I’ll Take Responsibility.

In the distant future, space travel will become normality.  Patrons will use it to travel to distant planets and explore the stars once too far to grasp.  Those planets will need the same essentials as needed for human life on Earth: food, water, and cleanliness.  Just as we move products from city to city on Earth, mankind will need to move products from solar system to solar system.  It’s a long, arduous job, but someone’s gotta do it.

The Tulpar has been a staple of the Pony Express for years, one of the last manned delivery services left flying through the cosmos.  In its latest journey, a planned flight eclipsing near 400 days, a miscalculated course directs the ship into a field of asteroids, crippling the ship in fire-preventing foam and a captain bandaged from head to toe with life-threatening injuries.  With months left in flight and supplies to dwindle far before that, the crew of the Tulpar must manage their resources and sanity on a ship where optimism feels as empty as the space surrounding them.

Mouthwashing sets course on a non-chronological path of destruction, swapping from days before the crash to the months after, letting you piece together the ins and outs of how the crew gets to where they go.  This style of storytelling lets you detail each side of the coin as you embrace the small nothings of a team going through the day-to-day routines of a 9-to-5 space expedition and the psychological terror that envelopes the crew over time.  Details as to exactly what you’re getting into will be mum as I will not do you the disservice of ruining this title.  Each scene plays out no longer than 10-20 minutes before a CD-skipping audio cue and a frozen video screen melt away the current memory or nightmare into a completely new scenario.  Blurring, smudging, violating the lines of fiction and reality and blending it all into a mocktail of perceived expectations and infallible misunderstandings.

The crew takes many forms, ranging from lovable doofus intern to hard-ass working-man’s veteran, but each character is impeccably written to allow players to peel as many layers off their constituents as they can identify.  One moment you’ll be laughing hard at the quotable lines of how slowly dying is slightly worse than not getting paid, the next you’ll be getting a tear-inducing monologue of the glories of living a life in the present no matter how threatening and tumultuous that present might be.  It never ceases to amaze me what developers and writers can accomplish in roughly 2 hours of time but the amount of depth portrayed by each crew member is something to marvel at, only to be emotionally sick as a reward.

Gameplay sets itself as a walking simulator with a light amount of puzzle-solving and a pinch of your favorite Amnesia title to taste.  The ship is small so navigation is easy, and while there isn’t much to the puzzles in terms of difficulty, the narrative weight they pull in makes their impact much more of a reward than the completion.  As Mouthwashing steadily paces itself to its roots of its psychological horror, the places it takes you are as unsettling as they are engrossing.  The eyes that follow you and the crew might as well be your own as it’s damning to look away at any given second when traversing the Tulpar, lest you miss something in the blink of those eyes.

But the coup de grâce to your emotional toll lies in the masterful, sublime, and draining sound design and soundtrack.  Small, intricate detailed actions: fingers to teeth, skipping transitions, valves turning, soft sobbing; stomach churning yet deceptively inviting, all layered beautifully alongside a soundtrack that is worth every penny should you buy it.  The rumblings and reverb of the dark and deep unknown resonate just as prominently as the tear-inducing and falsely auspicious orchestral strings highlighting a journey that is as lost and damned as the tenants that believe their actions can save what has been done.

I did not feel well after finishing Mouthwashing.  The baggage laid before me of a crew so surface-level happy and hopeful left me drained, disgusted, and dismal.  I cannot imagine Wrong Organ intended any other effect as they put these moments of the Tulpar crew together, but I can say with confidence that this is one of the most emotionally impactful games I’ve played this year.  As disgusted as I am with the taste this title left in my mouth, I feel obligated, wanting, yearning to bear it for another swig due to its absolute mastery of psychological horror, first-rate pacing, and its adroit level of writing and character development.

I don’t quite want to lose this feeling yet.  I don’t want to wash this away.

10/10