Hurt/Home – Mouthwashing Review

Heads up: this piece is full of spoilers. CW for mentions of sexual assault, suicide, and cannibalism.

In the opening moments of Mouthwashing, the cockpit screen of space freighter “Tulpar” warns me that the ship is on a collision course with an unknown orbital mass, and advises me to make a leftward correction to avoid it. The only options on the ship’s control panel are to turn right or to stare at a big red button under a locked cover. Naturally, I choose the only option available, and steer the ship right. 

Now, facing the immediate danger of collision with this object, an imminent and catastrophic event, the ship goes into autopilot mode to correct the navigational mistake which, in a small note that feels like a drive-by, also docks my pay by a substantial amount. So, I do the next obvious step, grab a key from a locker next to the pilot’s seat, unlock the cover on the big red button, and slam dunk disengage the autopilot, dooming this ship to crash into whatever this thing is. There is simply nothing else to do but that, or quit the game.

By now, I already felt like I fucked up and misread something in those opening lines, maybe a typo, or some kind of missed signal on my part. There were so many moments in which I searched for other options but none were presented, making each horrible deliberate action on my part feel all the more inculpable. After all, why would I do that? 

With nothing else to do but retreat from the impulsive, unavoidable decision to crash this ship, I run down the halls of the freighter, emergency lights flashing, alarm blaring. As I run, the hallways stretch on and become like a labyrinth. I turn back from locked doors and malformed horse mascots obstructing the way, and with each pass the walls are overcome with hollow encouraging corporate hell type of posters. The kind that say “lend a hand!” and “rise and shine!” and “medical expenses will be docked from personal credits.” 

The lights flicker, sparks fly, steam fills the hallway, there’s some kind of horrible wailing somewhere in the darkness. Polle, the Pony Express mascot, sits at the end of this stressful sequence with a jarring stinger. It’s the kind of atmospheric response one might hope for from the thought process of: “I fucked up bad and the only way to fix it is to kill myself and everyone on this ship.” Out here in the vacuum of space, when you pop like a grape no one is here to cradle what’s left of your body. 

When former-captain-of-the-ship Curly shows up in the post-crash scene looking how-are-you-still-alive levels of wounded, I thought: Ahhh, I get it. Now, I’m playing the guy who has to take over for the former Captain, who definitely jettisoned the ship toward a space anomaly in response to some turmoil I’ll find out in due time. That’s absolutely messed up, and Jimmy, the guy you’re playing as, has no issue bringing this up over and over. The ship is filled with growths of emergency sealant, which is deployed automatically to plug up any breaches between the interior and exterior of the ship. It’s everywhere, cutting off access to rooms, basic comforts, critical supplies, and the cryo chambers that would otherwise hold the crew in case of emergency. What a piece of shit!

When I reached the flashback scene in which Captain Curly receives a notice from upper management informing him that the crew of the Tulpar were to be laid off as soon as they finished their shipment journey, as the process of long-hauling across space had become automated and the Pony Express, as it were, no longer needed them. Curly breaks this news to the crew at his own birthday party, and the mood turns hopeless. Pairing this sharp turn with a few surreal, unsettling moments earlier that suggested Curly was Going Through It, I thought: Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, I get it. Take the inevitable disillusionment of capitalism and the unnatural isolation of space and you’re bound to get a time-tested and well-loved narrative path to all sorts of kinds of psychosis. 

When Anya, in a flashback scene, asks Curly why there are locks on the cockpit but not on the crew quarters, and Curly says “for safety.” When Anya, the ship’s nurse, asks Jimmy to give Curly his painkillers because she can’t stand to do it, and he all but shoves them down his throat as he struggles, complaining as the supplies dwindle that they’re running out of meds to “keep him quiet.” And when she hides the ship’s only gun after telling Jimmy she’s pregnant, and Curly tells her she should have just come to him if something was wrong, before things got out of hand. And when Jimmy’s first instinct to distract Swansea, the ship’s mechanic, is to give him a spiked drink. And when Jimmy emotionally coerces Daisuke, the ship mechanic’s intern, into crawling through a treacherous air duct and ultimately gets him killed. And every time Jimmy ruminates angrily on his own lack of authority and control until he takes over as Captain. And when Jimmy has nothing to say upon seeing Anya’s dead body. I thought: Uh oh, oh shit! Oh wow, oh no. Okay, yikes! I get it, I get it, I get it. 

When Curly has no choice but to finally confront Jimmy about Anya, and Jimmy surrenders to it, accepting that he has to take responsibility for his actions, and you watch him run down the hall to the cockpit I thought AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, I GET IT NOW.  

