Mouthwashing review: converging timelines make for an impressive and succinct descent into madness

Everyone on the ship has great oral hygiene, to be fair

Mouthwashing review
Compact horror that cleverly flits between timelines and puts you at the surreal heart of a growing nightmare.

• Developer: Wrong Organ
• Publisher: Critical Reflex
• Release: Out now
• On: Windows
• From: Steam, itch
• Price: £11/€12/$12
• Reviewed on: Intel Core i7-12700F, Nvidia RTX 3080, 16GB RAM, Windows 11

Mouthwashing's greatest triumph is placing you at the scene. The first being the most obvious crime: a captain steering their space freighter into harm's way, entirely on purpose. You're there, staring through the eyes of the person in the cockpit. You open the locker and grab the key and insert it into the safety override panel with a satisfying click. You see the plastic casing spring open and the red button emerge. You press it and listen to the sirens whirr. You grab the steering wheel and yank it.

Right from the start, you want to know why that's just happened and where, perhaps, did your character show signs of excess plaque and a disregard for flossing. But the scene's changed! And you're Jimmy, a bloke on a space freighter however many months before the crash. You learn that you were in the middle of hauling thousands of bottles of mouthwash for a company called Pony Express. After the captain's actions, you're now shipwrecked with very little hope of survival. And the mouthwash? Yeah, it's clogged up 90% of the ship, so only a few tunnels and areas are accessible.

Still, you meet your crewmates who aren't overly happy with the situation but surviving nonetheless. Swansea is a grumpy veteran and engineer, Daisuke is his surf bro intern, there's the ever anxious nurse Anya, and… Captain Curly who lies on a stretcher in the medical room. Basked in the orange glow of a sunset scene projected over his bandaged shoulder, Curly is a horribly disfigured victim of the crash, and a brilliantly upsetting flash of blood-soaked bandages and red scar tissue: a beacon and a clever reminder that, yes, it might seem sort of fine at that very second, but it's only going to get a whole lot darker.

To say any more about the story would be to spoil a horror game that only takes maybe a couple of hours to finish (perhaps a tad more or less). Still, it's how it presents you with scenes that grants the game a compelling cinematic shape. Where other games hit you with natural closing sequences, like bosses or fades to black, Mouthwashing is abrupt. You might latch a door closed and the game will freeze and the PSX visuals will bleed, a chugging noise in the background reminiscent of a tape spooling to a close. It's really quite something.

Not only is it a clever visual, though, it's a way of converging timelines that let you piece together important context. Early on you bear witness to the crew's first foray into survival and how they cope with the crash. The Pony Express mascot in the lounge is pristine and people have provisions next to their sleeping bags. Then the scene might switch and it's weeks out from the crash. Here, you get an insight into a freighter before stress and pressure and despair filtered into everyone's psyche. As one timeline moves forwards, the other stays close behind. You might switch to that scene, where you're latching a door closed in a panic - but you don't know why. Oh don't worry, you'll learn, as the first flashback might start you in the lounge, where the Pony Express mascot lies splintered apart.

And like I said earlier, you live through it all, and it really helps plant you in the ship as you both piece together how the story ends and everyone's inevitable descent into madness. Not only is it a brilliantly realised space, with the ship's narrow tunnels forever feeling a bit too quiet and twisty, or wall screens projecting calming night or day scenes - it's a pleasure (nightmare) on the ears. The hollow clunk of your steps, the sound of Curly's jaw creaking open as you plop a painkiller into his mouth, and the hum of your scanner really do envelop you in the ship's increasingly oppressive atmosphere.

Sounds? Spot on. Stuff you do with your hands? Also great. The make-up of what you actually do on the ship is simple, but wonderfully tactile. Objectives are often curt and sometimes bizarre, where Curly might request a cake, so you turn to the retro-futurist food-making machine and engage in some immerse simmery. You flick through instructions pinned to a wall, then find the sachets and plop them into the machine in the correct order, the machine depositing the finished article with a ping. I like how Mouthwashing always involves you in everything, where even the simplest actions have this air of, "I bet this'll affect the future timeline in some horrible way". You never feel at ease.

I wouldn't say, though, that Mouthwashing is all that scary; coming from a massive wimp like me. And I understand that scariness is subjective, but just know that this isn't a big, big jumpscare sort of experience. I'd say it's more upsetting and grisly, with only a couple of surreal sequences that are actually frightening from a threat standpoint (someone or something is out to get you). Otherwise, there's a lot of weirdness or yikes-ness, as you endure psychotic breaks spliced into scenes, where the ship contorts and eyes might spring from the walls.

Sometimes I'd say it suffers from a bit of surrealist tunnel meandering that drags on for a little too long, or surrealist interpretations of your character's psyche that seem a bit too on the nose. Some scenes also suffer from a lack of direction, where it's like, "Go here", and you might run around the ship for ages bumping your nose into every interactable thing, hoping it's the interactable thing that'll help you progress. On a couple of occasions, I actually turned to a walkthrough because I was genuinely a bit stumped. One solution I may have figured out if I really put my two brain cells to work, but one other? Nah, not a chance.

Mouthwashing's a hard one to review, namely because I have to dance around the story in fear of spoiling it for you. I hope I've at least got across how it tells the story and how it really is a well-told, succinct descent into a crew's deepest darkest secrets and struggles. Trust me, you'll want to play it in one or two sittings, mainly because you won't be able to peel yourself away from it. The only times you might, are when it doesn't signpost those solutions well enough. Go forth and swill your mouth out with this one, I say.