[GAME] Mouthwashing (2024)
Mouthwashing is a game that hits a lot of indie game tropes - it has a slick PS1-era aesthetic, it deals in a type of horror that's more psychological than gory, and it has long, abstract sequences where the protagonist's broken psyche is given physical form. Some of these aspects are more well done than others, but to me the best thing about the game is the character writing.
All characters in the game start out feeling like genre tropes - the gruff technician being particularly egregious - but as the game progresses they grow a surprising amount of depth, and towards the end, as the plot reaches its climax, there is some dialogue that feels genuine in a way I haven't experienced in a game in a while. Some of the gameplay mechanics are also quite clever in how they manage to re-contextualise actions from mundane to horrific.
Unfortunately, pretty much everything else in the game drags things down for me. It blows my mind that it has been over two decades since Silent Hill 2 sent us to the Silent Hill Historical Society, and here we are in 2024 still doing the same thing - stumbling through symbolic, surreal segments trying to find some trigger that will advance the story.
The reason why that section worked in Silent Hill 2 is because it was a tiny, impactful section of a larger game. This kind of thing just doesn't work when it takes up a third of the overall play time. And when the dream-like logic is so confusing that you don't know how to progress, the game stops being scary and starts being annoying. Mouthwashing is not the only game to make this mistake, but I am just getting a bit tired of indie horror games go down this route. There are also two gameplay sections that feel so out of place, and control so poorly, that I was very close to shutting down the game, which is not a good sign when the game length is at most two hours.
Another issue I had was that the overall plot is a little bit muddled in a way that doesn't feel intentional. I understand that these types of stories sometimes need to leave things to the player's imaginations, but when core plot points feel obscured, it robs the experience of its intended impact. When the credits rolled, I was left with a bit of a "that's it?" feeling, until I read someone else's plot summary online and realised that the story was actually quite clever.
I would still probably recommend this game to people that value good writing, because it's hard to come by in this genre, with the added caveat that playing through it will feel like playing a classic indie horror game, with all the good and bad that this entails.