Mouthwashing is about the doom of capitalism and the void of space, it’s about a few people breaking down in small quarters. It’s mainly about sexual assault, assault in general, and it’s very much about the kind of person who would do it, and also the kind of person who abides it.  

There are so many good elements to Mouthwashing that I don’t know where to start. The fact that it’s about 2-3 hours long is astonishing, the story that’s told within that small time frame is so concise and yet sacrifices none of the emotional impact. There’s this obvious specter of capitalism, especially when they open the cargo hold and find that all the time spent en route, the peril of their current situation, what Anya’s gone through, what everyone else eventually goes through, has all been done in service of getting an unbelievable amount of mouthwash somewhere. Functionally useless, too much sugar to be used as a disinfectant, and enough ethanol to exacerbate the tension and fear. It’s brilliantly frustrating. How many people have to die for these Temu hauls to land at someone’s doorstep? Fortunately, I’ll never know.

As soon as the Tulpar crashes and they start drifting through space, there’s a spoken uncertainty that, being what is likely one of the last manned Pony Express cargo freighters carrying such a non-crucial payload and yet months out from the scheduled end of their trip, no one even knows they’re missing. Nor do they care. Isolated, maybe forgotten, walking a tightrope around their new captain, and getting wasted off of mouthwash, they’re all dead within months.

Mouthwashing is unfiltered psychological horror, one of the better examples I’ve seen in a while. It’s most faithful in the sense that this particular horror is anxiety and guilt manifested in spectacular ways. The visuals – especially during the hallucinations – are grotesque and dramatic, overwhelming in terms of space and accompanying a story that’s erratic and non-linear. Despite playing from two perspectives constantly battling between jarring time skips and flashbacks with often glitchy, hard transitions, the story is unambiguous and well told. Chronological order would have ruined the impact, and starting with the crash itself allowed the narrative to leave little breadcrumbs and misleading evidence, establishing unreliable narrators and a gradual sinking feeling with a very dreadful but satisfying conclusion. Like it’s GREAT, but it’s taxing. I started this game, seeing Curly on the table covered completely in bandages except for an eye and his mouth and I very obviously thought: If there’s not a big crazy eyeball waiting for me at the end of this I’m going to be so pissed. And there are so many eyeballs, so many cartoon horses and flashing alarm screens, axes and wailing babies. Toward the end in some scenes, there are piles of empty bottles of mouthwash alongside the mounds of hardened sealant all over the ship, a reminder and insurance that they’re pretty much fucked.        

For the most part, I don’t think Jimmy (the perpetrator) or Curly (the friend and authority figure who abided it) had the self-awareness to feel much guilt. A lot of Jimmy’s hallucinations of Curly involve him as a silent and tortured observer, likely the only source of guilt that would manifest within Jimmy at all. Throughout the game, Jimmy’s motivation is the fear that he’s going to be held accountable for assaulting Anya, that as soon as they land he’ll have to face some sort of retribution, especially with evidence in the form of a child. Polle becomes a constant figure in the feverish hallucinations you experience as Jimmy. Usually at the end of these long, drawn-out sequences, Polle acts like a jump scare, a representation of the part of Anya’s pain and fear he caused and is refusing to acknowledge or confront. It comes up in small parts, like how Anya sleeps by a speaking robotic version of Polle that’s motion activated, or how it ends up busted to pieces later on in the story. Its subtle intrusion into Jimmy’s POV becomes more overt at the narrative goes on (chronologically, at least) until it’s too large or too loud to ignore, becoming a major part of his ultimate crash out at the end.

Curly, who can at least be said to have somewhat of an expectation of trying to keep the peace amongst a small ship they’re stuck on for over a year, plays dumb every time Anya brings him up. He glosses over Jimmy’s psych eval, waves away every bitter musing about how he has nothing to get back to on Earth, every slip of his toxic inferiority complex. Both of them evade any sense of shame until the scene where it’s revealed that Jimmy set the collision course, and Curly was only injured so badly as a result of trying to correct it. By ignoring the behavior, it finally coalesced into one moment of attempted eradication of the entire crew. A lot of psychological horror has the side effect of creating sympathy for these characters who are forced, often in horrifying ways, to confront something. We watch someone else struggle with the human condition of battling guilt or trauma, we can recognize the complexities of causing harm or evading responsibility, and empathy can manifest pretty easily. Here, all I ended up seeing were two men who were circling the drain and had more or less brought it on themselves.

