You mean to crash.
Ed hasalready reviewedthis 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.
To sum up: the ship has crashed.
You now play as Jimmy, the co-pilot who has taken charge of the remaining crew.
Tensions are high and they are arguing.
But inside the cargo hold, they just find millions of bottles of mouthwash.
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.
The crew bicker and mope, they make future plans or have charged conversations.
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.
As you go about the game, you’ll switch back and forth between two characters.
The twist is: he does not.
There is a running motif of horses throughout.
The ship - the Tulpar - is named for the winged horse of Turkic mythology.
The captain writes this off as Jimmy being Jimmy, a joke about the company mascot.
Anya finds it discomfiting.
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.
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.
Havingrecently played Silent Hill 2, it’s interesting to look at both games side-by-side.
A tale of two Jimmys.
In Mouthwashing, though, Jimmy never admits or faces his actions, never escapes his state of denial.
Jimmy chooses not to see the wreckage he has caused.
He literally blurs it out of his own eyesight.
The disfigured face of the captain, in the meantime, takes on new meaning.
It swivels round the room helplessly looking for the man who is a danger to everyone.
We know where he got this idea.
Anya once said to him that she must believe “our worst moments don’t make us monsters”.
Jimmy repeats this line later when defending himself against a shadowy figure of judgement.
Mouthwashing presents us with the frightening possibility that Anya’s words of hope are simply not true.
What if wearedefined by our most heinous moments?
Mouthwashing’s horror underpins how hard it is to truly know the inner workings of another person’s mind.
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 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.
Some hideous mouthwash-flavoured cocktail of all these emotions?
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 beganthe plane’s fatal descent.
This isthe horrorthat Mouthwashing channels.
Not just one of panic and helplessness as a victim - but the horror of legacy as a perpetrator.
