I wrote about this next game fairly recently already, but I am swiftly becoming more and more of a fan the longer I think about it. There’s so much to recommend about the narrative experience of this game. Someone asked me whether I’d played it, and I replied that indeed I had, but I don’t think I sold it as well as it deserved. I’m always reluctant to tell people to “just watch a playthrough” because I do think there’s something precious about playing for ourselves. I understand that time and money are of course significant obstacles – it’s easier to just flick on YouTube and watch someone – but the subtleties of play illuminate things about ourselves that we would never have learned about otherwise. Play makes us think and reflect. Play makes us human.

4) Mouthwashing | Wrong Organ
“In the back of my mind, it’s always there.”

What the hell does it mean to be human? Works of fiction prompt this question all the time, and video games are no exception. Gameplay loops are a key part of how a video game feels, and its core argument. What we are made to do in a game can tell us things about the human condition, and the character whom we are asked to control. Our tendency is to align with the point-of-view character of a story, at least to start with. That’s why people have weird takes about Lolita, or why so many people misunderstand when a first-person narration contains some horrible opinion. Sure, sometimes they’re reflective of the author’s thoughts (which can be figured out if you pay attention to the rest of a story’s themes and how it presents, say, women). But sometimes it’s indicative of just the character’s shitty beliefs – and that’s fine. Depiction is not endorsement, and all that. With that said, Mouthwashing challenges our model of empathy. As a game, it contests the notion that we must empathize with ourselves above all else, or that people deserve to be forgiven.

Mouthwashing is not a particularly difficult game to play from a mechanical standpoint. It’s a first-person linear horror game, with only a few sequences where you’re actually in any danger. The rest of the time you are listening to dialogue and exploring a space that is becoming worse and worse, decaying as the character you control also decays. The opinions we have about the characters are formed across nonlinear segments of gameplay. Nonlinearity further muddies the waters regarding who we identify with – or even at points who we’re playing as.

The game’s writing gets more nuanced the longer I think about it. I still wish that there was a bit more meat on its bones mechanically, but the story the game tells is also too efficient to weigh down with anything too complex. It is ultimately personal preference, I believe. What Mouthwashing does is tell a complex and meaningful story about human beings as monsters, while using the affordances of the video game medium to add depth. It is always kind of nice, in a way, to play something and struggle to think of how an adaptation could improve the experience.

Narrative in video games has come a long way, but I feel as though there is still much that needs to be done with education around narrative more generally. Empathy is a complex, multi-faceted thing, and as Mouthwashing becomes a bit of a runaway hit (as much as an indie horror game can become a runaway hit), how video games use point-of-view and narrative is essential. As is reading between the lines. The scene where Anya talks to Curly in the living room, staring at a dead pixel that she can see and he cannot, was in retrospect the most beautifully written scene in the game. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I did when I went back and thought about it some more after I’d had time to digest everything.

The horrifying imagery is enough to churn the stomach. But Mouthwashing is a smarter game than that. It is not just about seeing or experiencing horrifying things. It is about watching as the situation gets worse, and we make it so. It is an unwitting descent into unrelenting madness. We are the ones who push on, and we are the ones culpable in the downfall of this sad crew of people, trapped within a crashed spaceship. It is the old BioShock trick, but done much more effectively. Take responsibility? How can people do that, if they don’t even understand what they did wrong? Is empathy a given? Is forgiveness a necessity? Is a redemptive heroic arc what we need from every story? Is everyone on a hero’s journey? Or is life far more complicated than that? Sometimes, people are just monsters – and they inadvertently let monstrosity define them to the core of their being.