My sympathy was drawn mostly to the crew, who all suffer from the fallout of Jimmy and Curly’s cycle of abuse. There’s a concept here that might seem hyperbolic but hear me out: in a way, we’re talking about an anomic annihilator, just replace a family with the crew of the Tulpar. Humiliated at the prospect of being punished for his crime, the resulting shame that Jimmy feels gets externalized to the point of scorched earth. It’s not enough to remove himself specifically to evade punishment, but to ensure whatever perpetuates as his reputation isn’t tarnished, in an act he probably doesn’t recognize as purely selfish, he seeks to remove every possible piece of collateral evidence. He’s gone broke, in the existential sense. Everything that happens post-crash is that further anomic breakdown. Stranded, drunk, traumatized, and quickly realizing that they are never getting home, the rule of law becomes what they’re willing to and capable of doing to each other. And without Jimmy, they might have had a chance.

Anya is a great depiction of someone trying to survive. Sometimes discussions of sexual assault and abuse lean into the concept of a “perfect victim,” a collection of stereotypes about how a victim looks and acts, the relationship between them and their abuser, an over-scrutiny of accountability, reactions and environments and all that kind of stuff. We never see the assault, because we don’t need to, because it would be gratuitous and beside the point — we know it occurred because of how Anya talks to them and how she behaves as natural reaction. She’s forced to share confined space with Jimmy, who becomes even more insufferable after he’s assumed the role of captain. What we see in their interactions is one person trying to survive the other. She avoids raising his temper, tries to negotiate with his worst qualities, and suffers his outbursts because being combative isn’t going to save her here. Sometimes she even gets the opportunity to be friendly with him. They are stuck on that ship, even more so after they start drifting aimlessly with no way to know if anyone’s looking for them. Having been in rooms with abusive people I really didn’t want to piss off, not quite stuck but not quite free to leave, I tried to imagine what I would do in that specific kind of situation, and I couldn’t fool myself into thinking I could handle it much differently than Anya did.   

Her responses feel like a battle between acceptance and disgust. On one hand, she admits to Jimmy that she has to believe “that our worst moments don’t make us monsters” and watches over Curly, who ultimately could have done something to help her, but chose to do nothing. Curly who, in fact, everyone at this point believes tried to crash the ship. On the other hand, she can’t stand to give Curly his painkillers, because of the noises he makes, perhaps also the way they have to force him, the struggle and his total vulnerability. To me, it reads like a sort of clemency from her to him. Pre-crash, Curly waved away the problems with Jimmy, but he and Anya had nice moments, and there was a kind of support he showed for her despite also trying to make sure his buddy didn’t get in trouble, and that might be something she holds on to. Post-crash, Anya and Curly share the unfortunate role of being at the mercy of Jimmy. When she locks herself in the medical room and commits suicide by an overdose of those same painkillers, finding her feels like an afterthought. Being in the perspective of Jimmy at that moment means you have nothing to say about it and nothing to do about it, because you’re in the seat of the person who drove her to do it.

Let me walk it back a bit and say I also had some sympathy for Curly, post-crash, who in his state of immovable and unspeakable injury became yet another one of Jimmy’s victims. His control and treatment of Curly’s body is just another form of abuse. Forcing pills down his throat, at one point clearly beating him to get him to cooperate. Even moreso, the forced autocannibalism that Jimmy inflicts on Curly is one of the more direct pieces of symbolism in Mouthwashing, being reflective of other themes such as survival or punishment, yet is most tangibly a literal violation of the body, a method of control, a defilement of autonomy and safety; it is an assault. In allowing his friend to become an exception to the rule, he found himself in the unfortunate position of being at the mercy of him, now more angry and desperate than before.    

There’s this blatant recurring theme of “taking responsibility” presented mostly to Jimmy, and for a while it seemed like it was fluctuating between the contexts of literally taking responsibility or doing so as obfuscation for real accountability, you know, like “take responsibility, blow up the fucking ship and everyone in it.” Turns out, it was the latter until it was finally the former, pulled like a rotten tooth from Jimmy’s paranoid, defensive subconscious. Post-crash, taking responsibility doesn’t even mean anything anymore. What guilt resides in Jimmy comes out in the forms of Curly’s mangled body and distant crying babies.

