The program is coming apart at the seams. Her Bounty Pony Express is adrift in space. The crew is fracturing. Their space freighter veered off course and crashed and they found out what they were freighting all along: a copious amount of Mouthwash. High in sugar and ethanol. Kills 99% of germs. The non-linear story is conveyed in disintegrating fragments of broken code and Mouthwashed memories.
Mouthwashing is an exceptional Horror Adventure game with innovative storytelling. Each slice of playable content plays out as a short vignette à la the experimental method of Blendo Games’ Thirty Flights of Loving (2015). Like that game, Mouthwashing is a videogame short story. It will only take a few hours to see everything.
What those three hours contain though, is deeply compelling at a narrative level. Mouthwashing moves through characters, settings, and time with a non-linear structure. Each scene sticks around only long enough to turn the knife and then disintegrate into audiovisual glitches, nicely spacing out character moments with grotesque visages of horror.
The sense of off-footing the player and keeping the ship slightly off balance is key to why Mouthwashing works in such an unconventional way. By playing with the sequence of events, it allows a technique that is more rare in games, to produce an unreliable narrator, unknowable to the player, like Silent Hill 2 (2001) or Deadly Premonition (2010). Because of how the game splinters out the story, it allows the player the agency of their imagination. Play it like a mystery. As the reel unspools, information is piecemealed out to the player.
This works without feeling too formally obtuse, as a playable experience, because of how neatly the story is patterned out. It feels dynamic and constantly fresh. When we learn about characters, it is part of the schema that we only get to learn so much and then are quickly diverted.
You can say, in all its non-linearity, that the moment-to-moment demand of the game, mechanically, is actually strictly linear. The game tells you what to do and that’s what you go do. It shows us something else games can be, methods of experiential storytelling that can bend time, space, and meaning for their own devices until they result in something that feels deeply new.
When you take all of the broken parts and pieces and glue the story together in the end, Moushwashing begins to feel like a breakthrough for the medium. In all its Sega Dreamcast-looking glory, you build attachments to your low-poly shipmates and begin to attach sympathy and guilt to them until everyone is dead drunk on Mouthwash.
Mouthwashing is as new as game designs get. It occupies a warm space between classic Horror Adventure design — we can look at the Videogame Horror genre always as an extension of Adventure Game principles — and yet, every moment feels radically new and definitional of a new wave of videogame storytelling. So, come aboard, the Mouthwash tastes just fine.
Reviewed on Steam Deck