In 2015 a flight by Germanwings carrying 144 passengers and six crew crashed into a mountain in the French Alps. Later, the authorities who investigated the crash judged it was intentional – somebody in the cockpit had purposefully crashed the plane in an act of suicide, killing themselves and everyone on board. Mouthwashing begins with the same premise, albeit in a sci-fi setting. You’re piloting a spaceship with a crew of five, clicking on its various controls to override the safety and turn the ship towards a nearby heap of space rock. You mean to crash. The words that appear moments before this sequence are chilling in their simplicity: “I hope this hurts.”
Ed has already reviewed this first-person sci-fi horror, and he’s done it without spoiling the story. So if you’ve never heard of the game, I implore you to start there. Because I’m going to discuss a lot about the characters and plot. For me, everything interesting about Mouthwashing happens in the dialogue and the body language of its castaways, in the camerawork and set dressing that fills the claustrophobic, submarine-like corridors of the Tulpar. To celebrate why I think it’s one of the best and most horrifying games this year, I have to get deep into its dithered guts.
To sum up: the ship has crashed. The captain, Curly, lies covered in bandages, his face a mess of blood, muscle, and exposed teeth, with a single eye rolling around in grotesque watchfulness. It seems the cockpit was the worst place to be during the crash, and he has been horrifically burned and injured, unable even to speak. You now play as Jimmy, the co-pilot who has taken charge of the remaining crew. Everyone else seems to have survived the crash – gruff engineer Swansea, high-spirited intern Daisuke, and nervous nurse Anya. Tensions are high and they are arguing. Eventually, they agree to open the cargo hold (against company policy) to see if there’s anything useful that will help in their rescue on this remote interstellar rock.
But inside the cargo hold, they just find millions of bottles of mouthwash.
“Mouthwash was the first idea,” said the developers in a Steam post, “but we briefly considered hand sanitizer, rubbing alcohol or just straight up hard liquor. Mouthwash just has that vibe of being the worst and most absurd option… We considered having a few variants of different flavours but the uniformity of all the bottles being the exact same kinda adds to the sad horror of it all.”
Aside from the existential terror that comes from knowing your job (and life) is worth little more than an ocean of minty fresh oral hygiene, the mouthwash is a comically tragic symbol of everything to come. No matter how much of this high-alcohol solution you chug or swish, some stains do not come out. “Kills 99.9% of all germs” says the bottle’s label with unconvincing enthusiasm.
From this point, the story flips back and forth between post-crash and pre-crash scenes. These scenes might take place hours or minutes before the crash, or at various stages many months after it. The crew bicker and mope, they make future plans or have charged conversations. There is an undercurrent of dread throughout, helped in part by the horror-suited PS1-era visuals and an incredibly effective soundtrack. Sometimes the game judders to a halt, or words fill up the entire screen in distorted text. TAKE RESPONSIBILITY, the game might yell at you, and you’ll wonder: what does that mean?
There is also a lot of “funsettling” comedy in the day-to-day exploration of the ship. Swansea gets shatterblasted on mouthwash, and you use an axe to dig clumsy intern Daisuke out of the Demolition Man-like crash foam that fills the ship. The crew might struggle to survive on meagre food supplies following the crash, but in a scene before the disaster, you’ll make a birthday cake using a sci-fi mixing machine.
But it’s at that birthday scene that the game’s biggest structural strength starts to shine – the regular changing of perspective. As you go about the game, you’ll switch back and forth between two characters. In the post-crash scenes you play as the put-upon Jimmy, but before the crash you inhabit the questionable captain Curly – before he becomes the mutilated cause of all this survival horror. We see Curly’s various actions as leader, and we wonder exactly how this seemingly mild pilot goes from being vaguely discontent at work to fully self-destructive and dangerous.
The twist is: he does not. As the disjointed narrative falls together, and each of the crew come to distinctly tragic ends, we learn that Jimmy was the one to intentionally crash the ship. The captain, rushing into the cockpit to try and prevent the crash, is caught in the worst place and mutilated to the point of being unable to speak or tell the crew the truth about what happened. Jimmy blames everything on Curly, takes command of the shipwreck, and – in sequences that become increasingly uncomfortable to listen to – he force feeds the injured captain painkillers to keep the mutilated man from moaning.
As acting chief, Jimmy is now in a position of authority he has perhaps wanted but has never been able to reach. Looking on during all these events is a statue of the ever-freakish mascot of your company, Pony Express, whose tinny corporate voice becomes a lodestone for the classic horror game scares that are threaded through the story.
It’s not just a disturbing horse mascot that could easily guest star in a Five Nights At Freddy’s game. There is a running motif of horses throughout. The monsters that hunt the player during gamey “stay quiet or die” moments are awful, long necked ponies or centipedes made of mangled mascot. The ship – the Tulpar – is named for the winged horse of Turkic mythology. And during one psych evaluation, Jimmy jokes that he is becoming “sexually excited at the sight of cartoon horses”. The captain writes this off as Jimmy being Jimmy, a joke about the company mascot. Anya finds it discomfiting. In fact, if we look closely at all Anya’s dealings with Jimmy, we see a woman whose crossed arms, hunched shoulders, and stuttering responses suggest someone who is often uncomfortable in her co-worker’s presence.