Swansea is probably the only character I’ve ever seen come at me with an axe and said “this guy gets it.” A formerly sober mechanic, confidently nihilistic, he spends most of the time guarding the door to the utility room which, we find out later, holds the only surviving cryo-pod post-crash. One theory (that I agree with) is that he was saving it for Daisuke. He has a certain paternal instinct over his intern, despite his constant badgering. Daisuke isn’t a helpless little guy, but he’s plucky and optimistic, maybe a little too trusting. There’s a chance that Anya confided in Swansea at some point, there’s a lack of respect toward Jimmy that comes from somewhere other than jealousy, and there’s this subtle commitment to getting Daisuke out alive. Swansea ends up presenting a sort of foil to Jimmy, someone who at least intended to right his fucked up life even while eventually admitting to how much happier he was before. He’s taken responsibility, he’s willing to kill for reasons that aren’t entirely selfish and suicidal. Within erratic time skips, there are glimpses of Swansea trying to kill you. Short, violent vignettes that make you wonder what exactly was the turning point for these two characters. 

I won’t even go into the fact that swans will kill their own young, especially if they end up too weak, injured, or sick to survive in the wild. I also won’t go into the fact that Daisuke was only coerced into climbing around in the very dangerous air duct because Jimmy told him it would impress Swansea, or how they had to dump his gravely wounded body on Swansea’s cot while they figured out what to do, or how Swansea buried that axe in Daisuke’s face just like he buried it into the setting sun projected on the screen in their common room after calling him a “useless ray of goddamn sunshine.” A mercy killing, hours before Swansea tries to kill Jimmy with the axe and hours before Jimmy manages to shoot him in the head. 

Everyone on this ship dies because of Jimmy, and it’s because Curly couldn’t just jettison him out an airlock, or put him in one of the cryo pods! 

In horror games, I kind of hate having to fight some unseen monster, but the only thing I hate more than fighting one is running from one. A sequence happens in the cargo hold, which is fitting seeing as how unleashing the ethanol-laden mouthwash didn’t exactly make anything better for any of them. Inching your way out of the cargo hold while some invisible creature (you can shine your light on it, but it looked so bad I blocked it from my memory) tries to find you is agonizing. There’s a note at the beginning of the path saying “a blind beast, aimless and restless / you can’t run from it” and other than that being the literal directions of how to escape, I wonder what else it could mean. It could be death, or whatever judgment that comes from taking accountability. Seeing as how that path ends with yet another Polle, it could be related to Anya, seeing as how the Pony Express mascot becomes intertwined symbolically with Anya, her pain, and the baby that she was carrying. Maybe it’s Jimmy, cruel and without much inhibition, having to tiptoe around it lest it consume him.

Parallel to this is the other chase scene where you run from a centipede-like amalgamation of horse mascots through an air duct. Obviously in reference to Daisuke, and Jimmy’s heavy hand in getting him killed. The fight with Swansea happens in a cemetery full of crypts (conceptually speaking) where you only kind of see him out of the corner of your eye, running past gaps in the structures, a flash of yellow turning around a corner. You only hear him right as he comes up behind you, and you have to be quick enough to shoot him first. It’s fitting, seeing as how he was driven to this point by the deaths of the other crew members.

The final stretch of Mouthwashing is full of eyes and teeth and blood and babies and weird little horses. It’s the culmination of Curly’s effect on Jimmy, the paranoid surveillance, and it’s also, finally, a sort of reckoning in terms of Anya and the baby, and what he’s done to them, the ship, Daisuke, Curly, Swansea, all of them. He’s you, you’re him, so close to figuring it out even as you feed parts of Curly to himself. 

In the end it all comes back to the two of them. Jimmy fools himself into thinking his path to accountability means saving Curly, despite everything. And Curly, having ultimately avoided contact with every available opportunity to hold his own friend and subordinate accountable, is now on the receiving end of Jimmy’s final selfish betrayal. Jimmy carries Curly to the only functional cryo pod left on the ship and puts him in before shooting himself just out of view. 

Ironically, simply killing Curly would have been the kindest thing to do. Trapped in suspended existence for decades with little hope of survival both because of the extent of his wounds and because no one knows or cares that they’re lost in space and by the time anyone notices it’ll be way too late. Even if he does make it home and lives on, imagine the horror, the shame. It’s a real chef’s kiss moment. These two circling each other in virulent, delusional chaos. I’m so disgusted and uncomfortable and impressed.

All of this is to say that’s why this is a phenomenal game about assault and the different forms it takes, but more so about Jimmy, about the kind of guy who would do that, the ways in which he continues to abuse, and coerce, and violate other bodies. The way he spares no sympathy at all for Anya, even when she’s dead at his feet. It’s a grotesque display of how his ego destroys the people around him, even his own friend. It feels like a warning against complicity and tolerating the warning signs. It’s gross and creepy and beautiful and infuriatingly real.  

Mouthwash usually only kills 99.99% of germs, there’s always that .01 left behind.