameplay, dialogue and horror elements in a way that is much more fluid and intuitive than I’ve ever seen. You don’t have those moments of, “Now we’re back to the game part,” or “Oh now we’re back to the movie part.” It’s all one cohesive experience.

Deep narrative with obscured message and themes

It took multiple viewings and Googling to fully appreciate the obscured narrative, which made me appreciate the insane level of planning and depth that went into the story. However even at a surface level the game is entertaining and engaging, and hints very heavily at the message it’s trying to convery.

The ability to remain entertaining at a surface level rescues Mouthwashing from potentially being a pretentious art-piece that is hard to understand without looking up explanations online (e.g. Darksouls lore).

Instead it’s elevated to a great piece of media that most people will praise and recommend even if they don’t fully grasp the full meaning of the experience on the first playthrough.

Justification for an obscured message

Mouthwashing tells it’s story in a non-linear and obscured way. Time skips back/forward constantly, and the player’s perspective is swapped between two characters, Jimmy and Curly. Both are complicit in the rape of another crew member aboard their spacecraft, but this is not revealed until near the end of the game. Initially, the player is led to believe that Curly (the captain of the ship) simply went insane and crashed the ship. The other three characters - Anya, Swansea and Daisuke - hint at what’s really going on, but don’t outright tell you. By the end of the game, it’s up to the player to piece together how much of a turd Jimmy and Curly are, who crashed the ship and why.

The reason the message is obscured is not just to be artsy. The themes of Mouthwashing revolve around rape and the tribal behaviour of people who became aware of the crime after the fact. Commonly and illogically we see these people cling to loyalty to their friends/family to protect them from the consequences, rather than helping the victim. In other cases, more sympathetic people may offer support to the victim, but stop short of advocating for retribution in order to “keep the peace”.

I believe that we are led to believe in a false conclusion from the beginning and the overall narrative of Mouthwashing is so convulted for a purpose; it intentionally mirrors the way that true events surrounding a sexual assault IRL are so easily twisted and obscured by the people who are aware of it.

Justification for a non-linear timeline and surreal sequences

Going deeper than the theme of sexual assault from a “tangible impact on others” perspective, Mouthwashing delves into the psyche of the rapist by placing the player in their shoes for part of the experience. We explore their motivations for commiting the act in the first place, as well as their despicable ability to compartmentalize the aftermath into one where they are the good guy, trying to solve everyone’s problems.

It’s an excellent and deep portrayal of a mentally disturbed person whose justifications only make sense with a huge helping of cognitive dissonance. The game explores this theme through horrific surrealist sequences involving infinite liminal hallways, giant demonic horses and centipedes made of baby parts. All of which are meant to represent different fears and anxieties of the rapist character haunting himself.

I particularly enjoyed a particular sequence where the mascot of the spacecraft’s company “Pony Express”, mocks/challenges the rapist character on his motives and actions. The rapist hyper-focuses on remorse directed towards his male friend who was complicit in the rape, rather than the victim, and the mascot points this out to himself in a way that is very blunt and confrontational to the rapist character, but is only clear to the player if they have really been paying attention up until that point.

I believe that the story is told in a non-linear fashion and with these surreal sequences to reflect and hint at the mental state of the rapist character.

Conclusion

I’ve alread dived much deeper than I planned to in this article. In summary I applaud the developers of Mouthwashing for creating a great thought-provoking game that does a fantastic job of exploring a dark topic in an entertaining way.