YoPerhaps it’s poetic that throughout this year, PlayStation’s 30th anniversary, developers have found such a rich vein of horror in the first 3D images. Crow Country, Fear the Spotlight and now Mouthwashing make terrifying use of low-poly characters, smeared textures and muted color palettes to generate fear and abjection, and in this sci-fi odyssey from Wrong Organ they are also used brilliantly to symbolize wholeness. . psychological collapse.
The setup of Mouthwashing is simple and familiar: when a massive spaceship crashes in a remote part of the galaxy, the small crew slowly goes crazy waiting for a rescue that will never come. What doesn’t help is their cargo: millions of gallons of high-alcohol mouthwash, which is very quickly abused by desperate and deeply flawed castaways.
With the captain seriously injured, you primarily play as second-in-command, Jimmy, as he takes charge of survival efforts. But you soon discover that everyone has something to hide, from paranoid doctor Anya to bullish mechanic Swansea. Everything on the ship has a sinister feel, from the disgusting food processing equipment to the huge LED screens that continually display images of romantic sunsets and fluffy clouds.
However, what sounds like a tense thriller is actually a surreal exploration of social and mental deterioration. The characters hallucinate frantically, the narrative goes from before the accident to after, exchanging between the two in a dizzying chronological dance; the ship itself seems to mutate in response to the paranoid delusions of its inhabitants; the eerie vaporwave soundtrack hums and explodes in discordant bursts. There are elements of Event Horizon, Solaris, and High Life in the interplay of human and technological collapse; the way the ship’s submarine-like hallways expand and contract like intestinal passageways; the way the crew’s psychoses are reflected in broken screens and ruined control panels. It is something somber and fascinating.
There are puzzles to solve and items to collect and combine, but nothing works as it should and the game continually plays with and questions your assumptions. It may remind some players of the cult hit Clickolding in the way it raises questions about player guilt and complicity: the things it wants you to do with the only weapons on board, the way it makes you keep your mouth shut. open the Captain to give him painkillers. while moaning and crying; Although the images are nostalgic, your connection with what happens on that ship is very real and very alive. There are also serious messages about guilt, grief, and alcoholism that can resonate strongly with people who have been affected by these things.
Rinsing your mouth is a difficult but exciting experience, a work of surreal horror that invokes the cinema of David Lynch and Dario Argento, but also tremendously functional as a game, or at least as a study of what games are and what they want us to do. The fact that titles like this are still in production and in global distribution is one of the few bright spots in a dismal year for the games business. Book your flight as soon as possible, you won’t regret it.