Mouthwash Review: Converging timelines make for an impressive and concise descent into madness

Mouthwash’s greatest triumph is that it puts you on the spot. The first is the most obvious crime: a captain sending his space freighter into danger entirely on purpose. You are there, staring through the eyes of the person in the cockpit. You open the locker, grab the key and insert it into the security panel with a satisfying click. You will see the plastic casing pop open and the red button emerge. You press it and listen to the sirens. You grab the steering wheel and jerk it.

From the start, you’ll want to know why that just happened and where your character might have shown signs of excess plaque and a disregard for flossing. But the scene has changed! And you are Jimmy, a guy on a space freighter, many months before the crash. You discover that you were transporting thousands of bottles of mouthwash for a company called Pony Express. After the captain’s actions, you are now shipwrecked and have very little hope of survival. And the mouthwash? Yes, it’s hidden from 90% of the ship, so only a few tunnels and areas are accessible.

Yet you meet your crew members who are not too happy with the situation, but still survive. Swansea is a grumpy veteran and engineer, Daisuke is his surfer brother trainee, there’s the ever-worried nurse Anya, and… Captain Curly who’s 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 crash victim, and a brilliantly disturbing flash of blood-soaked bandages and red scar tissue: a beacon and a clever reminder that, yes, it could be corpses pretty good at the time, but it just gets a lot darker.

To say more about the story would spoil a horror game that only takes a few hours to complete (maybe a little more or less). Yet it’s the way it presents scenes to you that gives the game an immersive cinematic form. Where other games hit you with natural ending sequences, like bosses or fades to black, Mouthwashing is abrupt. You could close a door and the game will freeze and the PSX visuals will bleed, a chugging noise in the background reminiscent of a tape being spooled to the end. It’s really quite something.

Not only is it a clever visual, but it’s also a way to tie together timelines that allow you to piece together important context. Early on, you witness the crew’s first attempt at survival and how they deal with the crash. The Pony Express mascot in the lounge is spotless and people have provisions next to their sleeping bags. Then the scene can change and the crash is weeks away. Here you will gain insight into a freighter before stress, pressure and despair filter into everyone’s psyche. While one timeline moves forward, the other lags behind. You might switch to that scene where you close a door in panic, but you don’t know why. Oh, don’t worry, you’ll learn, because the first flashback might have you starting in the lounge, where the Pony Express mascot lies splintered.

And like I said before, you experience it all, and it really helps to plant you in the ship as you both figure out how the story ends and everyone’s inevitable descent into madness. It’s not just a brilliantly realized space, with the ship’s narrow tunnels always feeling a little too quiet and winding, or wall screens projecting soothing night or day scenes – it’s a delight (nightmare) for the ears. The hollow thump of your steps, the sound of Curly’s jaw cracking open as you pop a painkiller into his mouth, and the hum of your scanner really envelop you in the increasingly oppressive atmosphere of the ship.

Sounds? On site. Things you do with your hands? Also great. The design of what you actually do on the ship is simple, but wonderfully tangible. The objectives are often curt and sometimes bizarre, with Curly perhaps asking for a pie, so you turn to the retro-futuristic food-making machine and join in an immersive simmer. You flip through the instructions posted on the wall, then find the pouches and put them into the machine in the correct order, the machine depositing the finished item with a ping. I like how Mouthwash always involves you in everything, with even the simplest actions having the vibe of, “I bet this will affect the future timeline in a horrible way.” You never feel comfortable.

I wouldn’t say mouthwash is that scary though; coming from a huge wimp like me. And I understand that fear is subjective, but know that this is not a big, big jump scare experience. I’d say it’s more disturbing and creepy, with only a few surreal sequences that are actually frightening from a threat perspective (someone or something is out to get you). Otherwise, there’s a lot of weirdness or silliness as you endure psychotic pauses broken up into scenes where the ship twists and eyes can pop out of the walls.

At times I’d say it suffers from a bit of surreal tunnel-twisting that goes on a little too long, or surreal interpretations of your character’s psyche that seem a little too intrusive. Some scenes also suffer from a lack of direction, where it’s like “Go here”, and you can spend ages running around the ship bumping your nose against every interactive thing, hoping that it’s the interactive thing that will help you to make progress. A few times I chose a walkthrough because I was really a bit stumped. One solution I be able to I have discovered whether I really put my two brain cells to work, but one other? No, not a chance.

Mouthwash is difficult to review, namely because I have to dance through the story for fear of ruining it for you. I hope I at least understood how it tells the story and how it is really a well-told, concise descent into a crew’s deepest, darkest secrets and struggles. Trust me, you’ll want to play it in one or two sessions, especially since you won’t be able to tear yourself away from it. The only times you do that is when the solutions are not stated well enough. Go and rinse your mouth with this, I say.