Mouthwashing Review — I Hope It Hurts

I review a fair share of horror games here at Try Hard Guides. I’m forthright about my love of the genre and my recent foray into writing horror of my own in my reviews. With the influx of titles coming across my greedy reviewer fingers, I would venture to guess that I’m building something of a reputation among developers of the genre. Boy, do I hope this is true, because if so, it means I’m going to keep getting the chance to play games like Mouthwashing, which is one gnarly surprise and something I absolutely was not prepared for.

Psychological horror is hard to do. I won’t pretend that I’m an expert on it, but I can safely identify some of the tropes that bad or middling psychological horror stories tend to fall into. Striking and thought-provoking imagery is perhaps one of, if not the most important factor in making your psychological horror project shine, and a failed attempt will often throw creepy and weird visuals at you that don’t make any sense. Good psychological horror also needs to tell a story and deal with themes of the human psyche—stress, fear, grief, loneliness, whatever—as that is the whole, you know, the psychological part of psychological horror.

How your project handles these two aspects, in my amateur opinion, is essentially what will determine its success. Bad psychological horror tends to fail in one or both of these areas. Mouthwashing excels in both.

Mouthwashing tells the story of the Tulpar, an intergalactic shipping freighter captained by a small crew with eight months left in their current journey. Things take a tragic turn when the ship’s captain unexpectedly attempts murder-suicide, crashing the Tulpar into an oncoming asteroid. As a result, the ship is left in ruins, the crew with limited food supplies, and the former captain an armless, legless husk screaming in the med bay. As the former copilot and new acting captain, it is up to you to keep everyone alive and preferably sane until help can arrive.

Right off the bat, Mouthwashing has an incredibly strong premise. Beyond just being a tragic and stressful situation, Mouthwashing creates palpable suspense and intrigue in its story through its use of non-linear storytelling. Throughout the game, you constantly jump back and forth in the timeline, acting out events before the crash and many months into the survival effort. Everything is presented in such a way that you constantly question exactly what is happening around you, and you won’t get answers without finding a whole lot more to question.

The game also presents some profoundly interesting imagery, all of which makes perfect contextual sense with the themes and story of the game while still managing to feel supernatural and weird and just, chef’s kiss, absolutely glorious. The game constantly warps your surroundings without warning to present an incredibly convincing visual representation of insanity. Seemingly normal moments can seamlessly warp into unreal horrorscapes, making our perspective feel unreliable and forcing you to wonder just how accurate our perception of events is.

It isn’t just the environment that Mouthwashing likes to present as unpredictable and unreliable; the game will constantly, and I mean constantly, trip you out as a player by using special visual and audio effects to mess with your personal perception. The game will seemingly ‘freeze’ at moments, the audio will skip, the image will smear, and other such fun tricks will likely convince you that the game has crashed or been corrupted several times during your playthrough. It isn’t just that these effects happen, but that Mouthwashing uses them unpredictably, ending segments at unexpected times or switching out how they are used so you never quite get used to the effects happening.

On top of all this, stunning imagery is a story that gives it contextual relevance and meaning.

Mouthwashing deals with a number of themes in its story: betrayal, isolation, guilt, imposter syndrome, and the search for a sense of satisfaction in one’s life, along with the weight of being unable to find it. Among all the horror are several quiet, shockingly sincere, and touching moments that make you feel… well, awful, frankly. Mouthwashing is not a game that will make you feel good, but art certainly doesn’t always have to.

That really is what I would call Mouthwashing: art in game form, as many great horror games tend to be. It did much more than simply scare me or fill me with a feeling of dread; it also made me think. It tricked me into genuinely caring about its cast of characters, none of whom are their best selves, and inevitably broke my heart with each and every one of them.

Beyond that, it left me with so many questions and no answers. This wasn’t a case of incomplete storylines but rather purposefully ambiguous moments meant to tease you and prod at your desire to know more. In many ways, part of the horror comes from leaving these questions unanswered, knowing you’ll never get the satisfaction of complete closure, especially regarding the game’s characters.

Poor, sweet Anya. Add her to the list of horror protagonists I have a vague crush on.

All I really have to say about Mouthwashing is that you should buy it. Buy it, play it, fall in love with the game like I did, and leave a great review on the Steam page. Share it with all your friends so these wonderful developers can keep making games, and I can keep getting review copies to scare me shitless late at night.

Try Hard Guides received a PC review code for this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Mouthwashing is available on Steam.