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Mouthwashing is the most horrifying game of 2024KILLS 99.9%
KILLS 99.9%
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Critical Reflex
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Critical Reflex
Ed hasalready reviewedthis first-person sci-fi horror, and he’s done it without spoiling the story. So if you’ve never heard of the game, I implore you to start there. Because I’m going to discuss a lot about the characters and plot. For me, everything interesting about Mouthwashing happens in the dialogue and the body language of its castaways, in the camerawork and set dressing that fills the claustrophobic, submarine-like corridors of the Tulpar. To celebrate why I think it’s one of the best and most horrifying games this year, I have to get deep into its dithered guts.
Mouthwashing — Out Now!Watch on YouTube
Mouthwashing — Out Now!
To sum up: the ship has crashed. The captain, Curly, lies covered in bandages, his face a mess of blood, muscle, and exposed teeth, with a single eye rolling around in grotesque watchfulness. It seems the cockpit was the worst place to be during the crash, and he has been horrifically burned and injured, unable even to speak. You now play as Jimmy, the co-pilot who has taken charge of the remaining crew. Everyone else seems to have survived the crash - gruff engineer Swansea, high-spirited intern Daisuke, and nervous nurse Anya. Tensions are high and they are arguing. Eventually, they agree to open the cargo hold (against company policy) to see if there’s anything useful that will help in their rescue on this remote interstellar rock.
But inside the cargo hold, they just find millions of bottles of mouthwash.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Critical Reflex
“Mouthwash was the first idea,” said the developers ina Steam post, “but we briefly considered hand sanitizer, rubbing alcohol or just straight up hard liquor. Mouthwash just has that vibe of being the worst and most absurd option… We considered having a few variants of different flavours but the uniformity of all the bottles being the exact same kinda adds to the sad horror of it all.”
Aside from the existential terror that comes from knowing your job (and life) is worth little more than an ocean of minty fresh oral hygiene, the mouthwash is a comically tragic symbol of everything to come. No matter how much of this high-alcohol solution you chug or swish, some stains do not come out. “Kills 99.9% of all germs” says the bottle’s label with unconvincing enthusiasm.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Critical Reflex
There is also a lot of “funsettling” comedy in the day-to-day exploration of the ship. Swansea gets shatterblasted on mouthwash, and you use an axe to dig clumsy intern Daisuke out of theDemolition Man-like crash foamthat fills the ship. The crew might struggle to survive on meagre food supplies following the crash, but in a scene before the disaster, you’ll make a birthday cake using a sci-fi mixing machine.
But it’s at that birthday scene that the game’s biggest structural strength starts to shine - the regular changing of perspective. As you go about the game, you’ll switch back and forth between two characters. In the post-crash scenes you play as the put-upon Jimmy, but before the crash you inhabit the questionable captain Curly - before he becomes the mutilated cause of all this survival horror. We see Curly’s various actions as leader, and we wonder exactly how this seemingly mild pilot goes from being vaguely discontent at work to fully self-destructive and dangerous.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Critical Reflex
The twist is: he does not. As the disjointed narrative falls together, and each of the crew come to distinctly tragic ends, we learn that Jimmy was the one to intentionally crash the ship. The captain, rushing into the cockpit to try and prevent the crash, is caught in the worst place and mutilated to the point of being unable to speak or tell the crew the truth about what happened. Jimmy blames everything on Curly, takes command of the shipwreck, and - in sequences that become increasingly uncomfortable to listen to - he force feeds the injured captain painkillers to keep the mutilated man from moaning.
As acting chief, Jimmy is now in a position of authority he has perhaps wanted but has never been able to reach. Looking on during all these events is a statue of the ever-freakish mascot of your company, Pony Express, whose tinny corporate voice becomes a lodestone for the classic horror game scares that are threaded through the story.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Critical Reflex
It’s not just a disturbing horse mascot that could easily guest star in a Five Nights At Freddy’s game. There is a running motif of horses throughout. The monsters that hunt the player during gamey “stay quiet or die” moments are awful, long necked ponies or centipedes made of mangled mascot. The ship - the Tulpar - is named for the winged horse of Turkic mythology. And during one psych evaluation, Jimmy jokes that he is becoming “sexually excited at the sight of cartoon horses”. The captain writes this off as Jimmy being Jimmy, a joke about the company mascot. Anya finds it discomfiting. In fact, if we look closely at all Anya’s dealings with Jimmy, we see a woman whose crossed arms, hunched shoulders, and stuttering responses suggest someone who is often uncomfortable in her co-worker’s presence.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Critical Reflex
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Critical Reflex
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Critical Reflex
The disfigured face of the captain, in the meantime, takes on new meaning. A swivelling eye that seems monstrous at the start of the game becomes an eye of terror once you know Jimmy is responsible for the crash. It swivels round the room helplessly looking for the man who is a danger to everyone. Eventually it becomes an eye of judgement - unblinkingly watching Jimmy as he navigates the steel corridors of his own psyche.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Critical Reflex
Mouthwashing’s horror underpins how hard it is to truly know the inner workings of another person’s mind. Even when we are immersed in Jimmy’s own body, seeing the world through his eyes, it still takes us the whole game to understand what he did, if not 100% the reasoning for why he did it. There is something very Iago-like about Jimmy, in that his motivation comes from resentment, but the origin of that resentment is a cloud of mixed vapours. He is implied to be poorer than the other crew members. He is going to be laid off with the rest of the crew, we find out. He’s on a lower “rung” at work, he says to the captain - a man he sometimes seems to look up to and sometimes chops up to eat.
But it is his act of sexual assault, and the consequences of it, that sets Jimmy’s doom spiral into motion. He only steers the ship into that rock after he finds out Anya is pregnant, we discover. Exactly what is going through his head when he directs the ship doomward, it’s hard to know. Fear? Anger? Despair? Self-loathing? Some hideous mouthwash-flavoured cocktail of all these emotions? The words that appear - “I hope this hurts” - could be interpreted as both “I hope this hurts me” or “I hope this hurtsall of us”. Self-destruction, we’re reminded, does not exclude the destruction of others.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Critical Reflex
