mouthwashing (game)

rating

starstarstarstarstar

date

29 december 2025

genre

psychological horror

creator

wrong organ

what if the horror in alien didn't come from a deadly creature but instead from the crew breaking under the realities of extreme capitalism combined with the isolation of being stuck on a spaceship for months?

mouthwashing almost put me off within the first 5 minutes, as the opening sequence does a psychological horror game thing i loathe: walk down surreal hallway, reach dead end, turn around, there's a creepy thing behind you now! it took a moment to shake off this bad taste in my mouth, but following this, the game is mostly excellent. you explore a situation going from bad to worse in non-linear scenes contextualizing both the before and after of the crash of a freighter spaceship in the opening scene, getting more and more insights into the crew's state of mind and deterioration. there's a mix of real scenes and surreal explorations of the two pov characters' psyches here and while the latter have very cool visuals, the game managed to make me feel more uncomfortable (in a good way) in most of the real segments. the more abstract scenes also are often combined with simple-ish puzzle or avoid-a-monster gameplay elements that aren't communicated perfectly and end up more frustrating than scary as they are intended. meanwhile, the real scenes manage to deliver a lot of character development for the 5 crew members in a short amount of time.

the aesthetics of the game are pretty much flawless. clunky psx-style character and environment models combined with a pixel and dithering filter (especially that live dithering filter is a thing of beauty that makes me want to re-create it because it's so damn cool) and good thunk and thud sfx together with a soundtrack that stays in the background for the most part but fits very well. the glitchy scene transitions also look great and the aforementioned more surreal segments pack in some really nice visuals.

definite recommendation for anybody into psychological horror games at all. it has a small amount of the genre's trappings but the writing and visuals are so strong that it's easy to overlook them.