Again, the flipping perspectives tell a story. In a post-crash scene, Jimmy talks impatiently with Anya, who is unsettled by his anger. In a pre-crash scene, Anya asks the captain why the crew quarters don’t have a lock. In another scene, Anya is confiding something in engineer Swansea and hastily tries to change the subject when you (as Jimmy) walk into the room. Back before the crash, Anya asks the captain to do the co-pilot’s regular psych evaluation in her place, because she’d rather not have to speak to Jimmy. In one twisty horror sequence, we take an ultrasound scanner to a huge womb-like growth to find, swimming inside, the bony x-ray figures of (ah) baby horses.
You might not notice all these signs on your first playthrough, you might not put the fear and quiet nods to trauma together piece by horrifying piece. But you will once Anya tells captain Curly, before the crash, that she is pregnant.
The implication is that Anya has been raped by Jimmy, who never acknowledges or admits to that act. Anya, pregnant and trapped in a shipwreck with the man who assaulted her, eventually locks herself in the medical bay and commits suicide by overdosing on the last of the painkillers used to keep the heavily bandaged captain Curly from groaning. This sets in motion the final cascade of accidental death and panicked murder that sees Daisuke get an axe to the face; Swansea, a bullet to the skull (god, I wish I had the space to talk about Swansea in more depth here…) Throughout all this, your time spent as Jimmy becomes more and more psychotically surreal, the full weight of the horror descending on the player with a long, horse-like face.
Having recently played Silent Hill 2, it’s interesting to look at both games side-by-side. A tale of two Jimmys. The bloody monsters of James Sunderland’s descent into Silent Hill are often interpreted as manifestations of a guilt and shame that the protagonist carries with him. But the snakelike horsebeasts and gullet corridors of Mouthwashing suggest an even scarier possibility when it comes to Jimmy’s inner world. It’s possible he feels no shame at all, or that he feels shame but is incapable or unwilling to understand it as shame. Silent Hill 2 sees many endings in which the penny of repression drops for James Sunderland, and he confronts the deed he has done, shaking off the denial that has harangued him the whole game, like so many bloodsoaked nurses.
In Mouthwashing, though, Jimmy never admits or faces his actions, never escapes his state of denial. He will take responsibility in practical, physical ways for every post-disaster task, but he won’t “TAKE RESPONSIBILITY” in a more meaningful, emotional sense for any of the pain he has caused. Even when you enter the medical bay after Anya overdoses, the game washes out the sight of the nurse’s death with an ugly smear of pixels. Jimmy chooses not to see the wreckage he has caused. He literally blurs it out of his own eyesight. Anya, who has some of the most heartbreaking dialogue in the game just by musing on a dead pixel in a ship display, is effectively and intentionally made quiet, cowed and unheard, even by captain Curly, until she is essentially erased.
The disfigured face of the captain, in the meantime, takes on new meaning. A swivelling eye that seems monstrous at the start of the game becomes an eye of terror once you know Jimmy is responsible for the crash. It swivels round the room helplessly looking for the man who is a danger to everyone. Eventually it becomes an eye of judgement – unblinkingly watching Jimmy as he navigates the steel corridors of his own psyche.
In the end, Jimmy puts the bandaged Curly in a cryostasis pod and puts a gun to his own head, believing that “saving” the captain in this way makes him a hero, that it absolves him of wrongdoing. We know where he got this idea. Anya once said to him that she must believe “our worst moments don’t make us monsters”. She was talking about the captain – she wanted to believe a man who could intentionally crash a ship could still be a good person. Jimmy repeats this line later when defending himself against a shadowy figure of judgement. But the Pony Express horse he is talking to (ah) is not convinced by a contrition that conveniently ignores one very important victim. Mouthwashing presents us with the frightening possibility that Anya’s words of hope are simply not true. What if we are defined by our most heinous moments?
Mouthwashing’s horror underpins how hard it is to truly know the inner workings of another person’s mind. Even when we are immersed in Jimmy’s own body, seeing the world through his eyes, it still takes us the whole game to understand what he did, if not 100% the reasoning for why he did it. There is something very Iago-like about Jimmy, in that his motivation comes from resentment, but the origin of that resentment is a cloud of mixed vapours. He is implied to be poorer than the other crew members. He is going to be laid off with the rest of the crew, we find out. He’s on a lower “rung” at work, he says to the captain – a man he sometimes seems to look up to and sometimes chops up to eat.
But it is his act of sexual assault, and the consequences of it, that sets Jimmy’s doom spiral into motion. He only steers the ship into that rock after he finds out Anya is pregnant, we discover. Exactly what is going through his head when he directs the ship doomward, it’s hard to know. Fear? Anger? Despair? Self-loathing? Some hideous mouthwash-flavoured cocktail of all these emotions? The words that appear – “I hope this hurts” – could be interpreted as both “I hope this hurts me” or “I hope this hurts all of us“. Self-destruction, we’re reminded, does not exclude the destruction of others.
The Germanwings flight that crashed in 2015 was not crashed by its pilot, it turned out. Investigators found that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz locked the cockpit while his pilot colleague went to the bathroom. He then began the plane’s fatal descent. Lubitz had a history of severe depression and, along with other medical conditions, his doctor had written that he was unfit to fly. For some reason or another, the airline wasn’t informed, and Lubitz went on to crash the plane. Some of the last words on the black box recording of the flight are sounds of the pilot trying to break back into the cockpit, screaming: “For God’s sake, open the door!”
This is the horror that Mouthwashing channels. Not just one of panic and helplessness as a victim – but the horror of legacy as a perpetrator. The father of the co-pilot who crashed the above flight has always rejected the findings of the investigators, perhaps not wanting to see his son defined by his last, worst actions. But for the families of all those who died, that is exactly how such a man will always be defined.